The Christmas gift came early that year. The morning after Thanksgiving 2021, James Crumbley took his 15-year-old son to a gun store to buy him a Sig Sauger semi-automatic nine-millimeter, which Ethan, the boy, referred to on social media as his “new beauty”. Four days later, the boy surreptitiously brought the gun into his high school in Oxford, a suburb about 60 kilometers from Detroit, in the State of Michigan. He entered the service, took the revolver out of his backpack and began shooting everyone he encountered: he killed four schoolmates, between 14 and 17 years old, and wounded seven other people, including a teacher. His mother, Jennifer Crumbley, has just been convicted by a popular jury made up of six men and six women for the crime of reckless homicide. This is a decision that sets a historical precedent regarding the responsibility of parents for the behavior of their children in massacres like that one.
There are two things that, above all else, contributed to the guilty verdict, reached unanimously on the second day of deliberations, after about 10 hours of debate: the fact that she took Ethan to test the gun at a training camp. shot that weekend, and a message that he sent him when the marriage was required by the school due to the alarm of a teacher who saw the boy the day before the tragedy searching on his cell phone for information on how to get ammunition. They were summoned by phone, a call that left a trace on the answering machine, and by email. They did not respond to either message, but the mother did write the following text to her son: “LOL [carcajadas]. I'm not mad at you, but don't get caught next time.”
The defense of Jennifer Crumbley, 45, tried during the trial, held in Pontiac (Michigan), to blame her husband for not locking up the gun; to her school, for not notifying her of the adolescent's behavioral problems; and her own son, for pulling the trigger and murdering two women and two men. “Can each parent really be responsible for everything their children do, especially when it is not foreseeable?” attorney Shannon Smith asked in closing argument. “He was unpredictable. Nobody expected this. “No one could have expected it, including the Crumbleys.” In another intervention, Smith cited part of the lyrics of Bad blood by Taylor Swift, a singer-songwriter whose influence is almost impossible to escape today in the United States, in which she says that “band-aids are no good for bullet holes.” According to her argument, the prosecution intended to “resolve problems that cannot be solved with a Band-Aid; “A band-aid will not help recover those lost lives.” Regarding the gift of the gun, the defendant testified: “We didn't give him a gun just by saying, 'Here you go, son.' We gave it to him only so that he could use it only when we went to the field [de tiro] in family”.
Life imprisonment
The prosecution, for its part, presented to the court the image of an erratic mother, more concerned about her hobby of horses and an extramarital relationship than about the symptoms of her only son's deteriorating mental health.
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Ethan Crumbley was accused of terrorism, which allowed him to be tried as if he were an adult and ended up being sentenced last December to the maximum sentence: life imprisonment without the possibility of review. After finding out what his son had done, the couple fled. They found them a few days later not far from home: in the city of Detroit, while they were in a shopping center. That Saturday morning, the couple was charged and heard the charges by videoconference, to which they pleaded not guilty. Her father will be tried in March for the same crimes as her.
Karen D. McDonald, Oakland County prosecutor, took the accusation against the couple as an opportunity to teach a lesson to the parents who could, as the jury has found proven, prevent their son from carrying out the massacre, as when they were alerted a few hours before. of the facts that he had been caught at school drawing a gun in a notebook, with a text that said: “The thoughts don't stop. Help me. My life is useless, the world is dead.” The Crumbleys went to the school, but, according to the accusation, they acted negligently by not forcing the teenager to show them what he had in his backpack. Also, for refusing to take him home with him and for allowing him to return to class.
In December, McDonald did not hide her frustration when she presented the case to the jury: “I am angry as a mother, I am angry as a prosecutor, I am angry as a person who lives in this county, I am angry,” she added. “[La tragedia] It could have been prevented so easily…”
When at 1:22 p.m., 32 minutes after Ethan left the bathroom armed, the first news broke that there was an active shooter at her son's school, the mother wrote him another message: “Ethan, don't do it.” James Crumbley then ran to his house, where he found that the gun was not in his place, a place he did not have a lock. At 1:37 p.m., he later called the police to warn that he suspected his son could be the attacker. When she showed up at the institute and reduced it, the boy still had 15 cartridges left.
That massacre prompted Michigan to enact a law to regulate minors' access to their parents' guns. The conviction of Ethan's mother for involuntary manslaughter has few precedents. The idea of a massacre in a high school is a recurring nightmare in this society since the Columbine High School in 1999, in which two friends killed 13 people and inaugurated a new era in mass shootings in the United States. Some of those that have caused the greatest trauma since then occurred in educational centers, from Sandy Hook in 2012 in Newtown (Connecticut; 26 deaths, 20 of them minors) to 2019 in Parkland (Florida; 17 fatalities) or the from a couple of years ago Uvalde (Texas, 19 children and two teachers). The Crumbley murders counted as the deadliest school shooting of their year.
Associations working for gun control in the United States have supported the idea of pursuing Ethan's parents, but dissenting voices have also been heard: in an opinion article published by The New York Times, Megan K. Stack wondered about the meaning of trying a minor as an adult in order to sentence him to the maximum penalty, and at the same time hold the parents responsible for what their child did. “Persecuting children as adults is one of the obscenities of our judicial system. (…) And there is a logical contradiction between that and parents being held accountable for negligence in their education. Either he was a boy, or he wasn't. Either his parents were responsible for his actions, or not. Can the State argue both things at the same time? “The prosecutors are convinced.”
As was demonstrated this Tuesday, a jury in Pontiac (Michigan) is also.
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