PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) – The father of the Michigan school shooter who killed four students in 2021 missed an “incredible opportunity” to prevent the tragedy, prosecutors say. The announcement was made Thursday as jurors heard opening statements in a trial to determine whether there is a second parent. He will be held responsible for the attack.
“This case is not about bad parenting. It’s not illegal to be a bad parent. It’s not kids doing kid things,” said Assistant Attorney General Mark Keast. “We’re talking about preventable mass murder.”
James Crumbley is charged with four counts of manslaughter, one for each of the teens Ethan Crumbley killed at Oxford High School. Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of the same charges last month.
Mr. Keast emphasized a series of important points to the jury. He noted that James Crumbley, accompanied by his son, purchased a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun four days before the shooting.
On the day of the shooting, when the father and wife were called to discuss the disturbing drawings on Ethan’s math project, the father never told school officials about the purchase or about his trip to the shooting range that weekend. I didn’t speak.
The paper had a gun resembling Sig Sauer’s, blood drops, and bullets, along with the following words: help me. “
“It’s an emergency,” Jennifer Crumbley texted her husband before the meeting.
When he saw the picture, he said, “Oh my god.”
However, the Crumbleys did not take him home, and the school did not request Ethan to take him home, fearing that he might be suicidal. But no one checked the boy’s backpack for a gun, leading to a nine-minute shooting spree that afternoon.
“Instead of seizing that great opportunity, James Crumbley spent hours making DoorDash deliveries,” Keast said.
He showed the jury a photo of the gun lock still in its package.
Prosecutors said it was “never used” at the home.
James Crumbley is not accused of knowing what his 15-year-old son had planned for school. However, he is charged with gross negligence for failing to secure a weapon.
“This nightmare, these murders, was preventable and foreseeable by him,” Keast said.
Defense attorney Marielle Lehman suggested that James Crumbley, 47, may testify in his own defense or that his beliefs about the gun and Ethan may come out in other ways at trial.
“Mr. James Crumbley did not know that his son had access to that firearm,” Lehman told jurors. “You’re going to hear testimony that in James Crumbley’s mind he wasn’t allowed access. You’re not going to hear that James Crumbley even suspected his son was dangerous. right.”
James and Jennifer Crumbley are the first parents in the United States to be held criminally responsible for a school shooting by their child.
Prosecutors say the Crumbleys failed to secure a gun and ignored their son’s pleas for help for emotional distress. Ethan told a friend that James Crumbley’s reaction was to tell the boy to “shut up,” according to text messages shared Thursday by Detective Ed Wagrowsky.
“I’m dying mentally and physically,” Ethan told a friend in April 2021.
Before the jury was even in court, Judge Cheryl Matthews handed down a possible verdict in James Crumbley’s favor. He said prosecutors are barred from using text messages between the son and his mother that suggested his son had hallucinations about the devil in the months before the shooting.
The messages were used as evidence in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial.
The first witness was Molly Darnell, a teacher who was shot with a bullet lodged in her office door. Darnell, one of seven people injured that day, stood up and took off his jacket, showing jurors a stain on his upper left arm.
While hiding behind a cupboard, Darnell said she texted her husband without telling him he had been shot.
“I love you,” she wrote. “Active Shooter”
Ethan, 17, is currently serving a life sentence for murder and terrorism.
Jennifer Crumbley, 45, is scheduled to reappear in court for sentencing on April 9. Her prison sentence could be at least 10 years.
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