Georgia school shooter had a chaotic childhood and was fixated on mass killings, psychologist says

The teenager who killed two students and two teachers in a 2024 shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School had a chaotic, lonely upbringing and immersed himself in an online community of people interested in mass shootings, a psychologist testified Monday.

Colt Gray, 16, pleaded guilty Friday to 55 counts, including murder, in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting that also left several others wounded at the school about 45 miles (73 kilometers) northeast of Atlanta.

He entered the plea without having reached a plea deal with prosecutors. Murder carries a minimum sentence of life in prison, and it is up to Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm to decide whether he will have the possibility of parole after hearing testimony and considering evidence. The sentencing hearing started Friday, continued Monday and was set to resume Tuesday.

Teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, died in the shooting. Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.

Psychologist says Colt Gray had a ‘chaotic’ childhood

A forensic psychologist who evaluated Gray after the shooting at the request of an attorney for the teen testified that during their first meeting in May 2025, Gray asked if he could pull his arms inside his sweatshirt to wrap them around himself.

“I thought he was kind of an odd kid,” Kevin Richards said. The psychologist said he did four interviews with Gray for a total of about 15 hours and also spoke to Gray’s mother twice for a total of about three hours.

“It was pretty chaotic,” the psychologist said of Gray’s upbringing, noting that the family had financial problems and moved around a lot, so he wasn’t enrolled in school for long stretches. His parents used drugs and fought a lot, and Gray had a lonely and neglected childhood, Richards testified.

Colt Gray discussed school shootings online

Gray talked about fearing that teachers were plotting against him, and that people in public were whispering about him. Richards said that while he believes Gray experienced paranoia and anxiety, he doubts that motivated the attack.

“I don’t think he was driven by hallucinations or delusions to do what he did. I think he planned it out,” Richards said.

Most of the teen’s social life was online, Richards said. He was a gamer but also became immersed in a community of young true crime enthusiasts who were particularly fascinated by mass shootings. Initially, Gray focused on Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, as well as James Holmes, who killed 12 people in a Colorado movie theater. Richards said Gray was particularly interested in Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“He had just kind of disappeared into Discord and disappeared into the true crime community,” Richards said.

District Attorney Brad Smith showed Richards some of Gray’s online conversations on Discord, an online communication platform. They established that Gray would sometimes lie about his own mental health symptoms when talking to people online to establish common ground with them and get attention.

When asked by Smith if Gray studied and emulated school shooters, Richards responded that Gray was “kind of obsessed” with them.

In interviews with investigators, Gray lied about having called a suicide hotline right before the shooting, which Holmes had done, Smith said. He also told investigators he had damaged his computer the morning of the shooting and left it in the middle of his room, as Lanza had done. Smith called these “easter eggs” that Gray was planting to “gain fame and status” within the online community that fetishized those killings.

In an online conversation just days before the shooting, Gray mentioned Sept. 4. When the person he was chatting with asked what was happening that day, he wrote, “something i have for nik!” — an apparent reference to the Parkland shooter’s first name. He also noted that day was a Wednesday, just like the Parkland shooting.

Gray had more than 2,000 photos of Cruz saved on his phone and had 16 photos of Cruz printed and posted on his bedroom wall, Ashley Gilleland, an investigator with the district attorney’s office, testified. He shared photos of that “shrine” with another Discord user in the days before the shooting.

Similarly, he saved photos of other mass shooters and searched for details of those shootings, Gilleland said.

In phone calls with his mother while he was in custody just over a month after the shooting, Gray had her search online for mentions of his name within the “true crime community” and got excited when she found “fan art” drawings of him, Gilleland said. It appears his mother printed out some of the images she found to bring to her son, Gilleland said.

The judge also heard from victims and the lead investigator

After Gray entered his plea Friday, the judge heard from family members of those killed and victims of the shooting. Most asked the judge to sentence Gray to life without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors also played recordings of two interviews the lead investigator did with Gray, one that took place less than an hour after the shooting at the school and another that was done several hours later at the sheriff’s office. Though the teenager seemed hysterical, repeatedly apologized and described what had happened as “horrible” during the interview at the school, Barrow County Sheriff’s Office Investigator Jason Smith said Monday that he believed “a majority of that interview to be performative.”

A jury in March convicted his father, Colin Gray, on charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. He is scheduled to be sentenced later this week. Prosecutors said he gave his son the assault-style rifle used to open fire at the school.