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The teenager who killed two students and two teachers in a 2024 shooting<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Colt Gray, 16, pleaded guilty Friday<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Teachers Richard \u201cRicky\u201d Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, died in the shooting<\/a>. Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire. <\/p>\n A forensic psychologist who evaluated Gray after the shooting at the request of the teen’s attorney 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was pretty chaotic,\u201d the psychologist said of Gray’s upbringing, noting that the family had financial problems and moved around a lot, so he wasn\u2019t enrolled in school for long stretches. His parents used drugs and fought a lot, and Gray had a lonely and neglected childhood, Richards testified.<\/p>\n Gray was paranoid, Richards said. He talked about fearing that teachers were plotting against him, and that people in public were whispering about him. The teen also believed his home computer had been infiltrated, prompting him to keep changing usernames and destroying external storage devices, the psychologist said.<\/p>\n Richards said that while he believes Gray experienced paranoia, he doubts that motivated the attack.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think he was driven by hallucinations or delusions to do what he did. I think he planned it out,\u201d Richards said. <\/p>\n 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<\/a>, who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, as well as James Holmes<\/a>, who killed 12 people in a Colorado movie theater. Richards said Gray was particularly interested in Nikolas Cruz<\/a>, the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Florida\u2019s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had just kind of disappeared into Discord and disappeared into the true crime community,\u201d Richards said.<\/p>\n 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 and drugs when talking to people online to establish common ground with them and get attention.<\/p>\n When asked by Smith if Gray studied and emulated school shooters, Richards responded that Gray was \u201ckind of obsessed\u201d with them.<\/p>\n After Gray entered his plea Friday, the judge heard victim impact statements from family members of those killed and victims of the shooting. Most asked the judge to sentence him to life without the possibility of parole.<\/p>\n 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. During those interviews, the teen mentioned uncontrollable urges and hearing people tell him to do things.<\/p>\n