Apalachee High School shooter Colt Gray sentenced to life without parole

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Next up, I want to take you out to Georgia. Just moments ago, the Apalachee high school shooter Colt Gray was just sentenced to life without parole. Judge Nicholas Prim handed down the sentence following three days of testimony and arguments during Gray's sentencing hearing. The ruling came about an hour after the court went to recess following the closing statements. Let's listen in to this sentencing. [00:00:25] Nicholas Prim: We're 14 years of age. Those who appear regularly in front of me have often heard me lament about the difficulty in sending a young person to prison. And here, as everyone understands, the minimum sentence is life with parole. Now, the appellate courts have said that children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing. That stems from an understanding that juveniles aren't fully formed cognitively. Hallmark features of a juvenile include immaturity, impulsivity, recklessness, and failure to appreciate risk and consequences. Because of these factors, the Supreme Court says that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the death penalty for juveniles. The Supreme Court also disfavors life without parole for juveniles, declaring it to be a constitutionally forbidden, disproportionate sentence in all but the rarest of cases. Life without parole is thus authorized only for youthful crimes reflecting permanent incorrigibility. Life without parole is barred for crimes that are born out of a transient immaturity of youth. Now, I recognize that with your guilty plea, you have made a lengthy and public trial unnecessary. I also recognize that you were failed by each of your parents. You were failed by your extended family. To a certain extent, you've been failed by a society that can't stop propagating this misguided value in online cultures and social media rather than making genuine interpersonal connections and relationships. But that failure does not absolve you from who you chose to idolize worship and become. Four lives were stolen. Two of them really just beginning. And it wasn't done out of fear or anger. You weren't being bullied at Appalachee. It wasn't done out of hatred. You didn't even know anyone at that school. It was done for the infamy of it. Now, your childhood instability and neglect would explain or mitigate finding yourself in one of those problematic places that Dr. Richards testified about. But planning, fantasizing about, visualizing, and executing school shooting don't put you in a problematic place. It puts you in an unredeemable moral wasteland. Your crimes do reflect permanent incorrigibility, and I will sentence you to life without parole for each of the malice murders that you committed. You understood the horror of what you were going to do. You studied the trials of those other shooters. You even critiqued the victim statements given in those cases, and yet you did this anyway. You wrote, I want to make history. I want people to remember the pain I caused. And there you succeeded. The pain that you visited upon this community is unlikely to disappear in my lifetime. You do not seem to be tormented by what you did. You seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize. You aren't racked with guilt. You're proud of yourself. Less than a month after the tragedy, you weren't concerned with the horror you wrought, but rather with finding out which mass murderers they were comparing you to. A youth may fail to consider the harm his rash actions inflict before acting, but you did consider it. You studied that pain when you researched the trials of your profane idols. You contemplated that pain over and over. You were all too aware of the court outcome of those mass shootings because you studied and obsessed over them. You know that the Aurora Theater shooter received life without parole. Nicholas Cruz received life without parole. Ethan Crumley, a juvenile, received life without parole. Yet you were not dissuaded. Your plan was not hastily hatched. It was a slow boil simmering more than a year's time. You savored the thought of it, you visualized it, and you fantasized about it. You broke it down step by step in visualizing what you were going to do. The thought of mimicking these other mass murderers is what brought you joy. Now, for the rest of us, there is no joy here today. There's only a measure of closure. The slain will not return to life. The injured will not forget their wounds. And a 16-year-old boy will live and die in prison. You have certain post-appellate, post-plea appellate rights a need to inform you of. You have a right to file a notice for a discretionary appeal within 30 days of today's date. You can have a lawyer represent you for that, but you are not entitled to court-appointed counsel. You have a right to file a motion to withdraw this guilty plea because it's less than 30 days before the term of court ends. You have to file that within 30 days of today's date. That would be to correct a manifest injustice. You do have a right to a court-appointed attorney for that post-plea appellate right. If you need a court-appointed attorney, you need to promptly apply for one so that one can be appointed to meet that 30-day deadline. You also have a right to file a petition for habeas corpus to challenge any legal errors in the proceeding, any violations of your constitutional rights, but