A US judge on Tuesday sentenced a teenager who killed two students and two teachers in a shooting at Apalachee high school in Georgia to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Colt Gray, 16, had pleaded guilty on Friday to 55 counts, including murder, in the 4 September 2024, shooting at the school about 45 miles (73 kilometers) north-east of Atlanta. Gray, who was 14 at the time, was charged as an adult.
Nicholas Primm, a Barrow county superior court judge, handed down the sentence after hearing from family members of those killed and victims, as well as investigators, a forensic psychologist who had evaluated Gray, a youth detention center counselor and Gray’s grandmother.
The minimum penalty for murder in Georgia is life with the possibility of parole. That left Primm with the decision of whether Gray should ever be eligible for parole. He decided the teen should never be allowed out.
Brad Smith, a district attorney, had argued that Gray “cannot be in society”. “We’ve seen no evidence he has any ability to develop a conscience or any ability ever to fully value human life,” Smith said.
The defense attorney W Charlton Allen told the judge his client is “not irretrievably broken”. Giving him the possibility of parole would give him “an opportunity of hope”, Allen said, adding that without hope, “that takes away the ability for him to change”.
Two teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and two students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, died in the shooting. Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.
Victims of the shooting and family members of those killed conveyed their anger and grief to Primm on Friday, almost all of them asking him to impose a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Shayna Aspinwall, the wife of math teacher and football coach Richard Aspinwall, described “a life sentence of grief and trauma for those left behind”.
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