Life Without Parole for Colt Gray, 15 Years for the Father Who Bought the Rifle, the Clancy Jury Walks the House

0:03 Caalarogus Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime Injustice. It's Monday, August third, twenty twenty six. Before we go anywhere, a warning about today's episode. We are going to talk about the killing of children, about strangulation, about suicide, and about severe mental illness. Some of what first responders described under oath last week is genuinely hard to hear. I'm going to handle it carefully, but I'm not going to pretend it away either. If that is not something you can carry today, skip this one and come back tomorrow. There is no wrong answer there. Nine days ago on this show, I asked you a question.

0:47 Colt Gray had just pleaded guilty to all fifty five counts against him for what he did at Appalachi High School in winder Georgia. Four people dead, nine more wounded. He was fourteen years old when he did it. He is six team now, and there was no jury left to decide anything because the plea took care of that one. Judge Nicholas prim was going to decide alone whether that boy would ever have a chance at parole. I asked you where you landed. You answered a lot of you answered, and last week, so did Judge prim Today, two sentencings, two days apart, same courtroom, same judge. The sun got life without the possibility of parole. The father, the man who put the rifle under the Christmas tree got fifteen years.

1:33 The district attorney asked for more than seventy. We are going to sit with that gap for a while, because I think it tells you something about how this country actually calculates responsibility. Then we go to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Lindsey Clancy triple murder trial spent Thursday listening to the people who ran into that basement, and Friday putting jurors on a bus to see the house for themselves. Cora Dawson and Callan Clancy five years old, three years old, eight months old. And then Kentucky, where a man who strangled a college freshman in his dorm room stood up and asked that boy's family to forgive him. What makes that one land differently is that the boy's father had already told a room full of grieving students to do exactly that two years ago, before anybody asked this is daily crime and justice. Let's start where we left it on Friday, July twenty fourth, Colt Gray pleaded guilty to fifty five felony counts, including four counts of malice murder.

2:38 Then came a three day sentencing hearing, and it was not a formality. Note Books with plans in them, cell phone records, messages showing a fascination with the man who shot up a high school in Parkland, Florida in twenty eighteen, a man who killed seventeen people there. An investigator played jail calls between Colt and his mother, and on those calls, he talked about his own rising profile, le compared himself to other people who had done terrible things and gotten famous for it, and told her he was in the big leagues. The defense put on a forensic psychologist who said cult was not schizophrenic and could not have credibly run an insanity defense, but who did describe anxiety, depression, and paranoia. His grandmother testified about substances in the house and three neglected children. On Tuesday, July twenty eighth, Judge prim sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court has said you cannot execute a juvenile and you can only hand a juvenile life without parole. In rare cases, prim said he believed this was one of them. That Grey's crimes reflected what he called permanent incorrigibility. And then he said, the thing I have not been able to shake all week. He told that sixteen year old he had not been bullied at that school, that it was not hatred, that he did not even know the people he shot. In the judges' words, it was done for the infamy of it. Colt Gray wrote in his own notebook that he wanted to make history, that he wanted people to remember the pain he caused.

4:04 The judge quoted it back to him, told him he had succeeded and took away every day of the rest of his life. That was Tuesday. Two days later, Thursday, July thirtieth, the same judge sat in the same courtroom, and the man in the orange and white stripes was the father. You know this case. We covered the trial back in February and March. But let me put the spine of it in front of you again, because the spine is the whole point. May of twenty twenty three, more than a year before the shooting, the FBI got anonymous tips about online threats to shoot up a school, with photographs of guns attached, and the tips traced back to Colt Gray, who was thirteen years old. Sheriff's deputies came out to the house. Colin Gray sat there on body camera and told them there were guns in the home and talked about hunting and about teaching his son firearm safety. No charges. Everybody went home. December of twent three, seven months later Christmas, Colin Gray bought his son an Ar fifteen style rifle and gave it to him as a gift. By the following fall, that boy's bedroom wall had become a shrine to a mass shooter. District Attorney Brad Smith held up a poster of it in court on Thursday. Photographs and articles about the Parkland gunman taped up over a teenager's desk in a house where the FBI had already knocked about school shooting threats, in a house with a rifle his father bought him. That is not a mistake. That is a choice. It is a series of choices made over sixteen months by a grown