it is a civil proceeding for which you do not have the right to court-appointed counsel. Each of the malice murders will be life without parole, concurrent to one another. The felony murders and the related aggravated assaults for those all merge as a matter of law. Each of the aggravated batteries will be 20 years to be served in confinement consecutive to the life without parole. The aggravated assaults and the cruelty to children that do not otherwise legally merge will be 20 years concurrent to the life without parole. Is there anything else I need to address? I don't know, 20 years on aggravated batteries will say that they are concurrent with each other. Yes. All right. We're adjourned. [00:07:45] Speaker 1: Judge Prim handing down the sentence there, life without parole for the Appalachee high school shooter, Colt Gray, just a little bit ago out in Barrow County, Georgia. Now what we want to do, everyone, is showcase the district attorney making remarks right after this sentencing to the media. Let's listen in. [00:08:08] Speaker 3: Thank you all for your professionalism. [00:08:10] Speaker ?: No, we're not getting out of here. [00:08:11] Speaker 3: Okay. That was heartfelt. [00:08:15] Speaker 4: Mr. Smith, could you address some of the things that we heard today? It's simply the audio tape between me and his mom. I think by most people's definition would be troubling. Could you speak to that relationship and how we got to this day? [00:08:36] Speaker 3: No, that's the relationship I do not understand at all. That was the strangest thing I'd ever seen. I had heard the way this case shook out was very quickly. We realized that the shooter had been apprehended. He had given a confession. It was on tape. And then within a few days of the shooting, the investigation naturally turned towards the father when information about his culpability came in. So, as we went through it, it became pretty apparent early on that the father's case would probably get to trial before the son. So, we shifted and focused on the father for about a year. And then after the father's trial ended in March, we shifted towards the son. And that's when we really started noticing these things. I had heard that they'd had disturbing calls, but I hadn't really listened to them. It's only been within the last three months that I've sat down and listened to those jail calls. And it's one thing for someone to tell you they've been talking about inappropriate things. It's another thing to actually hear the chilling words and the tone and the joy that they seem to be getting out of it. So, no, sir, I could not ever understand what was going on there. [00:09:47] Speaker 5: Mr. Smith, can you tell us if you're exploring prosecuting others involved in this case? I'm thinking specifically about Colt's mother and maybe some of his online community. [00:09:56] Speaker 3: Well, if you look at our indictment of the father and our charging of him and why he was charged and what theory of the law we went under, it was a threefold, basically, that he had custodial. He was the custodial parent of the child. He had knowledge that the child had this danger about him, and he provided the firearm for the child. And because of that, we were able to prove that he was the proximate cause or a proximate cause of what happened at Appalachie. The mother does not fit that bill as far as she did not have custody. In the two years leading up to the shooting, she actually was only around the child physically about three months in the two years total. And she did not have custody of him. It was actually removed from her, and she was actually barred from being in Barrow County, so she wasn't even supposed to be up here. And she did not provide him with the firearm. She took some steps, not many, but some steps to actually have the firearms removed or ask the father to do that. So we don't believe we have the ability under the proximate cause of Georgia to charge her with what happened at Appalachie. The other crimes that she may or may not be guilty of would be probably outside of our jurisdiction here in Barrow County, or would entail Colt Gray being the victim. And I don't know that I have the stomach for a trial where Colt Gray is the victim. [00:11:28] Speaker 6: So you said it became a comment about a trial coming earlier before his site. Who ultimately used that decision? I thought, usually that's up to prosecution. How did that decision come about? [00:11:42] Speaker 3: No, ma'am. No, ma'am. The prosecution doesn't get to pick when trials go. It was a natural flow of things. Both of them were in custody. Whenever someone's in custody, the court will try and push that one to the front because they're in custody awaiting a trial. So both of them were in custody. We could tell that early on that Colt's attorney was looking at the psychological angle and was trying to get a psychiatrist or a psychologist to look at him and do an evaluation of him. And it was taking time. So every time the court would check in on the attorneys as to what's the status, what are things going, the state was always, we're ready. Collins' attorneys were always, we're ready. And Colt's attorneys were always, we're waiting on this, we're waiting on that. So it just became apparent to us. It wasn't anything official, but it became apparent. We could tell that it was going to inevitably end that way that we would do. [00:12:39] Speaker 6: Would you be ready for any possible