OXFORD, Mich. (CN) — The mother and father of Oxford High School shooter Ethan Crumbley were both sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison on Tuesday, as punishment for their respective convictions on four involuntary manslaughter charges.
She also forbade the Crumbleys from having any contact with the families of their son's shooting victims.
The couple sat impassively as Oakland County Judge Cheryl Matthews read out their sentences one after the other. Law enforcement escorted them from the courtroom not long after.
"It's not my role, it's not the role of the court system to make an example of the defendants," Matthews said before handing down her sentence. "However, it is a goal of sentencing to act as a deterrent."
Jurors convicted Jennifer Crumbley in February and James Crumbley in March. Despite undergoing separate trials, the pair faced identical charges stemming from the four high school students — Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Justin Shilling and Tate Myre — their son fatally shot in late November 2021.
They were also sentenced together on Tuesday morning, sitting at the defense table in prison garb. They were flanked by their defense attorneys, Shannon Smith representing Jennifer Crumbley and Mariell Lehman representing James Crumbley.
Michigan state prosecutors Karen McDonald and Marc Keast presented a nearly identical case to jurors in both parents' cases. They portrayed the Crumbleys as irresponsible gun owners and criminally negligent parents who ignored their son's worsening mental health crisis and gave him the semiautomatic handgun he used to carry out the shooting.
In journal entries the shooter wrote, which jurors saw in both trials, he explicitly blamed his parents for his desire to commit violence.
"I have zero help for my mental problems and it's causing me to shoot up the fucking school," he wrote on one page.
The shooter's school counselor at Oxford, as well as its then-dean of students, even called the Crumbley parents in to school for an emergency meeting on the morning of the shooting. Staff urged the parents to take their son for an immediate mental health intervention after discovering a math sheet on which he had drawn a handgun and a bloody, bullet-riddled body.
Instead, the Crumbleys kept their son in school and returned to work. He began his shooting spree only a few hours later.
Matthews nevertheless denied the Crumbleys were convicted for bad parenting or gun ownership. She argued they had failed to stop an "oncoming, runaway train" that more reasonable people would have acted on.
"Opportunity knocked over and over again, louder and louder, and was ignored," Matthews said. "No one answered, and these two people should have, and sure didn't."
Matthews also said she took into account the Crumbleys' self-victimization and apparent lack of remorse when considering their sentences. Another factor Matthews said she considered was James Crumbley's violent statements about McDonald before his trial began; in recorded jail calls he said McDonald "would be sucking on a fucking hot rock down in hell soon," among other things.
Lehman denied these tirades were threats, claiming her client was only venting his frustration at the situation. Matthews did not agree.
Besides Matthews' assessment of the Crumbley parents, the sentencing hearing on Tuesday featured statements from the families of the shooter's deceased victims and from James and Jennifer Crumbley themselves.
"The ripple effect of both James' and Jennifer's failures to act have devastated us all," said Jill Soave, Justin Shilling's mother. "This tragedy was completely preventable.
"You guys made loving Hana so painful. That is not a narrative, that is reality. For that, unless you have a time machine or the ability to stop time, there is no existing punishment or rehabilitation that will ever be enough," Hana St. Juliana's older sister Reina St. Juliana said, also noting that a 15-year sentence was longer than her sister's time on Earth.
Jennifer Crumbley, when speaking on her own behalf, said the last few years had taught her the value of forgiveness.
"I stand today not to ask for your forgiveness as I know it may be beyond reach, but to express my sincerest apologies for the pain that has been caused," Jennifer Crumbley told the victims' families.
She also forgave the prosecutors for the "slander and hate" she said they directed toward her and her husband. James Crumbley directly apologized to the deceased teens' families for his son's actions when he spoke.
"As a parent our biggest fear is losing our child or our children. And to lose a child is unimaginable," James Crumbley said. "My heart is really broken for everybody involved."
There was also heated debate between the defense team and prosecutors over the factors they wished Judge Matthews to consider before handing down her sentence.
One major issue was how the Crumbleys left their home in Oxford the same day they learned the state had filed manslaughter charges against them. Rather than turn themselves in right away, they took shelter in an industrial building in Detroit after withdrawing thousands of dollars from their and their son's bank accounts.
The defense attorneys repeatedly argued at trial that the Crumbleys fled to a friend's art gallery in Detroit to avoid violent retribution from Oxford community members, and planned to turn themselves in the following morning. Prosecutors, however, claimed the pair were on the run and trying to lay low. A Detroit SWAT team arrested them very early in the morning as they were sleeping in the industrial building, following a tip from a local small business owner who operates out of the same building.
Ultimately Matthews came down more in favor of the prosecution. The couple could have each faced a maximum of 15 years in jail. Both received 858 days credit for time served, considering the two years they have been in state custody since their 2021 arrest.
The Crumbleys were the first parents of a school shooter in the U.S. to face criminal charges over their child's actions. The whole immediate Crumbley family is now in jail; the shooter himself is currently serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.
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