5:37 man who had been warned. On September fourth, twenty twenty four, the boy carried that rifle into Appalachi High School and used it. Richard Aspinwall thirty nine years old. Everybody called him Ricky, math teacher and a football coach. He left for work that morning, excited to do the job he loved, and he never came home. Christina Irremi fifty three years old, also a math teacher. Mason Shermerhorn fourteen years old, Christian Angulo fourteen years old. Nine other people were wounded in March. A jury convicted Colin Gray second degree murder for Mason and for Christian, involuntary manslaughter for Ricky Aspinwall and for Christina Eremi reckless conduct, cruelty to children. He is the first parent in Georgia ever prosecuted over a mass school shooting committed by their child, and by most accounts, the first parent in the country convicted of murder for it.

6:38 The nearest comparison is the Crumbles in Michigan, and those were involuntary manslaughter convictions. So Thursday was the day the number came. The family spoke first. Shana Aspinwall talked about her husband. She has post traumatic stress disorder. She is raising their two daughters by herself. Now. Ricky's father Rick Aspinwall looked at Colin Gray and told him he was responsible for all of it, that he could not see it any other way, and said he hoped Gray would sit in a corner somewhere and have to remember every bit of what he caused. And then Mason Shermerhorn's mother, Brianna said, the thing that should follow Colin Gray into whatever cell he is in. She had been a single parent herself, and she was tired of hearing the difficulty of parenting used as an excuse. She drew a line between a person struggling to parent and a person refusing to.

7:29 Colin Gray was not an overwhelmed teenager figuring life out. He was a grown man with years of experience, chance after chance, warning after warning. District Attorney Brad Smith asked for more than seventy years. He told the judge that Colin Gray handed his son the exact tool he needed, that he is the reason four people are dead, and that he is the reason a sixteen year old boy had been sentenced two days earlier to die in prison. The defense asked for roughly ten years to serve grace. Attorney argued his client should be sentenced for what he did not for what his son did, and that the week of testimony at Cults Hearing had actually shown Colt hid his intentions from his father and even accelerated his plan because his father was trying to get him treatment.

8:16 He conceded that what Colin Gray did was not enough. He said it also was not nothing, and it was not indifference, and he laid out what is left of the family. One son in prison for life, a daughter in foster care, a younger son in foster care. On his attorney's advice, Colin Gray did not say a word. Judge prim said he had never found his own position less enviable. He said punishing criminal negligence is hard, precisely because the person did not intend to commit a crime. That the punishment has to come out of what was foreseeable and out of the damage that followed. He said the warning lights had been flashing brighter and brighter. He told Gray that if he had used gunlocks or taken the ammunition out of the house, he would not be standing there and then quote no parent thinks that their child is going to be the next school shooter. End quote.

9:08 But he said it became more and more obvious that something bad was coming. Then he told Colin Gray that he had failed as a parent, and then he gave him fifteen years, fifteen on each second degree murder count, ten on the reckless conduct counts everything running at the same time, total sentence fifteen years. He has already served about twenty two months of it. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I have been chewing on this for two days and I still cannot make the arithmetic feel right. I am not going to tell you Colin Gray deserved seventy years, because I do not believe the man wanted this. Criminal negligence is a real category, and it exists for a reason. The judge is right that it is hard, and I understand the argument that a father should answer for his own failures and not be handed his son's sentence. But here's what snags. Four people are dead, nine more were shot. A whole community is caring this for the rest of their lives, and the judge said so from the bench, and the total accounting for the adult in that story, the one person who could legally buy the rifle, the one person the FBI actually sat down with, is fifteen years, of which he has already done. Nearly two. There is a playbook for this, and it runs through every case where an adult builds the conditions for a catastrophe and then stands back. I did not pull the trigger. I did not know. I was doing my best, and a system built to punish

10:39 intent keeps finding itself in front of harm nobody intended and reaching for a smaller number. I do not think Judge prim did anything lazy. He did what the law gave him room to do with his eyes open. What I think is that we have built a legal architecture that is very confident about a person who meant it, and almost helpless in front of a person who simply would not look. Ricky Aspinwall should be teaching math this fall. Christina Irami should be teaching math this fall. Mason Shermerhorn and Christian Angelo should be starting their junior year complaining about homework and arguing about cars. Someone has to say your names coming up. The jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial gets on a bus and goes to see the house.

