PONTIAC, Mich. (CN) — Ethan Crumbley, who killed four of his classmates during a 2021 school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, sat Thursday for an emotional pre-sentencing hearing where he tried to shield himself from a life prison sentence — and from viewing some of the evidence collected against him.
The shooter had a fresh hair cut and showed no emotion as he was led to his seat in his orange prison jumpsuit and shackles.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald and pulled no punches in her opening statements and made a point to separate the role of his parents, who are jailed pending trial for manslaughter charges in Michigan Supreme Court.
“This defendant made the decision to take four lives,” she said. “The defendant does not get a pass because his parents were grossly negligent.”
The shooter, who was 15 years old when he shot up Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021, was charged as an adult. After an initial not guilty plea, Crumbley in October 2022 admitted to all 24 charges against him and faces life in prison without the possibility of parole, which triggered the need for Thursday's hearing.
Paulette Lofton, the shooter's court-appointed attorney, sought to counter prosecutors' call for a life sentence.
“We must move away from the trial mentality,” she offered. “We will be asking for a term of years.”
Lieutenant Oakland County Sheriff Timothy Willis, who headed up the investigation, took the stand at the hearing for questioning by Oakland County prosecutor Mark Keast.
Willis recounted his experience arriving at the grisly scene, dealing with the aftermath and combing over the disturbing content the shooter had produced in the lead-up to the shooting: text messages and journal entries that grew more horrific as time went on.
The shooter made repeated references to planning the shooting in his journal according to Willis, who admitted he had never seen anything like this before in his career.
“I want to shoot up the school so fucking badly,” the shooter wrote.
He added: “Killing myself is too much of a pussy move.”
The shooter apparently sought the fame that comes with shooting up a school and fantasized about what life in prison would be like for him.
“I want all of America to see the darkness in me,” he wrote.
According to his journal, the shooter lamented his deteriorating mental health but could not stop himself from violence. Willis described video footage of the shooter torturing baby birds, with a still image from one of the videos shown in court.
When courtroom watched surveillance footage of the shooting itself, the shooter kept his head down and refused to look up.
Lofton focused her cross-examination of Willis on the shooter's parents' behavior, including reluctance to get involved in their son's schooling when he displayed learning difficulties. When elementary school teachers implored the shooter's parents to help him read at home, they scoffed and said it was the school’s responsibility.
Lofton hammered the teen shooter's parents as detached and selfish. James Crumbley had delivered a Door Dash order shortly after he met with school officials over Ethan's behavior, Lofton noted, and the couple were found hiding in Detroit when they learned charges were filed against them.
Jennifer and James Crumbley are the first parents of a school shooter to be charged with a crime related to the shooting. They have pleaded not guilty and argue they did not directly harm anyone.
Even short of his parents' involvement, or lack thereof, Ethan Crumbley thought his increasingly bizarre behavior would be noticed by Oxford High School officials, Lofton said. The teenager was surprised that they didn’t reach out when his grades dipped and his Instagram posts featured pictures and videos of guns.
