Reporting by Wayne Ford, Athens Banner-Herald
The click of the metal handcuffs was barely audible as deputies secured Colt Gray just moments after he was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder on Sept. 4, 2024.
Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm appeared stone-faced as he handed down the maximum sentence on Apalachee shooter Gray at the county courthouse in Winder. The judge said he committed a “deliberate, contemplated, evil” act.
“A 16-year-old boy will live and die in prison,” the judge told the slender, bespectacled, pale teen who sat before him.
Gray was sentenced to four life terms in prison without parole to be served concurrently for the deaths of Apalachee students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie. Nine others were wounded or injured in the chaos of the gunfire.
In all, there were 55 counts to which Gray pleaded guilty on July 24. The other sentences imposed included 20 years consecutive for the aggravated battery cases and 20 years concurrent for the aggravated assault cases.
Primm, who presided over the shocking criminal case, noted that Gray was only a 14-year-old ninth-grader when he planned and committed the murders. Based on the state’s evidence, the judge noted that the teen carried out the killings not out of fear, hatred, or anger toward those at the school, but “it was done for the infamy of it.”
Gray was once recorded as saying he wanted people to remember the pain he caused, the judge said.
“And you succeeded,” Primm said as victims’ families, school employees, and others in the courtroom listened to the judicial outcome on a day of justice for this Barrow County community.
Gray, who carried out the carnage with a Christmas-gift assault rifle from his father, was offered an opportunity to speak, but his attorney, Charlton Allen of Tucker, said he would not. Allen asked for a life sentence with the “hope” for parole.
Piedmont Circuit District Attorney Brad Smith argued to the judge in the sentencing hearing that Gray’s ultimate goal was to become famous among an online subculture group known as the True Crime Community (TCC).
Smith said when he first learned about the killings, he thought it was done by someone who would see the horror of the slaughter and say, “Oh, God, what have I done.” But the shooting was nothing more than one step in a plan Gray concocted to gain “lifelong fame inside TCC,” according to Smith.
After his arrest at the school, Gray emulated acts and made comments that were done by other mass shooters, including Nikolas Cruz, who killed 14 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, according to Smith.
Telephone recordings unveil merciless attitude of Apalachee shooter
During the sentencing hearing, prosecutors continued to release more recorded telephone conversations between Gray and his mother, Marcee Gray, which showed how the teenager craved the attention he was receiving on TCC after the killings.
“I’m in the big league,” he told her on Oct. 13, 2024, about his ranking among mass shooters. The teen laughed after he commented.
During other conversations, he asked his mother if she had made a shrine of him, much like he had done in his bedroom for the mass killer Cruz, whom he idolized.
When he learned his mother had received a message from a person representing the British Broadcasting Corporation inquiring about the possibility of a documentary on her son, the teen excitedly responded by saying, “Yes. Go for it.” He later noted that, “I’m being compared to the big dogs.”
But in February 2025, Marcee Gray told her son she had learned the district attorney’s office had access to their telephone communications. She sounded somewhat concerned, telling her son that the authorities are saying she is encouraging his conduct.
“I got to be careful what we talk about,” she tells him.
The defense produced three witnesses: Steve Baker, a counselor for the Department of Juvenile Justice; Deborah Brocey, the Department of Family and Children Services director; and Gray’s grandmother, Deborah Bolhamus of Fitzgerald.
The grandmother told how when the Grays were living in Statham, they fell into financial distress, then began a life of substance abuse, domestic violence and a series of home evictions, all of which had an impact on Gray and his two siblings. The Bolhamus family initially reported the parental abuse to the state Department of Family and Children Services, which began an investigation.
Just the week before the Apalachee shooting, the grandmother testified she scheduled a visit for Colt Gray at a mental health clinic in Athens, but the day after she fell and broke her hand. She then returned to Fitzgerald for medical attention. Before Bolhamus left Winder, she testified the parents, Marcee and Colin Gray, assured her they would take their son to the mental health agency.
However, the grandmother testified they never took him to the appointment. Four days later, the teen took a high-powered rifle concealed in a bag into the school teeming with students easing into a new school year.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald.
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