A jury on Thursday convicted a Michigan man on four counts of manslaughter for failing to stop his son from killing four of his peers in November 2021, ending a closely watched prosecution that broke new ground in his attempt to punish the parents of a child who commits a school shooting.
James Crumbley faces up to 60 years in prison, as does his wife, Jennifer Crumbley, who was found guilty of the same charges last month. Prosecutors speculated that the two were responsible for ignoring signs that their son, Ethan Crumbley, was depressed and giving him the gun he ultimately used to execute Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling and Hana St. Juliana at Oxford High School.
It may be difficult to find sympathy for the Crumbleys, who, unsurprisingly, have been a magnet for backlash. It is plausible that they were neglectful parents. But it can be at the same time true that punishing them criminally because that sets a very worrying precedent, no matter how much you dislike them.
The prosecution’s argument rested on a few key points: Ethan Crumbley had mental health problems, which the government said his parents had not done enough to address, a point they emphasized more during Jennifer Crumbley’s proceedings. During James Crumbley’s trial, the government focused on the gun he had purchased for his son as an early Christmas present: He was negligent, prosecutors said, in how he stored the weapon, creating a perfect storm that opened the way to Ethan to transport it. that shooting happened about two and a half years ago.
But, no matter how ruinous their parenting, the case against the Crumbleys in some sense hinged on what the government wanted the law to say, not what it actually said. Like me he wrote last month:
Despite the difficult subject matter and the sheer tragedy of those deaths, Michigan law still seemed incapable of applying to Crumbley’s parents. Michigan lawmakers had the opportunity to pass “child access prevention” legislation that authorizes criminal charges against adults “who intentionally or negligently give minors unsupervised access to firearms.” noticed Reasonby Jacob Sullum in 2021, but they rejected the idea on multiple occasions. And although the state has since enacted a “safe storage” law related to securing firearms, it was not on the books at the time of the killings.
It may shock some consciences that the Crumbleys enjoyed going to the shooting range as a family activity. I can understand the knee-jerk reaction of nausea: It’s not even my idea of fun. But how someone feels about guns in general or politically shouldn’t affect whether or not a parent is criminally responsible for their child’s actions.
In this sense, the supposed obviousness of Ethan Crumbley’s depression is genuinely questionable, something that has been lost in the media uproar surrounding the case. In Jennifer’s trial, Kristy Gibson-Marshall, assistant principal of Oxford High School, testified she “didn’t think [Ethan] he could be the killer,” she was so surprised that he was capable of such a thing.
And then there’s that infamous meeting at Oxford High School, where the Crumbleys were summoned to speak with administrators after a teacher discovered a disturbing drawing made by Ethan. Following that discussion, he was allowed to remain at school, where he would commit the shooting shortly thereafter. But even that narrative isn’t so cut and dry, especially when you consider that Crumbley’s parents didn’t make that decision on their own. The school allowed him to stay. “The Crumbleys had been specifically told that their son was not to be left alone, and Ethan had simply expressed it [Tim] Trono, the superintendent, that the thought of skipping homework depressed him,” I he wrote after the trial of Jennifer Crumbley. “In hindsight, listening to him was obviously the wrong choice. But I can understand why, since parents, whether weak or experienced, are not clairvoyants.”
After all, hindsight is always useful when analyzing events in retrospect. It is also actively useless in determining what a particular person would think before having the benefit of knowing an end result. “He didn’t know,” said Mariell Lehman, James Crumbley’s defense attorney. said the jury. “He didn’t know what was happening to his son. He didn’t know what his son was planning.”
The prosecutors here, it seems, wanted to have it all. They wanted to prosecute teenager Ethan Crumbley as an adult, and they did, securing the maximum punishment: life in prison without the possibility of parole. And, at the same time, them wanted to convince the jury that Ethan Crumbley was simply a child who would not have done such a thing if he had better parents. These things are difficult to reconcile and speak volumes about the inconsistency of the charges against them. That doesn’t mean Crumbley’s parents are blameless. But not all mistakes should be punished with the hammer that is prison, no matter how hard it may be to swallow.
Karen McDonald, who followed the cases, hopes that his playbook will be a model for the future. So while Crumbley were first, they may not be last.