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A Georgia father who gave his 14-year-old son the rifle the teen used to kill four people at his own high school has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: In September 2024, Colt Gray opened fire at Apalachee High School, killing two students and two teachers. Nine other people were hurt, seven of them shot. According to police, the rifle rode to school on the bus with him, wrapped in poster board that left the barrel sticking out. He sat through second period, stepped out to a bathroom, and started shooting when he returned to the hallway, then moved into a classroom. Colt was charged as an adult and pleaded guilty to all 55 counts without a plea deal. He got life without parole. His father, Colin Gray, 55, was arrested after investigators found he had given his son the AR-style rifle as a Christmas gift, packaged with a gun sight, shooting accessories, and ammunition. The gift came months after deputies had already been out to the house over the teen threatening to attack an elementary school. He faced 27 counts, including second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and cruelty to children, and a jury convicted him on all of them, making him the first parent in the country convicted of murder over a school shooting carried out by their kid.

What’s going on now: In a notable development, Judge Nicholas Primm sentenced Colin Gray to 15 years with most counts running concurrently, well short of the 80 years prosecutors asked for and modestly above the 10 the defense wanted.

“It is clear you failed as a parent,” Primm told him. “You didn’t get him mental health counseling when it was obvious he needed some. None of those failures helped your case, but those aren’t why you were convicted. You were convicted because the warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter and you didn’t get him help.”

The state’s case was about what Colin Gray knew. Weeks before the shooting, Colt’s mother, Marcee Gray, had confronted her estranged husband about the guns in the house, telling investigators she pushed him to lock them up and cut off their son’s access. The teen was in an online “true crime community” fixated on mass shootings, particularly Columbine and Sandy Hook, and investigators found posters and news clippings about the 2018 Parkland shooting hanging in his bedroom.

“This was the risk that he was ignoring, that there would be a mass shooting of children at a school, and he gave his son the exact tool he would need to accomplish this,” prosecutor Brad Smith said, holding up the posters. “He is the reason four people are dead, seven were injured and countless others were traumatized, and he is the reason a 16-year-old boy was sentenced two days ago to the rest of his life in prison.”

Defense attorney Brian Hobbs argued that the red flags were scattered and surrounded by “stretches of a child who laughed, who was bright, who loved his computer, video games, who played guitar, who went into the woods with his father,” and that Colt “actively hid the depth of his involvement” online.

The families were not interested in that framing. Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband, Richard, was one of the teachers killed, is a high school teacher herself and says PTSD has kept her out of the classroom since the shooting. “He was a single parent by choice. I am now because of his decisions,” she said of Colin Gray. “Colin couldn’t take his kid to therapy. Now I have to take mine.”