A Michigan jury today began considering whether Jennifer Crumbley should be held criminally liable for the murders that her 15-year-old son, Ethan, committed at Oxford High School on November 30, 2021. Prosecutors have presented considerable evidence to reinforce the impression that Crumbley and her husband, James Crumbley, who will be tried separately, acted negligently, especially by giving Ethan unsupervised access to the 9mm SIG Sauer handgun he used to kill four students. But the charges against Jennifer Crumbley—four counts of involuntary manslaughter, each punishable by up to 15 years in prison—require more than that: proof beyond a reasonable doubt that she "willfully disregard[ed] the results to others that might follow from an act or failure to act."
Prosecutors needed to show that Crumbley should have recognized that Ethan was bent on mass murder and that she could have prevented that outcome through "ordinary care." But the evidence on that point seems ambiguous at best. "Even in the early hours after the shooting, during the Crumbleys' first recorded talk with the police, the parents appeared stunned to discover their child was suffering from anything beyond sadness," Megan Stack, who has been covering the trial, notes in a New York Times opinion piece published last Thursday.
The pistol, which Ethan's father bought for him the day after Thanksgiving as an early Christmas present, "seems to have been a ham-handed effort to cheer him up," Stack says. Jennifer Crumbley "celebrated by taking [Ethan] to a shooting range, an outing she called a 'mom and son day.'" While Stack describes the gift as "ruinously irresponsible," that does not mean Ethan's mother understood that her son was capable of the horrifying crime he committed four days after receiving the gun.
James Crumbley described his son as "a perfect kid" who never got into trouble, and that impression was shared by teachers and administrators at his school. "There's no indication that he fought with other students, creeped out his teachers or acted up in class," Stack writes. "Kristy Gibson-Marshall, an Oxford High School assistant principal, testified to her shock at seeing him carrying the gun during the attack. She was so stunned, she told the jury, that she couldn't process what she was seeing."
Gibson-Marshall's testified that "it just didn't seem right that it would be him." Initially she "didn't think he could possibly be the shooter," because "it seemed so odd that it would be him." She recalled asking him, "Buddy, are you OK? What's going on?" When "he didn't respond to me and he looked away," Gibson-Marshall said, "that's when I knew it was him—that he was the shooter."
The day before the shooting, a teacher noticed that Ethan was searching for ammunition on his phone during class. He told a school counselor that "shooting sports are a family hobby." Jennifer Crumbley was not alarmed by the incident. "LOL I'm not mad at you," she texted him. "You have to learn not to get caught."
The day of the shooting, Oakland County Prosecuting Attorney Karen McDonald reported, Ethan and his parents met with school counselors after a teacher found "a note on Ethan's desk" that included "a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun, pointing at the words: 'The thoughts won't stop. Help me.'" There was also "a drawing of a bullet, with the following words above that bullet: 'Blood everywhere.'" In between was "a drawing of a person who appears to have been shot twice and [is] bleeding," and "below that figure is a drawing of a laughing emoji." Ethan also had written "my life is useless" and "the world is dead."
Ethan claimed he was developing a video game and the pictures were part of that process. While waiting for his parents to arrive, Superintendent Tim Throne said after the shooting, Ethan expressed concern about the homework assignments he was missing and "requested his science homework, which he then worked on while in the office." Throne emphasized that school officials did not perceive Ethan as a threat to others: "At no time did counselors believe the student might harm others based on his behavior, responses and demeanor, which appeared calm."
Shawn Hopkins, a school counselor, wanted Ethan's parents to seek help from a therapist, warning that the teenager might pose a danger to himself and should not be left alone. They chose to leave him in school—a decision that seems utterly reckless in retrospect. But as Stack notes, "both parents had to work that afternoon, and their son didn't like missing school, so keeping him in class for the rest of the day might have seemed like the best option." Jennifer Crumbley testified that "she gave her husband the list of therapists from the school" and "asked him to start making calls."
School officials let Ethan return to class, underlining their belief that he was not inclined to hurt anyone aside from himself. At that point, Ethan had the loaded pistol in his backpack, which would have been discovered if anyone had bothered to look inside.
Prosecutors argued that Jennifer Crumbley was better positioned than school officials to recognize how deeply troubled her son was. They noted a text exchange in which he had suggested to his mother that their house was haunted, possibly by a demon. Crumbley testified that she perceived that comment as facetious, since she and her son had previously joked about the possibility that the house was haunted.
Prosecutors also cited a journal in which Ethan "had written about a plan to cause bloodshed," accompanied by drawings of guns. "My parents won't listen to me about help or a therapist," he wrote. But his mother said she had never seen the journal or heard her son request psychotherapy.
Crumbley also said storage of the gun was her husband's responsibility, since he was more familiar with firearms. "I just didn't feel comfortable being in charge of that," she testified. "It was more his thing, so I let him handle that. I didn't feel comfortable putting the lock thing on it."
The evidence presented at trial certainly did not make Jennifer Crumbley look like a model parent. Prosecutors argued that she was inattentive, distracted by an extramarital affair and her expensive horse riding hobby. But it is by no means clear that her conduct amounted to the sort of "gross negligence" required by the manslaughter charges.
To convict Crumbley, Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Matthews told the jurors before they began their deliberations, they "must decide that the shooter's actions were reasonably foreseeable," The Detroit News notes. "They must determine that Crumbley knew of the danger her son posed to others and that, had she used ordinary care, the deaths could have been avoided."
It is "not enough that the defendant's acts made it possible for the crime to occur," Matthews said. "You must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the deaths were a natural or reasonable result of the defendant's acts."
Although the shooting at Oxford High School "may have been foreseeable in some abstract sense," Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, noted in National Review after McDonald charged the Crumbleys with involuntary manslaughter, "it was certainly not foreseen in concrete reality." Yet the manslaughter charges require the jurors to conclude that Jennifer Crumbley "knew of the danger her son posed to others."
The Crumbleys plainly failed to responsibly store the gun. But at the time of the shooting, Michigan had no law requiring safe firearm storage. In the absence of that option, McCarthy argued, McDonald relied on an inapposite statute. Since Michigan legislators "refused to criminalize the conduct in which the Crumbley parents engaged," he wrote, prosecutors were "attempting in the heat of the moment to criminalize the conduct themselves."
During her closing statement on Friday, Jennifer Crumbley's lawyer, Shannon Smith, argued that the prosecution, "one of the first of its kind," was an attempt to criminalize parenting decisions that have disastrous but unforeseen results. "This case," she said, "is a very dangerous one for parents out there."
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