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Today, the parents of the 2021 Michigan school shooter will cross a grim legal threshold: They will be the first parents in American history to be sentenced for their own criminal responsibility in relation to a mass shooting committed by their child.

In separate trials held earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley were each found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son opened fire in the hallways of his high school, Oxford High School, in Michigan on November 30, 2021 —  just hours after school administrators had summoned the Crumbleys to campus to alert them that their son seemed to be having violent fantasies. 

The Crumbleys face up to 15 years in prison for their roles in the crime. Their son, who was 15 years old at the time of the shooting, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in December. Prosecutors have asked the judge in the trials to sentence both Crumbleys to at least 10 years.

Although the case is precedent-setting, gun rights advocates haven’t really embraced it as a cause, likely due to the troubling circumstances that led up to the shooting.

Prosecutors had argued that both James and Jennifer Crumbley, both strident gun enthusiasts, enabled their son to commit the shooting in three key ways: By continually ignoring what should have been warning signs regarding his mental health, by purchasing a firearm they intended for him to illegally own, and by failing to secure the gun away from him — even after school officials alerted them to the problem.

In other words, the very facts that made prosecutors charge the Crumbleys and handed them their precedent-setting convictions might also limit that precedent’s reach. 

According to an independent report released by the school district in October, multiple people failed at multiple points to prevent the 2021 shooting.

For months prior, the Crumbleys’ son, Ethan Crumbley, repeatedly asked his parents for help handling his mental health and showed signs of depression and mental illness. In texts sent to them, for example, he exhibited growing paranoia and complained multiple times of seeing ghosts or demons in their home when he was alone. But the Crumbleys ignored or dismissed his concerns.

“I actually asked my dad to take [me] to the Doctor yesterday but he just gave me some pills and told me to ‘Suck it up,’” Ethan texted a friend in April 2021.

“My mom laughed when I told her.”

Four days before the shooting, James Crumbley took his son with him to buy a gun, a Sig Sauer 9mm that prosecutors argued they intended for their son’s personal use, despite him being well under 18, the legal age for gun ownership in Michigan. 

One day before the shooting, Ethan was caught at school looking up bullets to use with the gun and was disciplined. Instead of expressing concern, his mother joked over text, “lol I’m.not mad. you have to learn not.to.get caught.” 

Courtesy Detroit Police

The morning the shooting occurred, Ethan accessed the gun and took it to school in his backpack.

Later, a schoolteacher alerted authorities after he drew a collection of disturbing images on a math worksheet, including a gun very similar to the Sig Sauer his father had just bought. Next to the gun, he sketched a person who appeared to be riddled with bullet wounds. Below it, he wrote, “The thoughts won’t stop — help me,” along with other messages like “blood everywhere” and “my life is useless.” 

Despite these indicators, neither James nor Jennifer alerted the school to the fact they had just purchased a gun similar to the one shown in the drawing. They left him at the school and went back to their jobs, without returning home to make sure the gun was still secured. School administrators neglected to search Ethan’s backpack, where the gun was still hidden. 

A few hours after this meeting, the Crumbleys received reports of the school shooting, and immediately began frantically messaging him. “He must be the shooter,” Crumbley texted her boss. 

By then, however, it was too late to intervene.

Again, this is a precedent-setting case. 

Michigan prosecutor Karen McDonald told CBS News after James Crumbley’s trial in March that she hadn’t initially been thinking about what precedents did or didn’t exist, but that the facts of the case led her to the decision to prosecute.

“The very first question I asked was, ‘Where did he get that gun, and how did he get it?’ And that question led to some really disturbing facts,” she said. “I think it’s a rare set of facts, but I also think that we don’t ask the question enough.”  

The Crumbleys’ lawyers fought the case’s legality from the start — arguing there was no justification for bringing charges against parents for the actions of their son, and that the decision to press charges could lead to overzealous prosecution of gun owners in the future.

But a state appellate court ruled that the trials could move forward, pointing out that Ethan Crumbley’s actions were “reasonably foreseeable.”

Even as it did so, however, the court acknowledged it was an unusual case.

Prosecutors argued that both parents failed to exercise “reasonable care” of their son, and went even further in failing to restrict his access to the gun. 

Gun safety experts recommend that considerable care be taken when storing a gun away from family members — in particular, making sure the gun and the bullets are kept locked and separate from each other. 

“Securing the gun is the whole thing,” James Crumbley’s anonymous jury foreperson told the Detroit Free Press after his verdict in March. 

While the extraordinary circumstances of this case make it unlikely that every parent of a school shooter could face prosecution, the Michigan shooter shares plenty of common red flags with other school shooters that parents should be alert to.

The Crumbleys have claimed ignorance, but they’ve also reportedly shown a lack of remorse, with James Crumbley claiming to be a “martyr” for the cause of gun rights.

Jurors clearly disagreed. “It’s not gonna fix nothing,” James Crumbley’s jury foreperson said after his verdict. “It’s just a start … it’s a start of things.” 

—Aja Romano, senior reporter

Daniel Steinle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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