OAN Staff Lillian Mann
1:23 PM – Friday, July 10, 2026
A judge has scheduled a plea and sentencing hearing later this month for the 16-year-old accused of carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Georgia history.
Colt Gray was charged as an adult with 55 counts, including murder, cruelty to children and 25 counts of aggravated assault, in connection with the September 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School in northeast Georgia, which left two students and two teachers dead and several others wounded.
The sitting judge set a “non-negotiated plea and sentencing hearing” to begin July 24th, according to a court filing on Friday in Barrow County Superior Court in Winder, Georgia.
A non-negotiated plea, in which the state and defense have not reached an agreement on a sentence, leaves the sentencing up to the judge, who will make a decision based on a summary of the case from each side.
The judge had said previously that Gray would have to notify the court and prosecutors by July 15th if he intended to plead guilty ahead of the trial.
Gray’s father, Colin Gray, was convicted in March on 27 charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter after supplying his teenage son with the assault-style rifle used in the shooting. Colin Gray faces up to 180 years in prison. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for late July.
According to prosecutors, Colin Gray overlooked several past instances of violence involving his son. However, while the father acknowledged purchasing the rifle for Colt as a Christmas gift, he testified that his intention was to connect with his son through hunting and target practice.
In an interview with detectives the year before the shooting, Gray’s father revealed that his son was branded “gay” by his classmates and was heavily bullied at school, saying they “just ridiculed him day after day.”
According to investigators, Colt Gray brought the semiautomatic rifle on a school bus wrapped in poster board on September 4, 2024, and later emerged from a bathroom carrying the rifle after leaving his second-period class. He then allegedly opened fire in a classroom and throughout the school’s hallways.
Teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39 years old, and Cristina Irimie, 53 years old, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14 years old, were killed in the shooting. Another teacher and eight other students were wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.
Authorities further alleged that Gray had carefully plotted the shooting and left a notebook in his classroom with instructions and a diagram detailing the assault, including an estimate that he could kill as many as 26 people and wound as many as 13 others.
Gray had even purportedly made a shrine in his bedroom to Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 2018 massacre, prosecutors said.
The suspected shooter’s trial is set to take place on October 13th in Columbia County, about 100 miles from Barrow County where the shooting occurred, following the defense’s request for a change of venue to ensure a fair jury.
The second-degree murder charges alone carry a potential sentence of up to 30 years in prison for Gray and he could face a maximum sentence of 180 years overall, according to The Guardian.
Gray has remained at the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center in Gainesville, Georgia, following his arrest for the Apalachee High School shooting.
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