Parental responsibility
It is a tried, tested and well-established truth that parents can be held legally responsible for the acts of their minor children.
This principle ranges from petty and mundane incidents—a young driver with a permit causes a fender-bender—to violent and lethal crimes, where parents fail to secure guns in their home.
But the verdict this week in a novel homicide case in Michigan sets a new precedent: It declared the mother of a mass killer to be a mass killer herself.
Jennifer Crumbley’s son, Ethan, was 15 when he took a 9mm handgun to Oxford High School in Michigan on Nov. 30, 2021. He fired 32 shots in the school hallway and a classroom, killing four students and wounding six others and a teacher.
Like other school shootings, red flags fluttered everywhere in hindsight. He planned and meticulously detailed his attack for months in a journal, left text message trails full of violent fantasies, and made audio recordings the night before describing his method and motive for the massacre.
He used Google to research Michigan’s death penalty laws and possible criminal sentences for a 15-year-old guilty of a mass shooting.
His plan played out almost to the letter.
“The first victim has to be a pretty girl with a future so she can suffer just like me,” he wrote. The first student shot, police confirmed, was 14-yearold Phoebe Arthur, who survived.
“I will continue shooting people until police breach the building,” he wrote. “I will then surrender to them and plead guilty to life in prison.”
Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty to 24 charges, including murder and terrorism in October of 2022. He was sentenced a year later, at age 17, to life in prison without parole for perpetrating Michigan’s deadliest school shooting.
Parents or guardians being charged with involuntary manslaughter in cases of accidental shootings by children too young to be prosecuted is not unheard of. One such case, also out of Michigan, made national headlines back in 2000 after a 6-year-old boy took a gun to his elementary school and shot and killed a female 6-year-old classmate.
The owner of that gun, which had been reported stolen a few months earlier, pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter for having made the firearm available to the young boy. But no parent has been convicted of homicide charges involving a mass shooting committed by their child until Jennifer Crumbley, in a case featuring unique circumstances.
Crumbley and her husband James, who faces trial for the same involuntary manslaughter charges in March, were called to the school office on the morning of the shooting, because a teacher found disturbing drawings made by Ethan on a math handout.
The sketches included a handgun and a person apparently bleeding, with the words “Blood everywhere” written beside them.
The gun used in the shooting was an early Christmas gift bought by his father just days before the shooting. But neither parent thought it relevant during the office meeting to mention that Ethan had access to a handgun—which at that very moment was tucked in his backpack.
The school ultimately decided to have Ethan stay in class rather than be sent home alone, since both parents said they had to return to work.
Civil lawsuits have been filed against school officials and their lack of intervention efforts. A simple search of Ethan’s backpack after finding his hand-drawn picture of a gun and victim would have averted the mass murder.
It’s natural to grasp for straws when suffering from a tragedy so senseless and unthinkable as a school mass shooting. But charging parents of mass murderers with homicide themselves seems like shaky legal theory at best; and a slippery slope susceptible to great abuse at worst.
The standard for involuntary manslaughter guilt is appropriately high—in Crumbley’s case, it required proof that the shooting was “reasonably foreseeable” and of failure to perform the legal duty to control her minor child—because the penalty is long-term loss of liberty.
There are complications with this case, which may factor into the inevitable appeal. First, there was no safe-storage gun law in effect in Michigan at the time of the murders, which means there was no legal obligation on Ethan’s parents to lock the weapon away.
Second, the state of Michigan tried Ethan as an adult, meaning he was deemed fully responsible and accountable for his actions. The state’s subsequent trial of his parents rests on his status as a minor under their control. The trial court judge ignored the contradiction; appellate courts may rule differently.
Finally, Ethan Crumbley himself strenuously exonerated both the school and his parents at his trial, stressing that no one could possibly have known what he was up to. He had no disciplinary record at school and in fact had good attendance and solid grades on track for graduation. Distracted as his parents might have been, he still hid his intentions from them, or else they would have intervened.
Twisting a 1931 manslaughter law to fit a modern school-shooting anomaly isn’t ideal. If Michigan lawmakers, or any others, want specific laws to address something so rare, they should write them.