The parents of the perpetrator of the school shooting in Michigan that cost the lives of four students in 2021 have been sentenced this Tuesday to sentences of between 10 and 15 years in prison for not having taken measures that could have prevented the massacre.
Jennifer and James Crumbley are the first parents convicted in the United States for their responsibility in a mass shooting perpetrated by a minor in their care, in this case at the school they attended (the usual pattern in this type of case is that the shooter be a student or former student of the center). Both were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter on March 15, after prosecutors presented evidence of the existence of a weapon improperly stored in their home, as well as their indifference or at least inattention to the mental health of the son. According to prosecutors, “very simple actions” such as keeping the weapon under a lock could have prevented the event. The couple faced separate trials in Oakland County Court, 40 miles north of Detroit.
Ethan Crumbley, the shooter, had drawn dark images of a gun, a bullet, and a wounded man on a math assignment, accompanied by phrases expressing despondency. The staff at Oxford High School, where he studied and committed the massacre, did not require him to go home, but were surprised when the Crumbleys did not volunteer to do so during a brief meeting with teachers in which they were informed of the disturbing signs.
That same day, November 30, 2021, the 15-year-old young man took a gun out of his backpack and started shooting at the school. After pleading guilty at trial in 2022, Ethan, now 17, is serving a life sentence for four counts of murder and other crimes.
During the trial, the testimony of the parents of the four victims was heard, which was decisive in convincing the jury of the Crumbleys' guilt. They all asked the judge to sentence Ethan's parents to 10 years, calling them failures whose selfishness caused four deaths and a community tragedy. “The blood of our children is on your hands too,” said Craig Shilling, who was wearing a hoodie with the image of his son Justin Shilling on the chest, reports the AP agency. “It wasn't just your son who killed my daughter, you two did too. While you bought a gun for her son and left it within her reach, I helped her finish her college work,” said Nicole Beausoleil, mother of a dead student, looking into James's face and Jennifer Crumbley.
Alarming signs that no one heard
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“The thoughts don't stop. Help me. My life is useless. Blood everywhere,” Ethan wrote in his math notebook, along with drawings of a gun, a bullet, and a gunshot victim. Ethan told a school counselor that he was sad – his grandmother had died and his only friend had suddenly moved away – but claimed that the drawing only reflected his interest in the world of video games.
The Crumbleys were called to a meeting at school that lasted less than 15 minutes. They did not mention that the gun drawn by their son looked similar to the one James Crumbley, 47, had purchased just four days earlier: a 9mm Sig Sauer that the teenager had described on social media as “a beauty.”
After the meeting, the parents refused to take their son home, choosing to return to work and accepting a list of mental health services provided to them by the school. The faculty agreed to let Ethan stay at the center, as one of the school counselors considered that it would be safer for the young man to remain at the center than to stay home alone. But no one checked his backpack. That same day, he pulled out the gun and killed four students and wounded seven other people.
At trial there was no specialist testimony about Ethan's mental state. But the judge, despite defense objections, allowed the jury to see excerpts from his diary. “I don't have any help for my mental problems and that is causing me to shoot up at school,” he wrote. “I want help but my parents don't listen to me so I can't get it.”
When asked if Ethan had hallucinated months before the shooting, Jennifer Crumbley, 46, told jurors that he was just “playing.” This Tuesday, before the sentence was pronounced, she expressed her “deepest pain” and said that she had not had the slightest idea that her son was capable of killing. “My husband and I used to say we had the perfect son. I truly believed it,” she said. “I had no reason to do anything different. This is not something we could foresee,” she added. “If there is one thing people can take away from this, it is that this can happen to anyone” in the United States, where guns are sold in large stores.
The prosecutor demonstrated at trial how a simple padlock could have secured the gun.
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