Colin Gray, 55, was sentenced on Thursday to 15 years in prison for his role in the September 2024 mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia — a suburb northeast of Atlanta — in which his then-14-year-old son, Colt Gray, killed two students and two teachers. Judge Nicholas Primm of Barrow County Superior Court handed down concurrent sentences of 15 years for each second-degree murder conviction and 10 years for each involuntary manslaughter conviction, far below the 80 years prosecutors had sought and closer to the 10-year term the defence had requested.

The case centred on a decision Colin Gray made the previous Christmas: buying his son an AR-style rifle as a gift, despite a string of serious warning signs about the boy's mental state. Just seven months before the shooting, police had visited the family home to investigate an online threat of a school attack traced to their address. Investigators found that Colt had built what was described as a shrine in his bedroom to Nikolas Cruz, the perpetrator of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17 people. A notebook detailing plans to kill students and teachers was also discovered. Prosecutors said the boy's parents had discussed seeking mental health treatment but never followed through, and that Colt had instead been given antidepressants prescribed informally by his mother. The four victims were students Christian Angulo, 14, and Mason Schermerhorn, 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.

In delivering the sentence, Judge Primm addressed Colin Gray directly, telling him: "It is clear you failed as a parent. The warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter — and you failed to do the simplest things to prevent this." The judge acknowledged, however, that Gray had not orchestrated the attack or even known of his son's specific plans, and that he had not sought to harm anyone himself. The defence argued that gifting his son the rifle had been a misguided attempt to connect with the boy and draw him away from the internet and video games, and that no parent is trained to look at their own child and see a mass shooter. Colt Gray, now 16, pleaded guilty to 55 charges and was sentenced earlier in the week to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The prosecution is part of a narrow but growing legal trend in the United States. It marks only the third time a parent has been held criminally responsible for a mass shooting carried out by their child. In April 2024, the parents of a Michigan teenager who killed four classmates with a gun they had purchased for him days before the attack were sentenced to 10 and 15 years respectively. The Barrow County prosecutor said he hoped Thursday's verdict would send a broader message. "These young people are not in a position to make rational decisions when it comes to firearms," he said, "and we need, as a society, to take responsibility and recognise who should and should not have access to them."

The case has drawn attention to wider debates in the United States about accountability for gun violence, where federal protections largely shield firearms manufacturers from lawsuits, and efforts to hold other parties — from gunmakers to law enforcement — responsible for mass shootings have repeatedly stalled. For advocates of gun violence prevention, the criminal sentencing of parents represents one of the few avenues through which broader responsibility has been successfully established in court.