A Georgia teenager was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison for carrying out an attack at his high school that killed two students and two teachers and left a trail of grief in a suburban community near Atlanta.
A judge found that the boy, Colt Gray, now 16, should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. He had pleaded guilty last week to 55 charges, including murder and aggravated assault, in connection with the 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. He was 14 at the time and beginning his freshman year.
The change in plea spared Winder, a small city northeast of Atlanta, the inherent uncertainty of a trial. But the sentencing hearing itself spanned days. Agonizing victim impact statements and other testimony excavated the panic and anguish in the hours after the shooting, the fitful path toward recovery for survivors and the families of those killed, and the downward spiral of an adolescent who had access to a rifle but not the psychological support he urgently needed.
At the start of the hearing, Judge Nicholas Primm of Barrow County Superior Court said his discretion was limited: By statute, Mr. Gray would receive a life sentence, but it was up to the judge to determine whether Mr. Gray would ever be eligible for parole.
Judge Primm said that the gravity of the crimes led him to determine that Mr. Gray should spend the rest of his life in prison, even after taking his age and immaturity into account.
“You understood the horror of what you were going to do,” Judge Primm said, adding, “It was deliberate, contemplated evil.”
Mr. Gray had been scheduled to go on trial in October, but the change in plea had been anticipated, especially given that his father had been convicted in March of murder and involuntary manslaughter, among other charges.
The shooting — the deadliest school shooting in Georgia history — attracted national attention because prosecutors succeeded in holding his father criminally responsible for the attack. Prosecutors pointed to his allowing his son virtually unfettered access to the weapon used in the attack — a rifle given to him as a Christmas gift — and failing to heed signs of his son’s deteriorating mental health.
The father’s sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin on Thursday.
During the father’s trial and in the recent sentencing testimony, prosecutors presented a series of witnesses and evidence that portrayed the shooting on Sept. 4, 2024, as the culmination of years of escalating family turmoil and a growing obsession with violence for the younger Mr. Gray.
Well before the shooting, Mr. Gray would have violent outbursts and flashes of overwhelming anxiety, family members testified. He told them that he’d hear voices prodding him to act aggressively.
Mental health experts said he had been affected by the persistent isolation and neglect of his childhood. But they also said he was malingering and that the symptoms he described seemed exaggerated or highly improbable, like hearing voices only on specific days of the week. They testified that they believed he did not have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
In a search of his home immediately after the shooting, investigators found a collage on his bedroom wall of photographs of the 19-year-old perpetrator of the attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018 and news clippings related to that shooting, in which 17 people were killed.
He had also left detailed plans. In the sentencing hearing, prosecutors showed stick-figure drawings Mr. Gray had made in a notebook, apparently mimicking sketches by the Parkland gunman.
Prosecutors shared recordings from phone calls with his mother from jail in which Mr. Gray relished the notoriety he had gained from the attack. “I’m in the big leagues, bro,” he told his mother, at one point comparing himself to the man who attempted to assassinate President Trump in 2024.
Still, his maternal grandmother, Deborah Polhamus, testified that she had seen some improvements while he was in jail. He had a routine and psychological treatment and medication — things, she said, he did not have before.
“He’s thriving,” Ms. Polhamus said. “He’s more like the Colt I saw growing up.”
In the years before the shooting, Mr. Gray had spent much of his childhood jostled by turbulence. He enrolled in seven schools over four years, as his family bounced between homes, sometimes because of eviction. His mother struggled with substance abuse and legal troubles. His family eventually split, with his younger sisters living with their mother and him with his father, until his father gained sole custody of all three.
When Mr. Gray was in middle school and living in a nearby county, sheriff’s deputies visited the boy’s home after the F.B.I. traced an anonymous threat about a school shooting made on an online message board to his address. But the investigation was dropped after the boy could not be definitively connected to the posts.
In 2024, after missing his eighth-grade year entirely, Mr. Gray entered Apalachee as a freshman. There, he attended class only occasionally; Sept. 4, already several weeks into the academic year, was Mr. Gray’s fifth school day.
In the sentencing hearing, some survivors, like Natalie Griffith, conjured alternative scenarios imagining if Mr. Gray had held off. Maybe, she said, he would have found a place for himself on campus and found friends. “If you had just waited,” said Ms. Griffith, a student at Apalachee.
She also would not have gone through painful surgeries and physical therapy to try to regain the full use of her hand. “I wonder if the person I am today,” she said, “is the person I would have been if the shooting had not occurred.”
Jessica Rehberg, the principal, described the chaos caused by the shooting. “He turned staff members into impromptu paramedics and caregivers,” she recalled. And she described the lasting consequences beyond the stolen lives and major physical injuries, like the hundreds of students whose ability to learn was disrupted long after the shooting was over.
“He destroyed what once felt like the most safe and secure place,” Ms. Rehberg said. “He stole the ability to focus and not zone out. He turned conversations about ‘Where should we eat after the football game?’ into ‘Is it even safe enough to go?’”
Because of that, she told the judge, “he deserves the harshest consequences.”
Standing in the courtroom, some saw an opportunity to speak directly to Mr. Gray, as he sat just a few feet away. They sought to convey the fury and the grief they blame him for.
“I’m angry at how cowardly you are,” Alanna Wallace, the sister of Mason Schermerhorn, a 14-year-old student who was killed, said in court.
She described the videos and photographs she has seen from that day at Apalachee — harrowing images burned into her mind.
“You saw him scared and running,” Ms. Wallace said. “And then you proceeded to shoot him in the head.”