11:24 And in Kentucky, a killer asks a family for forgiveness they had already offered him two years ago. Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fischer, and we are on this trial every day now because it is going to run six to eight weeks, and because the question at the center of it is one this country keeps refusing to answer. Lindsey Clancy is thirty five years old. She was a labor and delivery nurse. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder, and I want to be precise about what that plea means here because it is unusual. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, is not disputing that she strangled Cora, Dawson and Callen in the basement of their Duxbury home on January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three. He has offered to stipulate to nearly all of it. The fight is not about what happened.

12:23 It is about whether she was criminally responsible when it happened. Prosecutors say no. Assistant District Attorney Shaneon Buckingham told the jury this was a woman acting deliberately and meticulously, not a woman in the grip of psychosis. The defense says she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, that she had been begging the medical system for help for months, and that she was over medicated by the very people she went to for that help. That is the whole case. Everything else points at one of those two answers. On Thursday, the prosecution put ten first responders on the stand, one after another, and it was the hardest day of the trial so far. Duxbury police officer Stephen Hall went first, and he cried on the stand. He described arriving to find Patrick Clancy calling for help from behind the house.

13:12 Officer Brian Josephine described going down into that basement after they heard screaming, and knowing before he ever got a hand on the child that there was very little he could do. I am not going to walk you through all of it. You do not need the inventory and those three kids do not need it read out loud, but you should know what those people carried out of that house. A Duxbury firefighter named Jennifer Stratton testified that she picked up eight month old Callen and ran him to the truck herself and rode with him and he never took a breath. Firefighter Patrick Dwyer worked on five year old kra with everything he had. Cruz worked on three year old Dawson with CPR and medication. None of it changed anything. A Pembroke paramedic testified that he treated Lindsay Clancy on the way to the hospital, including for a possible opioid overdose, and that she never fully came around.

14:05 Reddington objected through all of it, calling the testimony repetitious because prosecutors were handing each new witness the same photographs from that basement. Legally, he has a point since he has already offered to stipulate to the debts. But the prosecution is not doing this purely for the horror of it. Two of those officers conceded something on cross that matters enormously. Lindsey Clancy had cuts on her neck and arms that she inflicted on herself before going out the second story window. Those officers said the cuts were not life threatening, did not need immediate attention, and had largely stopped bleeding by the time they arrived. That is the prosecution building toward an argument that the suicide attempt was not what it looked like, and if the jury buys that, it goes straight at the heart of the defense, because a woman staging the appearance of a suicide attempt is a woman making calculations. A woman in psychosis is no The defense will tell you. The fall speaks for itself. She went out a second story window and she is paralyzed from the waist down. She comes to court in a wheelchair.

15:09 She has been held at Tewksbury Hospital. There is nothing performative about a spinal cord injury. That is going to be one of the central fights of this trial, and we are only in week two. Then Friday, Judge William Sullivan did something you do not see often. He sent the jury to the house. It is called a jury view, and Sullivan approved it over the objection of the people who own that house on Summer Street. Now, which tells you how much weight he put on it. Jurors could look at the outside, the basement, and every room on the first and second floors. They could not open a closet or touch anything. Neither lawyer was allowed to narrate. They can point, they cannot explain. No media within one hundred yards. Reddington said his client would not attend. And then the jury got back on the bus and went two more places, the CVS where Patrick Clancy picked up medicine for Cora, and a restaurant in Plymouth called three v where he picked up the takeout order. That second stop is the prosecution's theory made physical. Their argument has always been that the errand itself was the plan. That she sent her husband to a restaurant they did not normally use, and checked how long the round trip would take.

