Georgia high school shooting suspect’s father, Colin Gray, faces judge after murder charges
Colin Gray stood in the stillness of the courtroom, a place where time felt like a slow bleed, and the weight of it hung heavy in the air. His face, weathered by years and choices made long before this day, now seemed to bear the scars of something far deeper, the kind no mirror can ever reflect. His skin pulled tight over the bones, his shoulders slouched as if he had finally been beaten by the life that he had once thought he could control.
The chains that bound his wrists were nothing compared to the ones that shackled his mind. He had given his son the tool, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps out of some misguided belief in freedom, in rights. But now, in the dim light of the courtroom, with a tattoo half-faded on his arm and the weight of a nation’s gaze upon him, those choices circled back to him like ghosts, whispers of judgment, long before the gavel would strike.
There was no mercy in the eyes that looked upon him, not from the judge, not from the spectators, and certainly not from within. He was a man condemned, not by the laws of men, but by the unspoken laws that govern a father’s duty to his son.