appeal to be part of the father? That confession, that tape confession, was never able to be played during his trial. If you were to appeal, would that be something you're honest with? [00:12:50] Speaker 3: No, the theory of guilt for Colin Gray was what he knew of the threat Colt has opposed. So everything we presented at his trial was his knowledge of the danger that Colt posed. The stuff that came here was not introduced at his trial because we could never show that he knew these things. So it was not part of his theory of guilt. But the jury found that based on what he did know and what we could prove he knew, that that was sufficient, that he should have taken that gun away. [00:13:24] Speaker 4: I can't say anything to the family members. [00:13:32] Speaker 3: This is not a happy day. This is a relief day, I would say. But like I said in my closing, the depths of their loss, I can never comprehend. We just hope that we've done honor to them. We've done honor to their loved ones in the work that we put forward. And that's all we could do. [00:13:53] Speaker 7: Describe what you want Colt to take away from this. And actually, you said that it was an argument. [00:14:00] Speaker 3: What do I want Colt to take away from this? I have not going to think one more minute about Colt Gray. What I would like society to take away from this, and this was something that I didn't know existed, was this true crime community that's out there and the insidiousness of it. Whenever there's a mass shooting, I've noticed, people are always wondering, well, do they vote for Trump or do they vote for Harris? Do they believe in this or do they believe in that? And that's us adults thinking, why would someone do this? But what I realized was with this true crime community, they don't have an ideology. They're not progressive. They're not conservative. They're just nihilistic. And they want to just cause harm and pain. And they revel in that. And so I want everyone to realize this is not harmless. The things they're doing online are not harmless. And we need to pay attention to when these kids start doodling these things on their notebooks and putting them on their backpacks and doing these things and putting pictures on their wall. Who is that person you just put on your wall? Why are they on your wall? And if you do see your child acting this way or doing these things, please, please, please make sure they do not have access to firearms. Because, like Colt, it's not going to be something where, oh, they did this little violent thing. It's going to go from no violence to mass murder, and you can't wait at that point. [00:15:28] Speaker 4: Is there anything that can be done legislatively when you look at these chat rooms, this TCC? [00:15:33] Speaker 3: I hope so. I hope smarter minds get into that sort of thing and come up with something like that. We talked a lot, and we talked with Peter Smith, who was the expert that we called on the TCC. And we talked a lot about, well, won't this just encourage it? Aren't we giving more ammunition to this? And we were worried about that. But we kind of fell on the side that this needs to be out there. People need to know. Because the only way you're going to stop these, you're never going to stop these kids from doing it. The only way you're going to stop this is what they call leakage, where other people see the signs and other people intervene. So we're going to try, hopefully, get it educated out there that these are the signs you're looking for. These are the things that are unhealthy. Mrs. Gray should have noticed this really early on. This is not just some innocent little game that kids play. And firearms need to be taken away from these children. [00:16:29] Speaker 4: There was some concern about this all happening since the school starts. Yes. Having this sentencing, does that, a lady, fears that there may have been people concerned that this was hanging out there. Kids would be having to listen to all of this. [00:16:45] Speaker 3: I don't think that's why it was set at this time. The judge had to do it with other things. He had other things he was looking at as far as his schedule and when it was set. We did try, we knew it was going to be this week, and we knew school was starting this week. So we did try and move some things around, like school open house, when can kids be here, because they wanted to be here. Teachers wanted to be here. Administrators wanted to be here. This is something huge for our community, and they wanted their own piece of closure. So we were trying to accommodate it as best as we could, but we knew it was going to be this week, and we were trying to get it finished as quickly as we could this week. [00:17:24] Speaker 8: Mr. Smith, it was an extremely emotional day to listen to the testimony of your victims. I'm struggling for words that some of your victims may also testify in Thursday, twice in one week. What are the words that you have or thoughts? I need some of your victims for that. [00:17:38] Speaker 3: We've told our victims from the beginning. We brought them in when we knew that the sentencings were going to be at the same time, and we explained to them that victim impact statement is for them. It is not for us. I don't need you to help me get a sentence. I don't want them to feel like they have some sort of responsibility or some duty that they have to do anything. They are specifically for them. If they want to talk, they can