OXFORD, Mich. (CN) — A jury has found Jennifer Crumbley, mother of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley, guilty on four counts of involuntary manslaughter — one count for each student her son fatally shot at Oxford High School in November 2021.
The jurors received Jennifer's case shortly before 10 a.m. on Monday, after sitting through seven days of trial and hearing from 22 witnesses, including Jennifer Crumbley herself. The jurors deliberated for about a day and a half before arriving at their decision Tuesday.
The defendant began crying quietly at the defense table as jurors read off the guilty verdict — announced first by the foreperson, and then polled individually.
That verdict, as defense attorney Shannon Smith noted in her closing arguments on Friday, could have ramifications beyond Jennifer Crumbley's personal fate. Crumbley is the first parent of a school shooter to be held criminally liable for their child's actions, and the jury's findings could set a precedent for similar cases in the future. It might also impact the case of her husband, James Crumbley, who faces trial on identical manslaughter charges in March.
Over the course of the trial, Smith and state prosecutors Karen McDonald and Marc Keast offered competing narratives to the jury. According to the prosecutors, Jennifer was a self-absorbed, negligent parent who — along with her husband — ignored her son's severe mental health issues, gave him the semiautomatic handgun he used to kill his classmates, and then fled after the state announced charges on Dec. 3, 2021.
Jennifer and James Crumbley did not turn themselves in but were captured by police in Detroit after withdrawing several thousand dollars from an ATM.
McDonald said in her closing arguments that this evidence is "telling you exactly where the defendant was, who she was talking to, what she did, what she didn't do and you can't hide from that."
Ethan Crumbley, in his own journal, also explicitly blamed his parents for failing to get him mental health treatment and inspiring his desire to shoot up his school.
“I want to shoot up the fucking school so badly,” the then-15-year-old wrote in one passage jurors saw last week.
“I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the fucking school,” he proclaimed in another.
Per Smith's recounting of events, Jennifer was the working mother of a difficult teenager. She conceded her client had a "messy" life — it came out at trial that she had an affair with a firefighter named Brian Meloche, who testified for the prosecution — but argued Jennifer Crumbley couldn't possibly have foreseen the threat her son posed. As Smith pointed out several times at trial, neither did trained professionals at Oxford High School.
Both Ethan Crumbley's counselor and the school's former dean of students testified as such. The former dean, Nicholas Ejak, said he held the boy's bag with the gun inside, but didn't search it, just hours before the shooting.
"I had no reasonable suspicion to search his belongings," Ejak said while on the stand last Tuesday.
Smith acknowledged that the Crumbleys left their home in Oxford the same day the state charged them, but maintained they did so because they were receiving violent threats from community members and said they would have turned themselves in anyway if the Detroit police hadn't arrested them.
Smith claimed biased local law enforcement was out to get her client, and argued she had been made a scapegoat for larger political issues. The defense attorney had warned jurors that if they found Jennifer guilty, any parents of a troubled child could eventually find themselves in her place.
"This case is a very dangerous for parents out there, it just is, and it is one of the first of its kind," Smith said in her closing argument Friday. "Luckily however, this is a case where the prosecution cannot meet its burden of proof."
Neither Smith nor the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office immediately responded to requests for comment, but the jurors' verdict showed which narrative they found more convincing. Jennifer Crumbley now faces up to 60 years in prison, 15 years apiece for each manslaughter conviction.
Law enforcement led her out of the courtroom in chains after jurors delivered their verdict. Judge Cheryl Matthews has set sentencing for April 9.
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