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A jury has found Jennifer Crumbley, mother of a Michigan school shooter, guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors said Jennifer Crumbley was grossly negligent and could have foreseen the violenceThe Associated Press
· Posted: Feb 06, 2024 1:51 PM EST | Last Updated: 12 minutes ago
Jennifer Crumbley, right, stands in court with her laywer, Shannon Smith, during trial on Monday in Pontiac, Mich. (Carlos Osorio/The Associated Press)A jury has found Jennifer Crumbley, mother of a Michigan school shooter, guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors said Crumbley was grossly negligent and could have foreseen the violence before her son opened fire at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021.
The guilty verdicts — one for each student slain — were returned on Tuesday after roughly 11 hours of jury deliberations.
Prosecutors say Jennifer Crumbley had a duty under Michigan law to prevent her son, who was 15 at the time, from harming others. She’s accused of failing to secure a gun and ammunition at home and failing to get help for her son’s mental health.
The gun — a 9mm handgun — had been purchased just four days earlier on Black Friday by his father, James Crumbley. Jennifer Crumbley took her son to a shooting range that same weekend.
“You’re the last adult to have possession of that gun,” assistant prosecutor Marc Keast said while cross-examining Jennifer Crumbley last week. “You saw your son shoot the last practice round before the (school) shooting on Nov. 30. You saw how he stood … He knew how to use the gun.”
The teen’s mom replied, “Yes, he did.”
Gun, wounded man drawn on math assignmentOn the morning of the shootings, the school was concerned about a macabre drawing of a gun, bullet and wounded man on the 15-year-old’s math assignment, accompanied by the words: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” But Ethan was allowed to stay in school following a brief meeting with the parents, who did not take him home.
The teen pulled the gun from his backpack that afternoon and shot 10 students and a teacher, killing four students. No one had checked his backpack.
Handwritten messages are left at a memorial site outside Oxford High School in Oxford, Mich. Ethan Crumbley was 15 when he killed four students and wounded seven others in a shooting inside the northern Oakland County school on Nov. 30, 2021. (Jake May/The Flint Journal/The Associated Press)Crumbley, 45, told jurors that she would not have done anything differently but wished her son had “killed us instead.” She denied that he had mental health problems.
“We would talk. We did a lot of things together,” she testified. “I trusted him, and I felt I had an open door. He could come to me about anything.”
But in a journal found by police, Ethan wrote that his parents wouldn’t listen to his pleas for help.
“I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the … school,” he wrote.
Jennifer and James are the first parents in the U.S. to be charged in a mass school shooting committed by their child. James, 47, is scheduled for trial in March on the same involuntary manslaughter charges.
Ethan, now 17, is serving a life sentence for murder and terrorism.