talk. If they don't want to talk, they don't have to talk. We specifically told them there would be one with the shooter, and then there would be one with the father. And they could choose both. They could choose neither, or they could choose one or the other. We also told them that when they make a decision, it's up to them, and they can do it at the last second. If they've told us they want to and then change their mind, that's fine. If they've told us they don't want to and then they, like, raise their hand they want to, that's fine. It is an invitation to them because they need to be able to take some of the power back. [00:18:33] Speaker 4: He said you didn't want to think anymore about Colton, but his grandmother said something that was really interesting about conversations about his future, about getting a GED. Can you address that? Would you like to address that? [00:18:47] Speaker 3: In what way? [00:18:49] Speaker 4: What do you expect him to do in prison? For the rest of his life. [00:18:52] Speaker 3: Again, that's not something I think about. He should have thought about that beforehand. People in his life should have thought of that. [00:18:59] Speaker 7: What's the maximum that minimum max that Colin could face this week? [00:19:05] Speaker 3: I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head. He could technically get time served all the way up to, I think it's over 100 years. [00:19:16] Speaker 9: You mentioned the community here. People did sit through the audio that was played in the last couple of days here. People sat through the video in the first trial. People are aware of how horrific this whole situation developed. What does today represent for this community? [00:19:39] Speaker 3: I hope it's an opportunity to move past this. This has been a very dark place that this trial has taken everyone to, and none of us should have had to go there. But we did, and hopefully this is the end of it, or the end of this week will be the end of it, and we can all try and start working our way out of that dark place. [00:20:02] Speaker 6: Did you ever struggle with conjuring what justice looks like when you're encountering somebody that's such a young age? Obviously today was about the victims and accountability for all of them, but did you ever take that in when he was 14 years old and he interpreted everything that's going on around him? It's a fair shape in court. How heavily did you honor that in deciding your approach? [00:20:26] Speaker 3: That's always been with me. The first thing that I found out when the shooting happened was that he was 14, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. It's always been with me. Like I said in my closing, I'm the father of sons. I understand what a 14-year-old looks like, and to think that someone that age is making a decision that's going to affect them the rest of their life. There are no winners here today. This was a losing day all the way around. But like I said, hopefully this is an opportunity for us to work our way back out of that dark place. [00:20:58] Speaker 10: I just want to know what you were thinking in that hour that we were all waiting for the answer, you know, after, and then you see the family's reactions to it. [00:21:08] Speaker 3: I was actually at peace. We presented our case. What I need to know, I need all decisions to be made with the truth. And so we just wanted to make sure that when the judge made this decision, he knew everything. And he knew the truth of the situation. At that point, once we were able to do that and felt like we had done that and presented what actually happened, then it's up to the judge to make that decision. And I was at peace with whatever he would have done. [00:21:39] Speaker 6: Was there any particular piece of evidence? I mean, it was all terrible. Like, was there any particular piece of evidence that kept you up at night or shook you? [00:21:48] Speaker 3: Yes, ma'am. There was one piece of video from the school that we did not introduce at trial, and it will haunt me for the rest of my life. [00:22:00] Speaker 11: A major thing that you covered in the hearing was the Easter eggs or tidbits of information that you say he left behind for the true crime community to find. Are you concerned, or did you ponder at all the elements at trial that could be looked at in the future by future children in these sites, evaluating this and idolizing it in the same way that he did? [00:22:24] Speaker 3: Absolutely. And we know that's going to happen. We weighed that, we talked with experts about it, and we ultimately landed on it is more important for society, for the rest of society to know this dark, ugly place exists, so that we can start doing something as a society to fix it. I don't know what that is, but you can't fix a problem if you don't know it exists. And they were always going to do something anyway, and I hope they know now that everyone knows they're there, and we'll be looking for them. Anything else? Thank you again for y'all's professionalism and throughout this process. [00:23:01] Speaker 1: Thank you. DA Brad Smith wrapping up there after the sentencing for Hulk Gray getting life without parole. You are watching Live Now from Fox, everyone. We appreciate you continuing to join us. We are going to take another two-minute break. When we come back, we are going to be talking about some severe storms in the Northeast. We'll be breaking that down coming up next on Live Now.