LIVE: Colin Gray Trial Continues in Georgia School Shooting Case (March 3.)

So Jerry. Yeah. Yes. to Ma'am, was this your verdict and it was freely and voluntarily made by you? Is this still your verdict? Any reason why the jury should not be relieved? There you are. Ladies and gentlemen, did you all vote? Sure. Rules? Sir. You can put the alternate back in the seat. Yes, sir. You all can remain in the jury. Obviously, we're not doing sentencing today. Oh, maybe you had custody. Sorry. So, sentencing will be deferred. I'll meet with counsel in the chambers and discuss scheduling for sentencing. And then we'll go to the sheriff's office. Anything else we need to address today? Before you talk to the jury, do you mind if me and the defense counsel work just quickly? Yeah, of course. Thank you. We're going to discuss scheduling of sentencing, which obviously there are a lot of people that need to be notified to appear at sentencing. Sentencing will be deferred to another day. I will talk to counsel in the chambers to discuss the timeline for that. Otherwise, we are... Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will see you in the next video. Good morning. Thank you all for coming. Just to tell you straight off the bat, we're very happy with the jury's verdict. The victim is very happy with the jury's verdict, and I'll answer any questions anyone has for me. What does this mean for the state of Georgia? This guilty verdict, the first time a parent has been charged in connection to a school shooting? Well, we hope that it moves the needle a little further. I think you saw in this case that the mother actually reviewed what happened in Michigan, which would have been the first one, and she then, as a result of that, asked her husband to remove the weapons. It could have ended this tragedy. So, Michigan was able to move the needle to the point that it almost stopped this tragedy. We don't know how many tragedies it did stop. We hope we move the needle a little further. At what point in this investigation did you decide to charge? It would have been in the first few days. Of course, we learned about the shrine in the house early on, which worried us, and then we found out about the FBI a few years before at the house, or a year and a half before. That started to connect the dots with us, and he had a long time of knowledge. So, we were leaning towards charging and probably did charge at that point. The text message came in later and just reinforced our decision. You had an opportunity to talk to Durham afterwards. What did they share with you? This is an extremely quick verdict, considering the length of the trial. They were very happy with our presentation. They thought we did a good job. They had some questions about things they didn't see, evidence they weren't allowed to see. We talked to them a little bit about that, and they just kind of talked us through where the children were, where the victims were, how they were doing, and we reassured them on that front. What was the biggest piece of evidence that you think led to this guilty verdict by the jurors? I don't think it was one piece of evidence. I think it was the fact that it was multiple pieces of evidence over a lengthy period of time that really showed them what was happening inside that house and all the warnings that were missed. I think it's one of those things, the defense talked about a slippery slope, but it wasn't like one parent may miss one warning. This was multiple warnings over a lengthy period of time, and like we said, you just had to do one thing and take that rifle away, and this would have been prevented. So I think it was all of those things together. You did get him to concede on the stand that he was told by Colt that that was Nicholas Cruz in those pictures. Do you think that that was a big moment for the jurors? Absolutely. I mean, how do you allow those pictures on your child's wall and not question it further? At what point for you should he have locked up the guns? That calls for a lot of speculation. I would have never given a 14-year-old child a firearm like that after Jackson County came to my house. I think most parents wouldn't have done that. I don't know if that reaches criminal at that point, but it certainly reaches common sense. What do you recommend the sentence be on? We haven't decided that yet. We're going to talk with the victim's families. I haven't actually spoken to them at all since the verdict came out, so we're going to go talk with them and get them ready. Sentencing will be at a future time when they can all be here and speak to the judge, and we'll discuss it with them and make a decision. What have the victim's families told you prior to this, like throughout this process? Are there any comments that they've made that sort of stand out in your mind? I don't think it was a common reaction. They all are reacting to their grief in different ways. They all have different perspectives, and we've listened to all of them and talked with all of them, and I don't think there's any common thing. I've just told them from the beginning that my plan was to prosecute this to the fullest extent of the law, and that's what we've done. When you spoke to the jurors, did they give any sense that they were trying to send a message? I don't think I got that sense from them. I think they were looking at this case, reacting to this law, and coming to a decision. You actually blamed others in this case, said DeMartin could have been to blame, said Lisa Butler. What do you say? Or the mother should have known something. How do you explain that One of the things that came to light during our investigation was that the reason so many lives were saved at Appalachee was because of lessons we learned from prior tragedies. So I am all for looking at these things. What could we have done better? What can we do in the future to make our children safer? But the blame game, these were good people trying to make their best decisions as they could with limited information. The one person that had all the information was the one that did that. Did you have questions? Absolutely. We found what she did to be morally reprehensible. We do not believe she was a good mother, in my opinion. But at the end of the day, she did not have custody of Colt. She did not have proximity to Colt, and she was not the one that provided him firearms. I cannot state stand ready to try the case at any time. What does this verdict mean for the community here in the county? I hope it starts the healing process. It can't, of course, complete until we finish the whole trial, both trials. But I hope that they can start moving forward with their healing. Were you surprised how quick the verdicts came? If they didn't come back in five minutes, I'd start sweating. So, to me, it seemed like an eternity. What message do you hope this case sends to other parents here in Barabas County? Well, in my college, there was a plaque on the wall that said, duties of sublimest worth in the English language. And we talk a lot about rights in our country. We're proud of our rights, and I'm proud of our rights. But, you know, our rights were given to us by our forefathers. But God gave us a duty to protect our children, and I hope that we remember that as parents, as community members, to protect our children, because that is our God-given duty. Legal question. Colt has a presumption of innocence. Yes, sir. But how can you still have that? That's a question for the courts and his constituents. Can you give our audience a case like this? Ours, Alive's. We've had Ashley Gilliland, who testified in the trial, Amanda Dibble, Ginny Fenke, worked extremely hard on this case. It's all they've been doing for the last year, at least. The hours you put in has been tremendous. But we wanted to honor the families, the victims. We wanted to honor all the hard work that law enforcement did, and us not giving everything we had to this case would be a dishonor to them, and we wanted to do that. And clearly it had an emotional impact on the entire team as well, too. There were moments that we saw you, you know, tearing up as we heard testimony from the survivors. Well, we're all parents. We can never understand the full grief, but it touches us. And we've met these families. We've dealt with these families. We've walked through with these families. And, yeah, it's emotional. There were points throughout the tragedy when law enforcement could have stepped in to interrupt the situation in some way or have slowed it down a little bit higher than they did. Do you think there are some lessons that can be learned from that for a lot of us to prevent this kind of situation from happening again? Yeah, we've been discussing that as a law enforcement community. In fact, you'll probably know that after this event happened, we got a flood of threats coming in from kids all over the world because kids are kids, I guess. So we've had to discuss how we're going to deal with these, how are we going to work through all of these threats where children are doing this outrageous, what we would consider outrageous, actions of calling in threats when they don't mean anything. So, yeah, there's been a lot of discussions with law enforcement about how to deal with these sorts of things going forward. What would you say to those that are disturbed by this project across the nation who think this is a parent that is being held responsible for something that his child did? What would you tell those? I would say please watch my opening. This was a trial about this defendant's actions, his choices, and his responsibility. Thank you all so much. I appreciate everything. Thank you.