By Julia Harte
July 28 (Reuters) - A Georgia teenager will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing four people and injuring nine others in a 2024 school shooting, a judge ruled on Tuesday.
Colt Gray, 16, who on Friday pleaded guilty to 55 counts including murder and assault charges, appeared impassive as a judge in Barrow County Superior Court delivered his sentence.
"Your crimes do reflect permanent incorrigibility," said Judge Nicholas Primm. "You do not seem to be tormented by what you did.
You seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize."
Primm had had two sentencing options: life with or without the possibility of parole.
Gray, a 14-year-old ninth-grader at the time of the September 4, 2024, shooting, brought an assault-style rifle he had received as a Christmas present from his father into Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, hidden inside a roll of poster board.
His father, Colin Gray, was convicted in March on 27 charges, including second-degree murder, for giving his son the rifle despite what prosecutors said were clear red flags, including a shrine to school shooters in the boy's room. It was a rare prosecution of a parent in connection with a child's mass shooting in the United States. Colin Gray is expected to be sentenced on Thursday.
Colt Gray was charged as an adult for the shooting, in which he killed students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14, and teachers Cristina Irimie, 53, and Richard Aspinwall, 39.
In hearings on Monday and Tuesday, prosecutors argued that Gray was still driven by a desire to achieve the notoriety of other school shooters he admired. They played recordings of jailhouse calls weeks after the shooting in which Gray asked his mother to tell him how the Internet's "true crime community" was reacting to his rampage.
During one such call, Gray laughed and said he was "in the big leagues... and not in a bad way."
"The shooting was not the culmination of the plan -- [it] was just one of the steps," said Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith in his closing argument on Tuesday. "The plan was ultimate and lifelong fame."
Smith dismissed the defense's efforts to show that Gray could be rehabilitated and safely rejoin society one day, comparing the teenager to a shark with inescapably violent instincts.
Gray's defense attorney, Charlton Allen, sought to show that Gray's traumatic and unstable childhood pushed him to embrace an online community that idolized violent crime. Allen presented testimony from figures in Gray's life, including his grandmother, that Gray's parents abused drugs and neglected his basic needs.
Gray's shooting was his way of "reflecting the behaviors of the community that seems to be willing to accept him when his own parents won't," Allen said in his closing argument.
(Reporting by Julia Harte; editing by Donna Bryson and Alistair Bell)
