The Michigan prosecutor charged this week’s school shooter’s parents with involuntary manslaughter and rightly so:
Four days before 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley allegedly opened fire at his Michigan high school, his parents bought him an unusually early Christmas gift: a 9mm Sig Sauer handgun.
The teen accompanied his father, James Crumbley, to buy the gun at Acme Shooting Goods in the small town of Oxford. Ethan referred it to that night on Instagram as his “new beauty.”
The next day, his mom, Jennifer Crumbley, who once posted an open letter thanking President-elect Donald Trump for protecting “my right to bear arms,” penned her own Instagram post. “Mom & son day testing out his new Xmas present,” she wrote, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said on Friday.
By Monday, however, Ethan’s new present, which was kept in an unsecured drawer in his parents’ bedroom, was already causing concern at Oxford High School.
A teacher found Ethan searching for ammunition on his cell phone during class and reported it to higher-ups. Administrators left a voicemail for Jennifer Crumbley and followed up with an email, but received no response.
“Lol, I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,” Jennifer texted her son.
Conduct by James and Jennifer Crumbley before and after the shooting was “so egregious” that it warranted charging them with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, McDonald announced Friday in an extraordinary move that is a rarity in the U.S. legal system, which seldom holds parents of school shooters accountable for their child’s actions.
Charges were filed, in part, to “send a message that gun owners have a responsibility,” she said. “Four kids were murdered and seven more injured. So yes, I think we should all be very angry and we should take a very hard look at what is in place in terms of criminal responsibility and what gun owners are required to do.”
On the morning of the shooting on Tuesday, a teacher was “alarmed” at a drawing made by Ethan. It included a handgun with the text, “the thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” and a bullet with the words, “blood everywhere.” There were also some laughing emojis, a person who’d been shot, and the words, “my life is useless,” and “the world is dead,” McDonald said.
The drawing prompted staff to remove Ethan from class, and his parents were called into the school. James and Jennifer were shown the drawing and told they had to “get their son into counseling within 48 hours.”
“Both James and Jennifer Crumbley failed to ask their son if he had his gun with him or where his gun was located and failed to inspect his backpack,” McDonald said.
They resisted taking Ethan home with them and left the school soon after, she said. Ethan returned to class with the handgun in his backpack.
“The notion that a parent could read those words [in the drawing] and also know that their son had access to a deadly weapon that they gave him is unconscionable. And I think it’s criminal,” McDonald said.
Just after lunchtime that day, the sophomore student went into a bathroom with his backpack, then came out into a hallway and started shooting students at random, sending terrified teens ducking for cover and into hiding, police said. Sixteen-year-old Tate Myre, 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin, and 17-year-old Justin Shilling died. Seven more, including a teacher, were injured.
As news alerts went out about an active shooter at the school, James Crumbley “went straight to his home to look for his gun,” McDonald said. Jennifer Crumbley texted her son, “Ethan, don’t do it.”
James then called 911 to report that his gun was missing and that “his son could be the shooter,” McDonald said.
Acme Shooting Goods declined The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Friday. Multiple attempts to contact the Crumbleys were unsuccessful.
Involuntary manslaughter was “the strongest possible charge that we could prove and that there’s probable cause to charge,” said McDonald.
Ethan has been charged as an adult with one count of terrorism, four counts of first-degree murder, seven counts of assault with intent to murder, and 12 counts of possession of a firearm.
At Crumbley’s arraignment on Wednesday, Oakland County Sheriff’s Lt. Tim Willis said police seized “two separate videos recovered from Ethan’s cellphone made by him the night before the incident, wherein he talked about shooting and killing students the next day at Oxford High School.”
Willis also told the judge that investigators discovered a journal in Ethan’s backpack, “detailing his desire to shoot up the school, to include murdering students.” Social media accounts showed Ethan practicing with a Sig Sauer handgun identical to the one used in the shooting, Willis told District Court Judge Nancy Carniak.
His new Christmas present. They bought it for him. And then he killed four people and injured seven more all casualties of a grotesque gun culture that inspires people like this. They encouraged their sick kid to become a gun nut and he became a murderer. The same thing happened with the Newtown killer Adam Lanza. What kind of people would think that handing a gun to a disturbed 15 year old kid is a good idea?
This kind of person. Here’s an open letter from the shooter’s mom to Donald Trump back in 2016:
“Mr. Trump, I actually love that you are a bad public speaker because that showed sincerity, and humility,” she wrote. “You changed your mind, and you said ‘so what.’ You made the famous ‘grab them in the pussy’ comment, did it offend me? No. I say things all the time that people take the wrong way, do I mean them, not always. Do I agree that you should of [sic] shown your tax returns? No. I don’t care what you do or maybe don’t pay in taxes, I think those are personal and if the Gov’t can lock someone up over $10,000 of unpaid taxes and you slipped on by, then that shows the corruption.”
Crumbley went on to tell Trump that she hoped he would “really uncover the politicians for what I believe they really are,” and that he might “shut down Big Pharma, make health care affordable for me and my MIDDLE CLASS family again.” She was in favor of Trump’s long-promised border wall, and noted that she was “not racist” because her grandfather “came straight off the boat in Italy.”
“As a female and a Realtor, thank you for allowing my right to bear arms,” the letter continued. “Allowing me to be protected if I show a home to someone with bad intentions. Thank you for respecting that Amendment.”
She complained about parents at other schools where the “kids come from illegal immigrant parents” and “don’t care about learning.”
It was signed, “A hard working Middle Class Law Abiding Citizen who is sick of getting fucked in the ass and would rather be grabbed by the pussy.”
She seems nice. So does her husband who responded to that letter with this:
