"James Crumbley is not on trial for what his son did. James Crumbley is on trial for what he did and what he didn't do." Michigan State Attorney Karen McDonald insisted on this before the jurors retired. The trial against this family man was, in fact, unprecedented. The prosecutor charged James Crumbley, 47, with neglecting various warning signs before his son Ethan Crumbley, 15 at the time, committed a mass murder at his high school in Oxford, Michigan.
On November 30, 2021, the teenager killed four of his classmates and wounded seven others. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2023. For the father, the verdict was delivered on Thursday, March 14, when he was found guilty of manslaughter. Imprisoned since the massacre, James Crumbley faces up to 15 years in prison, as does his wife, Jennifer, 45, tried a few weeks earlier by the same court and also found guilty. Sentencing will be announced in the coming weeks.
The case has highlighted the parents' overwhelming responsibility, but it also opened two lines of thought. First, faced with the inability of the US Congress to regulate gun ownership under the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to "keep and bear arms," local authorities are resorting to other means to achieve their ends. Prosecuting the parents of young people guilty of mass killings is one of them. Next, despite the prosecutor's explanations, the case presents a fundamental question: Can one be held responsible for acts committed by others?
The case reveals a troubling trend among predominantly young white teenagers who have access to weapons despite their psychiatric disorders. Four days before the massacre, Ethan Crumbley had been given a 9 mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic pistol by his father for Thanksgiving. The father gifted the weapon in agreement with his wife and did not secure it despite being aware of his son's serious mental health issues.
The teenager's diary reveals his prolonged struggles: "I have zero help for my mental problems and that causes me to shoot up the fucking school," or "I want help, but my parents won't listen." The father claimed not to have read this diary, but there were signals, as evidenced by a message Ethan sent to one of his friends shortly before the massacre: "I actually asked my dad to take [me] to the Doctor yesterday, but he just gave me some pills and told me to 'Suck it up.'" He had also said, "My mother laughed when I told her."
On the morning of the massacre, a teacher noticed disturbing drawings in the margin of Ethan's math homework: a gun, a bleeding, bullet-riddled body, accompanied by these comments: "The thoughts won't stop. Help me," "blood everywhere" and "the world is dead." The parents were summoned to the school but left again without their son. At that time, the adults thought the teenager was having suicidal thoughts, so the parents were given 48 hours to see a doctor. No one thought to search Ethan's backpack, which contained the 9 mm pistol.
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