James Crumbley found guilty in Michigan school shooting trial

A jury found James Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter late Thursday after about 11 hours of deliberation, holding him partly responsible for failing to prevent his son from carrying out Michigan’s deadliest school shooting.

Mr. Crumbley’s wife, Jennifer Crumbley, was convicted of identical charges last month in the same courtroom in Pontiac, Michigan, after a jury deliberated for about the same amount of time. The trials became a lightning rod for issues of parental responsibility at a time of high-profile gun violence by minors.

Each defendant’s parenting skills were closely monitored, as was the shooter’s access to a gun his father had purchased. Now two separate juries have taken the unusual step of holding a parent criminally responsible for a child’s heinous crimes.

Oakland County prosecutors charged the Crumbleys three days after the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, where their son, Ethan, who was 15 at the time, killed 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14, and injured seven others.

“James Crumbley had the easiest and most striking opportunities to prevent the deaths of these four students,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in his closing argument Wednesday. “And he did nothing.”

Mariell Lehman, Mr Crumbley’s lawyer, urged the jury to take into account how much Mr Crumbley could not have known until it was too late. “You have heard no testimony, and you have seen no evidence, that James had any knowledge that his son was a danger to anyone,” she said.

Mr Crumbley has been in prison since December 2021. He and his wife requested separate trials and unlike them, Mr. Crumbley chose not to testify in his own defense. Both will be convicted later and face up to 15 years in prison.

Their prosecution was seen as part of a national effort to hold some parents responsible for enabling deadly violence by their children. In recent months, parents in other states have pleaded guilty to charges of reckless endangerment or neglect after their children injured or killed others with weapons.

The witness lists in the two Crumbley trials were similar, but there were a few key differences in the evidence presented. During Ms. Crumbley’s trial, lawyers delved into her communications with her son, including months of text messages, as prosecutors tried to portray her as a distant and neglectful mother.

But in Mr. Crumbley’s case, testimony focused less on his parenting and more on the Sig Sauer pistol that prosecutors say he bought his son as an early Christmas present four days before the shooting.

Law enforcement officers who searched the Crumbleys’ home shortly after the attack testified this week that they found the gun storage case open on the parents’ bed, along with an empty box of ammunition. They said there was no indication the case had been closed.

In her closing argument Wednesday, Ms. Lehman said that Mr. Crumbley did not know before the shooting whether his son was aware of the gun’s hiding place. During her rebuttal, Ms. McDonald put on a pair of gloves, picked up the murder weapon and a cable lock and demonstrated for the jury that the gun could be locked in seconds.

Prosecutors also walked the jury through several entries in the shooter’s diary, including one that appeared to have been written the day before the shooting. “I have access to the weapon and ammunition,” the entry said. “I am now fully committed to this.”

It was not clear whether either of the shooter’s parents had seen the journal entries before the shooting. But they were called to school on the morning of November 30 after a teacher saw their son making violent drawings. Those drawings included an object resembling the gun Mr Crumbley had bought, and phrases such as ‘help me’ and ‘blood everywhere’.

Neither the Crumbleys nor school officials searched the teen’s backpack, which contained the gun.

Mr Crumbley, dressed in a gray suit and blue tie, appeared somber and shook his head slightly on Thursday evening as the jury’s four guilty verdicts – one for each charge of involuntary manslaughter – were announced. Sheriff’s Department officers then handcuffed him and led him out of the courtroom.

Prosecutors called 15 witnesses in Mr. Crumbley’s trial, including people who saw the shooting and law enforcement officers who investigated it. The defense called only one witness: Karen Crumbley, the defendant’s sister. She said she had never seen a reason to be overly concerned about her cousin until the shooting.

According to his lawyer, neither did Mr. Crumbley.

“He didn’t know,” Ms. Lehman told the jury. “He didn’t know what was going on with his son. He didn’t know what his son was planning to do.”

Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty to 24 charges stemming from the shooting, including the first-degree murder of his four classmates. He was sentenced last year to life in prison without the possibility of parole and has not testified in any of the trials against his parents.