OXFORD, Mich. (CN) — The first parent of a school shooter to face trial for their child's actions took the stand Thursday, hoping to beat the state's accusation that she's criminally responsible for her son's fatal shooting of four Michigan teenagers.
Facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter, Jennifer Crumbley told jurors she never would have imagined her son Ethan Crumbley would have been capable of killing four students — Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Justin Shilling and Tate Myre — at Oxford High School in November 2021.
"As a parent, you spend your whole life trying to protect your child from other dangers,” she said. “You never would think you’d have to protect your child from harming somebody else."
She also told jurors that while she wouldn't have done anything different regarding her son, she would have traded her and her husband's lives for those of the four murdered students.
"I wish he would have killed us instead," she said.
Jennifer's testimony was the opening play of her defense case, as planned by her attorney Shannon Smith. State prosecutors rested their case earlier Thursday with their last of 21 witnesses, Lt. Timothy Willis of the Oakland County Sheriff's Office. Willis helped organize the investigation into the shooting in 2021. While he discussed a range of topics related to that investigation, one of the most dramatic moments came when he shared excerpts from the shooter's journal.
“I want to shoot up the fucking school so badly,” the then-15-year-old wrote in one passage.
“I’m about to shoot up the school and spend the rest of my life in prison,” he proclaimed in another.
The shooter also discussed his mental health and how he felt like his parents weren't listening to him about it. In one passage he directly blamed his violent actions on their negligence.
“I want help but my parents don’t listen to me so I can’t get any help,” Ethan Crumbley wrote on the fifth page in his journal. On the next page he added, “I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the fucking school.”
The passages directly supported the case state prosecutors Karen McDonald and Marc Keast have presented to jurors since trial began last Thursday; that Jennifer Crumbley was self-absorbed and willfully ignorant of her son's severe mental health issues. Smith, her attorney, has conversely pointed out that even trained education professionals at the high school did not grasp the threat Ethan posed on the day of the shooting, and proposed that Jennifer has instead been made a scapegoat.
On Tuesday, Smith made a point of highlighting that while Ethan's father James Crumbley may have bought the handgun shooter used to kill his classmates, the school's dean of students held it in the boy's bag on the morning of the shooting and didn't bother to search it.
Smith also used Jennifer's time on the stand Thursday to have her explain the circumstances that surrounded her and her husband's actions immediately following the shooting. State prosecutors announced involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents on Dec. 3, 2021, but they did not immediately turn themselves in. The pair were instead captured by police in Detroit early the following morning. They also withdrew $4,000 dollars from an ATM on Dec. 3.
According to Jennifer, this wasn't because they were attempting to flee the law as prosecutors have implied, but because they were trying avoid violent reprisals from the community. She reported getting threats online, and said the couple planned to turn themselves in later the same morning they were caught. She also explained she had withdrawn the cash in case their accounts were frozen.
"My dad's been involved in some civil suits before and he told me that there's probably going to be a lot of lawsuits and they're going to try to take [my] assets... they said they could freeze [my] account," Crumbley said. "So I went and withdrew money from my account," Jennifer said.
Prosecution will begin their cross-examination of Jennifer when trial resumes Friday morning. James Crumbley faces his own trial on involuntary manslaughter charges in March.
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