OXFORD, Mich (CN) — Six witnesses took the stand in the manslaughter trial of Jennifer Crumbley on Tuesday, making for a packed court day despite a late start.
Jennifer, mother of Oxford High School shooter Ethan Crumbley, faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter in Michigan state court related to the four students her son killed in November 2021. She is the first parent of a school shooter to face trial for their child's actions, though her husband James Crumbley will go on trial on manslaughter charges in March.
Jurors didn't begin hearing testimony until shortly before 10:30 a.m., almost two hours after Judge Cheryl Matthews wanted the day's proceedings to begin. The judge had hoped to make up lost time after she dismissed jurors early on Monday amid a debate on several pieces of evidence Crumbley's attorney Shannon Smith objected to. But heavy snow in the area scuttled that plan.
The state hopes to rest its case by the end of the week despite the delay, prosecutor Marc Keast told Matthews.
The jurors, once they had finally assembled in mid-morning, spent the day hearing testimony on a wide spread of topics. The prosecution's six witnesses for the day included Oxford High School's former student dean Nicholas Ejak, Jennifer Crumbley's old boss and real estate firm COO Andrew Smith, and her former co-worker Amanda Holland. A trio of officers with the Oakland County Sheriff's Office — Detective Adam Stoyek, Sgt. Matthew Peschke and crime scene supervisor Robert Koteles — also testified.
Keast and fellow state prosecutor Karen McDonald maintained a similar strategy with Ejak, Smith and Holly as they had with witnesses on the preceding trial days: painting Jennifer as self-absorbed and negligent of her son's mental health crises. Shannon Smith, despite a rough start last week, has similarly crystallized her defense strategy — to point out witness' ignorance of the Crumbleys' home life and demonstrate that even trained education professionals like Ejak didn't realize the threat Ethan Crumbley represented.
Andrew Smith, for example, testified he found it odd when Jennifer Crumbley texted him the day of the shooting, asking him not to fire her.
“I need my job. Please don’t judge me for what my son did,” Jennifer told her boss the day of the shooting, after also texting him that she needed to find a lawyer.
Smith sent back a text that day stating he was praying for Jennifer, but in court more than two years later he testified that he was surprised she was worried about work at that moment. Jennifer worked as the real estate firm's marketing director in November 2021, Smith said, and it wouldn't have been a problem if she took time off the day of the shooting to watch her son. Ethan Crumbley's school counselor Shawn Hopkins had called the Crumbley parents to the school that morning to discuss violent images the boy had drawn on a math worksheet, and advised them to get their son mental health treatment for suicidal ideation as soon as possible. Instead the couple left their son at school and Jennifer returned to work.
On cross-examination, Jennifer's defense attorney pointed out to the real estate COO that James Crumbley was in between jobs and only doing gig work when the shooting took place. The firm fired her a few days after the shooting regardless, Smith said.
Shannon Smith similarly needled Ejak over his own failure to realize the school shooter's intentions. The former dean told prosecutors that he found it "a little odd" that the Crumbleys didn't take their son from school after Hopkins recommended immediate mental health treatment, that day if possible.
“Typically when it’s recommended, the parents take their children to seek out mental assistance immediately... that's been my experience every time," Ejak said, adding the Crumbleys' meeting with Hopkins "ended abruptly" after less than 15 minutes.
But on cross-examination, Ejak acknowledged that despite his extensive professional training and degrees in sociology and education, he didn't believe Ethan Crumbley posed a threat to others only a few hours before the then-15-year-old fatally shot four classmates. He even retrieved Ethan's backpack where the boy had stashed his semiautomatic handgun, and despite Ethan getting caught looking up images of bullets only a day prior, didn't search it.
"I had no reasonable suspicion to search his belongings," Ejak said.
The trio of county sheriffs' testimony was more factual, detailing for jurors the search Stoyek helped carry out of the Crumbleys' home after the shooting, the conversation Peschke had with Jennifer in a patrol car while that search was underway, and Koteles' and other officers' investigation of the school itself in the hours following the shooting.
Koteles said Ethan Crumbley fired his 9mm semiautomatic handgun 32 times in the school, while photos police took in the Crumbley home showed bullet-riddled shooting range targets and shell casings in the boy's bedroom. There were also more guns inside the Crumbleys' home, which Stoyek testified were kept in a lockbox with the default combination of 000.
During a nearly hourlong recording of Jennifer's time in a patrol car that jurors heard, she expressed disbelief at her son's actions.
"I don't get it. I don't get what happened," Jennifer said.
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