Michigan jurors convict school shooter’s dad on manslaughter charges

OXFORD, Mich. (CN) — A jury in Oakland County, Michigan, has found James Crumbley guilty on four counts of manslaughter, concluding a weeklong trial for the father of school shooter Ethan Crumbley.

Jurors reached their verdict around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday after deliberating for about 12 hours. Four days and change of testimony preceded those deliberations, which began Wednesday afternoon.

James Crumbley remained silent at the defense table as the jury foreman read out the verdict. He shook his head with each pronouncement of "guilty."

The four manslaughter counts on which James Crumbley now stands convicted stem from the four Oxford High School students his son killed in November 2021, in the eponymous Detroit suburb of Oxford. He and his wife Jennifer Crumbley, whom jurors convicted on identical charges last month, are the first parents of a school shooter in U.S. history to be held criminally responsible for their child's actions.

The course of James Crumbley's trial mirrored that of his wife's in late January and early February. State prosecutors Karen McDonald and Marc Keast called 15 witnesses; most were law enforcement officials with the Oakland County Sheriff's Office and Detroit Police Department. Oxford High's former student dean and the shooter's school counselor also took the stand, as did an Oxford High School staff member who survived being shot by the defendant's son.

Through these witnesses, the prosecutors built a narrative that portrayed James Crumbley as both an irresponsible gun owner and willfully negligent of his son's worsening mental health leading up to the shooting. Four days before the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting, he bought his son the murder weapon — a 9mm semiautomatic handgun — as an early Christmas present.

The shooter seemed to have easy access to the gun and ammunition, police witnesses testified, and while investigators were searching the Crumbley home in the aftermath of the shooting, James Crumbley also showed them another gun case which he kept locked with the default tumbler setting of 000.

An August 2021 video the then-15-year-old shooter sent to his friend, which jurors saw at trial, showed the teenager loading another handgun. He sent his friend a message along with the video, bragging that his father had left the gun out.

"My dad left it out so I thought, 'Why not' lol," the shooter wrote.

James Crumbley's son also showed disturbing behavior at school prior to the shooting, former Oxford student dean Nicholas Ejak and school counselor Shawn Hopkins testified on Monday. The day before the shooting, a teacher caught the boy looking up bullets on his phone in class, prompting a phone call home that his mother brushed off.

Hours before the shooting, the pair of counseling staff called both Crumbley parents in for an emergency meeting after their son drew violent images on a math sheet. Those images included a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun and a bullet-riddled body, accompanied by the words "blood everywhere" and "the thoughts won't stop help me."

The counselors testified that they wanted the Crumbleys to take their son for an immediate mental health intervention, but instead both parents left him in class and returned to work.

Of the "over a dozen" times Hopkins had recommended such an intervention to parents, he said Monday, he couldn't think of any besides the Crumbleys who left their child in school.

The shooter's own journal entries, which jurors saw on Tuesday, also explicitly blamed his parents for his worsening mental state, exacerbated by the recent deaths of his grandmother and the family dog, and a close friend moving away.

"I want help but my parents don't listen to me so I can't get any help," the shooter wrote on page five of his journal.

"I have zero help for my mental problems and it's causing me to shoot up the fucking school," he wrote on page six.

James Crumbley's defense attorney, Mariell Lehman, took the strategy of pointing out what prosecutors couldn't definitively prove, and claimed her client was being held to an unfair standard. She argued that teenagers are prone to moodiness and exaggeration, and that it wasn't fair to hold her client responsible for his son's actions when trained professionals like Ejak and Hopkins also didn't realize the level of threat the boy posed.

Ejak even testified that on the morning of the shooting, he held the backpack with the shooter's gun in it, but lacked any compelling reason to search it.

"With all of this, all of the knowledge that you had on November 30 of 2021 at approximately 10:52 a.m., you did not feel that he was a threat to anyone and you did not feel that you had reasonable suspicion to look in his backpack?" Lehman asked the former dean on Monday.

"No, because you have to remember that I knew very little of what we all know today," Ejak responded.

This seemed to be the admission Lehman was looking for, inviting the jury to extend the same logic to her client. James Crumbley acted with the information on his son that he had available, she argued, and while he may have taken different actions had he known what his son was planning, the school's trained professionals were just as guilty of that lack of foresight.

The jury did not agree.

James Crumbley now faces up to 60 years in prison, 15 years for each manslaughter charge.

Presiding judge Cheryl Matthews will sentence both Crumbley parents for their manslaughter convictions on April 9.

Follow @djbyrnes1

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