Michigan verdict is a modest step forward on school shootings
Jennifer Crumbley is taken into custody after a guilty verdict was read on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024 in Pontiac, Mich. The jury convicted Crumbley of involuntary manslaughter in a first-of-its-kind trial to determine whether she had any responsibility in the deaths of four students in 2021. Prosecutors say Jennifer Crumbley was grossly negligent when she failed to tell Oxford High School that the family had guns, including a 9 mm handgun that her son, Ethan Crumbley, used at a shooting range on the weekend before the Nov. 30, 2021, attack. Credit: AP
Holding the mother of a Michigan school shooter criminally responsible for the deaths of four classmates is a novel but narrow avenue in the effort to reduce gun violence. But it can help.
The guilty verdict in the trial of Jennifer Crumbley won't end the horrific epidemic or stop the terror of school shootings. It will bring little comfort to the families of Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. Each was shot and killed by Crumbley's son, Ethan, in November 2021. Yet by convicting Jennifer Crumbley of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, a jury held her accountable for “gross negligence” in not doing more to stop Ethan, then 15, from harming others.
This case featured a particular set of circumstances and strong evidence that made it a compelling example of tools prosecutors can use to go after parents who don't take responsible steps to stop children they know are troubled and may be violent. Jennifer Crumbley, Michigan prosecutors said, failed “to exercise ordinary care,” to do “the smallest of things [that] could have saved Hana and Tate and Madisyn and Justin.”
In a nation that does far too little about the scourge of gun violence, any attempt to achieve some justice for these families and their community, to control what seems uncontrollable and stop what seems unstoppable, is a step forward.
In Uvalde, Texas, the failed police response was appropriately examined; a Justice Department report last month detailed massive failures, and there are reports that a grand jury is assessing whether to bring charges for law enforcement negligence. Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012, as well as his mother and himself. Lanza was an adult, but his mother was a gun enthusiast who taught Adam to shoot. In the aftermath, Adam Lanza's father, who hadn't seen him for two years prior, wondered whether he could have done anything differently.
When asked that question on the stand last week, Jennifer Crumbley said she wouldn't do anything differently. That had to be a stunning comment for a jury to hear. Crumbley and her husband gave their son the handgun that ended up in his backpack that day. They didn't get Ethan help despite persistent red flags, from troubling journal entries and texts to a picture Ethan drew of a gun and a bleeding body. When called to the school in response to the picture, the parents never told administrators he had a gun and never checked his backpack.
Parental responsibility is often fraught. Determining where to draw the line gets clouded by controversies ranging from vaccination to curriculum. But fundamentally, parental responsibility is about protecting children — both our own and others. This conviction should send a message to parents and the other adults in children's lives to be more watchful and vigilant. Someday they may be held accountable for their actions.
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