Crumbley verdict shows parents can share blame for school shootings
When a 15-year-old brought a gun to Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021, killed four of his schoolmates and wounded seven other people, the United States was in the grip of a gun violence crisis that had already stretched more than two decades and tallied more than 300 school shootings.
The intractable problem of school gun violence is now pushing prosecutors to consider a provocative — some say overdue — question: When a child picks up a gun and hurts or kills someone, should their parents be held responsible, too?
In the past two months alone, the father of a young man who carried out the deadly 2022 Highland Park, Ill., mass shooting pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless conduct for sponsoring his son’s gun ownership application despite clear warning signs. The mother of a Virginia 6-year-old who shot his teacher was sentenced to two years in prison for felony child neglect.
On Tuesday, Jennifer Crumbley, the 45-year-old mother of the Oxford High School shooter was convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter by an Oakland County jury after an emotional trial that examined a parent’s culpability for their child’s deadly actions.
The jury of six men and six women deliberated for about 11 hours before finding her guilty. The Crumbleys bought their son, Ethan, a gun four days before the shooting as an early Christmas gift, a fact that propelled their prosecutions as the first parents of a mass shooter to face such serious charges for their child’s crime. Crumbley’s husband, James, 47, faces identical charges at a trial scheduled for March.
The Crumbleys’ son was sentenced in December to life in prison for the murders of Hana St. Juliana, 14; Tate Myre, 16, Madisyn Baldwin, 17; and Justin Shilling, 17. Prosecutors agreed the parents did not know about their son’s plan, but they argued the parents’ actions made them responsible: They bought their son a gun four days before the shooting, allegedly failed to secure it properly and had ample warning signs that he could pose a threat to others.
The shooter’s access to a 9mm Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol has been a key point throughout her trial.
School shooting data indicates that family members storing guns securely would curb the flow of weapons in a majority of school shootings perpetrated by children, who, unlike adult shooters, cannot legally buy firearms. The Washington Post reviewed more than 180 shootings committed by juveniles since the
Columbine massacre in 1999 and found in cases where the source of the gun could be determined that the weapons were found in the homes of friends, relatives or parents 86 percent of the time.
Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald in her closing arguments stressed that Jennifer Crumbley’s case was rare but had to be brought because of the facts. Defense attorney Shannon Smith argued the case was dangerous to parents and asked the jury to find Crumbley not guilty “for every parent doing the best they can, who could easily be in (her) shoes.”
That the Crumbleys are being prosecuted may shape perceptions of how people think about parental culpability when their children independently take deadly action. But on the continuum of problematic parenting, there’s no clear agreement on when it crosses the line into criminal negligence.
In the future, extending liability to parents for the criminal acts of their children will fall hardest on parents who are poor, people of color or from marginalized groups, predicts Evan Bernick, a law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law.
Bernick said the desire to prosecute the Crumbleys is understandable — “It’s a set of appalling facts that cry out for justice” — but noted the legal maxim that “hard cases make bad law.”
“Unfortunately, I think the sea change is that as we’re grappling with an ocean of firearms, we are going to — and should — see more of these prosecutions brought,” said Eric Rinehart, the Lake County States Attorney in Illinois who prosecuted the father of the Highland Park shooter for sponsoring the shooter’s firearms card despite knowing of his mental health issues.
“I think sending parents a message they can be responsible for what their kids do, if those kids are expressing homicidal and suicidal thoughts, locking up guns is something we can do,” he said.
Extraordinary as the facts in the Crumbley case might be, the public has to consider not just this case but others in the future — “cases that won’t get the public’s attention, that may look different, and where the same amount of scrutiny won’t be applied,” Bernick said.
Randy Zelin, a criminal defense attorney who teaches at Cornell Law School, is sympathetic to the desire to want to hold parents accountable yet wary of prosecuting such cases.
“The law is not supposed to be emotional,” Zelin said, “It’s supposed to be neutral and detached.”
There’s been a growing reassessment of how people think about the different actors who play a role in a shooting, said Erin Davis, who directs litigation at the Brady Campaign & Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Brady is representing the family of Elijah Mueller, an Oxford student wounded in the shooting, in a lawsuit against the gun shop that sold James Crumbley the firearm and current and former staff of Oxford Community Schools.
Frameworks for accountability have already become common in civil cases, like the landmark $73 million settlement between the families of Sandy Hook victims and Remington Arms, but are now are becoming criminal matters, according to Davis.
“The most important thing about the prosecution and lawsuit is the message that somebody helped put that gun in a child’s hands,” Davis said.
The facts are what set the Crumbley case apart to Jessica Roth, a professor at Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University who specializes in evidence and criminal law. Roth thinks prosecutions of parents will remain rare, and will happen only if they meet the threshold that the parents were aware of a strong risk of their child carrying out a shooting — and willfully disregarding the warning signs.
It would be oversimplifying the case to say the Crumbleys were charged with manslaughter based on their son’s deadly actions and leave out critical distinct facts about this particular case, said Roth. “The details just make it seem that there was a callous disregard for the danger or possible danger.”
Much of the evidence against the Crumbleys emerged during their son’s sentencing; Jennifer Crumbley’s trial was the first time she explained in her own voice some of the decisions she made in the hours, months and days before the shooting.
In her closing argument, McDonald said the shooter’s actions were foreseeable by his mother.
“She didn’t give him the help he wanted,” McDonald said.
Smith, the defense attorney, said the crime was unthinkable “because it was unforeseeable.”
Prosecutors depicted Jennifer Crumbley as a selfish, distant parent who rarely spoke of her son to others. When she did, she described him as “weird” and speculated he might be depressed after losing his paternal grandmother and the family dog, and his only friend moved away in the months leading up to the shooting. When Crumbley and her husband had opportunities to tell the school he had recently been at a shooting range and handled a gun, they said nothing. Instead of helping their son, prosecutors said, they gave him a gun and then fled from authorities after they learned they were facing charges, too.
Smith said Crumbley was a loving, “hypervigilant” mother who never had reason to believe her son was a troublemaker or a danger. He hid the depths of his mental health struggles from his mother, instead pouring them into journal entries and text messages with his only friend, Smith told jurors. After her son was identified as the shooter, Crumbley testified, the Crumbleys planned to surrender but first had to go into hiding amid a wave of death threats.
Eight months before the shooting, Crumbley’s son texted that he could see demons or clothes flying from shelves and asked his mother to respond to him. This was Crumbley’s chance to get her troubled son help, prosecutors said. Crumbley testified she took the messages as her son’s offbeat sense of humor that played on a running joke about their family’s house being haunted.
If the months before the shooting suggested the shooter was experiencing mental health issues, prosecutors said, the days before the shooting clearly showed repeated examples of grossly negligent behavior.