16:23 The defense has an answer, which is that she had told him she was frightened of being alone with the children. Same fact, two completely different stories about what it means. After the view, jurors returned to Plymouth Superior Court to hear from medical staff at South Shore Hospital who treated Lindsay Clancy after the fall. Judge Sullivan has told the jury the trial is running ahead of schedule. Here is what I keep coming back to. Long before January twenty fourth, this woman was in the system, emergency rooms, a psychiatric facility, a stack of prescriptions, People with credentials looked at her over and over. Whatever the jury decides about criminal responsibility, and that is genuinely their call and not mine. A great many professional adults had eyes on this family, and none of it stopped what happened in that basement. Courra Clancy was five years old. Dawson Clancy was three years old.

17:16 Callan Clancy was eight months old. They're the ones nobody in that courtroom can give anything back to still Ahead, a college freshman from Montana, a dorm room in Kentucky and a father who stood in a chapel and asked people to forgive the man who killed his son. Welcome back last story today, and this is a new one for us. Josiah Malachi Kilman was eighteen years old. He grew up in Columbia Falls, Montana, and before he was a college wrestler, he was a soccer player, and a good one. His coach had him from the age of seven until he left for school and named him team captain two years running. That coach described a kid who was strong and also gentle, who went out of his way to be decent to people who were not as gifted or as popular as he was. His mother said that when he was four years old, he insisted on wearing three piece suits through the Texas summer, not for a wedding, not for church, just because he wanted to look nice. He went to Campbellsville University in Kentucky, a small private Christian school, freshman Biblical studies major wrestler, just after midnight on February twenty fourth, twenty twenty four, Josiah was found unresponsive in his dorm room. He was taken to Taylor Regional Hospital and pronounced dead. The coroner ruled it a homicide cause of death asphyxiation by manual strangulation.

18:50 Police pulled surveillance video from the dorm. A detective later testified it showed another student entering the building wearing a backpack and leaving without it. That student was Charles Escalera, who also goes by Zeke, twenty one years old at the time, another member of the Campbellsville wrestling team, a teammate. Law enforcement went looking for him that afternoon with a murder warrant, and Kentucky State Police found him hiding in a barn near the county line. A grand jury indicted him on murder, third degree, burglary, and theft. He pleaded not guilty and sat in the Taylor County Detention Center for roughly two and a half years. Then in June of this year, he took a deal guilty to murder two other charges dropped. Thursday was the sentencing. Judge Isaac Garb told the courtroom he had received more than sixty letters and emails from Josiah's family and friends, and that he had read every one. Josiah's cousin, Paul Brown, spoke about a smile that lit up rooms and said that while no sentence could give back what was taken, he asked that justice be served faithfully. Prosecutors read a statement from Josiah's mother, describing a boy who was full of life and, in her words, a hopeless romantic. Then Escala stood and read a statement he had written himself, addressed to Josiah's parents, his brothers and sisters, his grandparents, all of his people. He said there were no words that could ease any of it. He said, quote if I could trade him places, I would in the blink of

20:21 an eye end quote. He said he asked God every day to forgive him and to help Josiah's family forgive him. The judge said he believed the killing happened during what must have been a profound mental health crisis. He noted Escala has been a model prisoner who has stayed on his medications and gone to therapy. Then he imposed the sentence already agreed to in the plea forty years in the custody of the Kentucky Department of Corrections, with credit for time served and parole eligibility after twenty under Kentucky law. The judge said probation was not available. Two years on, the motive has never been made public. Police said early they did not have one. Nothing since has changed that.

21:05 Josiah Killman's family got a conviction, a sentence, and an apology, and they still do not know why. Now here's the part I cannot let go of. And it happened two years before Thursday, in the week after Josiah died, Campbellsville held a chapel service therapy dogs in the buildings students who could not stop crying. Kilman's own family came onto that campus and stood with the students grieving their son, and Josiah's father, Joe Kilman, got up in that chapel and said this to a room full of people who had every reason to want blood. Quote, I challenge you to choose forgiveness. End quote. I want to be careful here because I am not in the business of telling anybody what to feel about the person who took their child.

