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.
