OXFORD, Mich. (CN) — In February, jurors convicted Jennifer Crumbley, mother of school shooter Ethan Crumbley, on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Now a new jury is set to decide the fate of her husband James on identical charges.
Together the pair are the first parents of a school shooter in the U.S. to be held criminally responsible for their child's actions. Each manslaughter charge against them stems from a teenager killed during their son's shooting spree in Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021 — Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre and Justin Shilling.
The jury began deliberations on James Crumbley's charges on Wednesday afternoon after four days and change of proceedings. Prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning after briefly recalling Brett Brandon, a federal agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who testified on Monday. The defense team rested only about 20 minutes later, after calling their first and only witness — Karen Crumbley, the defendant's sister.
Karen Crumbley acted as a character witness for her brother, and testified that he never voiced any worry for his son when he visited her in Florida in April 2021 after the siblings' mother died. The last time Karen Crumbley had seen her nephew in person was in June 2021, she said, and denied noticing anything out of the ordinary.
"From your observations, did you see anything concerning in June of 2021?" James Crumbley's attorney Mariell Lehman asked her.
"Absolutely not," Karen Crumbley responded.
During cross-examination, though, prosecutor Marc Keast asked how close Karen Crumbley was to her brother, bringing up the relative infrequency of their communication. Per device records that Keast cited, the siblings only spoke to each other about two dozen times over the course of 2021, counting both phone calls and social media messages.
The defendant's sister also testified she would find it "wrong" for a child to have unsupervised access to a firearm, but defended the Crumbley parents introducing their son to shooting in general.
"If you’re getting a gun specifically for your child to use at his leisure that would be wrong," the sister said. "But with adult supervision I don’t see any problem with it.”
The attorneys' closing arguments which followed on Wednesday afternoon summarized both sides' narratives around James Crumbley's actions before, during and after the shooting in 2021.
Prosecutor Karen McDonald painted the school shooter's father as willfully oblivious to his son's worsening mental health leading up to the shooting, exacerbated by the recent death of his grandmother and the family dog, and by the then-15-year-old boy's close friend moving away. Earlier in the trial jurors saw a text message the shooter had sent to his friend, explaining that James Crumbley had given his son "some pills" and told him to "suck it up."
McDonald pushed this theme by highlighting that the day of the shooting, Oxford High School's then-student dean Nicholas Ejak and school counselor Shawn Hopkins urged the Crumbleys to take their son out of class for an immediate mental health intervention. Instead they went back to work, and never mentioned that their son had access to firearms.
"He didn't take his son home, didn't take him to get this care that a counselor is telling you he needs, didn't say 'we bought him a gun four days ago as an early Christmas present,'" McDonald said.
The shooter's journal entries, which jurors saw on Tuesday, also explicitly blamed his parents for poor mental health and his desire to shoot up the school.
McDonald similarly blamed James Crumbley of being an irresponsible firearm owner, noting how on the day of the shooting he hadn't locked the case which held his son's 9mm handgun. She played a 911 call James Crumbley made after news of the shooting broke, in which he tells the operator he found an empty gun case at home and suspects his son was the shooter.
"I'm at my house, there's an active shooter situation going on at the high school, my son goes to the high school, I have a missing gun at my house," Crumbley told the 911 operator with rising panic in his voice.
"I think my son took the gun, I don't know if it's him, I don't know what's going on," he said a few moments later.
McDonald's third major argument was a preemptive rebuttal against the notion that this a case of over-zealous prosecution in which James Crumbley is being used as a scapegoat for larger issues surrounding gun control and mental health care. She dismissed the concern that the trial could pave the way for "any parent" to find themselves in James Crumbley's position, painting the defendant's negligence as unusually egregious.
"Tragically small efforts could have saved the lives of four kids," McDonald argued.
Lehman's own closing arguments followed the strategy of highlighting what the prosecution couldn't definitively prove. She reminded jurors that the state had to prove her client guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and argued the state hadn't conclusively shown he was willfully negligent of his son's poor mental state.
"The absence of evidence that James knew about the struggles that his son was having can be your reasonable doubt," Lehman said.
Lehman also said James Crumbley had "no idea" what his son was planning, and was no more guilty of misjudging the threat his son posed than were Oxford's own counseling staff. Earlier in the trial, both men testified that the shooter had shown concerning behavior on multiple occasions leading up to the shooting, but that they never had any reason to discipline him.
"Shawn Hopkins and Nick Ejak confirmed that they had no disciplinary history with James' son," Lehman said.
Following closing arguments, Judge Cheryl Matthews gave the jury its instructions and the jurors began deliberations. They ended the day without a verdict around 5 p.m., with plans to resume Thursday morning.
If found guilty on all counts James Crumbley could face up to 60 years in prison, 15 years for each manslaughter charge. His wife will be sentenced in April.
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