21:53 Forgiveness is not owed. It is not a moral obligation, and anybody who tells a grieving parent otherwise should be quiet. Some people never get there, and they are not lesser for it. But I would be lying if I said I was not moved by the order of operations. Charles Escallera asked for forgiveness on Thursday in a courtroom after a plea deal with a sentence hanging over him. Joe Kilman offered it in a chapel in February of twenty twenty four, when nobody had asked, when nothing was owed to him, when the wound was eleven days old. That is not weakness. That is one of the hardest things a human being can do, and he did it in public while it was still bleeding. Forty years parole eligibility at twenty. Charles Escallera will be in his forties when he first gets to make that argument. Josiah Killman was eighteen years old, freshman year, first semester away from Montana.

22:47 He should be twenty right now, midway through college wrestling, arguing about scripture wearing a suit for no reason at all. Rest in peace, Josiah, someone has to say your name before we go. One quick up on a case we have been following. Coory Richins, the Utah woman convicted in March of murdering her husband, Eric Richins, with fentanyl and then writing a children's book about grief, has lost her bid for a new trial. A judge ruled last week that her motion to disqualify the trial judge was not properly supported and was filed too late. Under Utah law, her convictions stand and she is already serving life without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors are seeking more than one point three million dollars in restitution based on the life insurance money she collected after Eric died. That hearing was set for Friday afternoon in Utah. We are recording before the outcome was reported, so treated as unresolved. She also still faces a separate case with more than two dozen felony counts over alleged financial crimes that predate her husband's death.

23:54 Eric Richards was thirty nine years old. He had three sons. That's daily Crime and Justice for Monday, August third, twenty twenty six. Colt Gray will die in prison. Colin Gray will be out in about thirteen more years. Lindsey Clancy's jury walked through the house on Friday and heads back into testimony this week, and Charles Escalera got forty years for a killing nobody has ever explained. Richard Aspinwall thirty nine years old, Christina Eremi fifty three years old, Mason Shermerhorn fourteen years old, Christian Angelo fourteen years old, Cora Clancy five years old, Dawson Clancy three years old, Calan Clancy eight months old, Josiah Killman eighteen years old, Eric Richards thirty nine years old. Someone has to say their names.

24:47 If today's episode did something to you, and I suspect that Georgia one might have hand it to one person, text it to somebody. That is honestly, how this show grows one listener passing it to one listener. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment because I want your read on the fifteen years. The district attorney asked for more than seventy, The defense asked for about ten. The judge landed at fifteen and told the man he failed as a parent. Was that justice or was that the system doing the smallest thing it could get away with? Nine days ago, I asked you about the sun and you showed up. Show up again, YouTube same deal comments are open. Do better. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media for informational and entertainment purposes and is not legal advice. A few notes on sourcing. In the Appalachi case, outlets differ on the number of counts on which Colin Gray was convicted in March, reported variously as twenty seven and is all twenty nine charged, so we have described the categories of conviction rather than a total.

25:58 The number of people wounded is reported as nine by wire services and as seven by at least one outlet. We have used nine. One outlet reported that the Parkland gunmen killed thirty four people. The established figure is seventeen killed, and that is what we have used. Colin Gray's defense request has been reported both as ten years to serve and as twenty years with ten to serve, and his attorney's first name appears differently across outlets, so we have not stated it. In the Clancy case, Lindsey Clancy has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. Her defense does not dispute her involvement in the deaths and contest criminal responsibility, and nothing described here is a finding of fact by the jury. The court order permitting the jury view listed the defendant among those allowed to attend, while her attorney stated she would not, and we have reported the latter.

26:51 Callan Clancy's age appears as both eight months and seven months across outlets, and we have used eight months Friday's jury view and after Nune. Testimony occurred after this episode was written, and the outcomes may have changed. In the Kentucky case, Charles Escallera's guilty plea date is reported as both June eighteenth and June twenty eighth, and no motive has ever been publicly established by police or prosecutors. The Kuri Richan's restitution hearing was scheduled for Friday afternoon, and its outcome was not available at the time of recording. Garrett's commentary is opinion directed at conduct and choices established in the record, not at unproven allegations. If anything in this episode hit close to home, please talk to a real person In the United States. You can call or text nine eight eight anytime and reach a trained human being for pregnancy and postpart of mental health, specifically postpartum support International's helpline is one eight hundred nine four four four seven seven three. You do not have to sit in it alone mc