Jury selection underway in criminal trial of school shooter’s father

OXFORD, Mich. (CN) — The manslaughter trial of James Crumbley, father of school shooter Ethan Crumbley, began with jury selection Tuesday.

Hundreds of potential jurors showed up at Michigan's Oakland County Circuit Court. Most were excused Tuesday afternoon and instructed by Judge Cheryl Matthews to return Wednesday, while prosecutors and defense attorneys began questioning the handful that remained.

James Crumbley's defense team, led by attorney Mariell Lehman, faces an uphill battle both in jury selection and the trial to follow. James and his wife Jennifer Crumbley have achieved national notoriety as the first parents of a school shooter to face criminal charges for their child's actions, which by itself makes it more difficult to find local jurors who aren't aware of the situation.

Worse for the defense, Oakland County jurors convicted Jennifer Crumbley in February on the same four manslaughter charges her husband now faces — one for each Oxford High School student Ethan Crumbley killed in November 2021 in the Detroit suburb.

Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty to all 24 charges stemming from the shooting, including the first-ever terrorism charges levied against a school shooter, in October 2022. He entered his plea at the same county courthouse where jurors assembled for his father's trial on Tuesday,

Concerned that these factors would make it impossible to seat an impartial jury from the local population, Lehman moved to have James Crumbley's trial moved out of Oakland County last month. Matthews denied that motion, instead giving the Crumbley defense team more leeway to dismiss jurors they don't like.

James Crumbley has faced other court defeats on his road to trial, including the fact that he is facing trial at all.

State prosecutors charged both James and Jennifer Crumbley with manslaughter on Dec. 3, 2021, three days after their then-17-year-old son fatally shot teens Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre and Justin Shilling with a semiautomatic handgun James had bought for him four days earlier. The pair responded by withdrawing over $4,000 from an ATM and leaving their Oxford home — they say to avoid violent reprisal from the community — to lay low in an industrial building in Detroit. The Crumbleys' lawyers have argued the pair planned to turn themselves in, but before they could Detroit police raided the building early on Dec. 4 and arrested them at gunpoint.

Both pleaded not guilty to the charges when they were arraigned later that day.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, the parents asked multiple levels of state court to throw out their manslaughter charges, culminating in a three-judge state appellate panel ruling last March which found there was enough evidence to justify a trial.

Seven months later, the state Supreme Court issued a single-page order refusing to hear their appeal.

To explain their reasoning, the high court justices wrote, "we are not persuaded that the question presented should be reviewed by this court."

Last November the pair did manage to secure individual trials for themselves rather than facing the jury together. But given Jennifer Crumbley's conviction, James Crumbley and his defense team are wrestling with how to convince jurors to find him not guilty when the background facts of his case are effectively identical to those of his wife's.

A major element of Jennifer Crumbley's conviction was the assertion that she was willfully ignorant of her son's deepening mental health crisis prior to the shooting. Ethan Crumbley's own journal attested to that, with the disturbed teen explicitly blaming his parents for his poor mental state in several lines jurors saw at trial.

“I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the fucking school,” Ethan Crumbley wrote on one page.

James Crumbley hopes to bar these journal entries and similar pieces of evidence from his own trial if his son won't testify, claiming it would be unfair for jurors to see them without their author in court to provide context. Ethan Crumbley absolved his parents of any responsibility for the shooting at his sentencing hearing this past December — where Judge Kwame’ Rowe condemned him to life behind bars without parole — but indicated he would plead the Fifth Amendment if asked to testify at either of his parents' trials.

Another major hurdle for the defense team is the issue of safe gun storage, which prosecutors last month said was lacking in the Crumbley household. At Jennifer Crumbley's trial, Detective Adam Stoyek of the Oakland County Sheriff's Office testified that while searching the Crumbley home after the shooting, James Crumbley directed investigators to a firearm lockbox with the lock combination of 000 — the default setting.

State prosecutor Marc Keast said Tuesday he expected James Crumbley's trial to last two weeks. Jennifer Crumbley's sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 9.

Follow @djbyrnes1

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