Is Bad Parenting Criminal?

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Over the past few months, in a courtroom in Michigan, a local prosecutor has been attempting to do something I consider basically impossible: explain a school shooting. The school shooting in question happened in November 2021, at Oxford High School. A student named Ethan Crumbley came to class with a 9 mm handgun. He killed four people, injured seven.

Afterward, the district attorney got access to reams of information in an attempt to figure out how this shooting went down. That included security footage, cellphone video, text message after text message. It’s all piled up in court each day. “The defense attorney had a stack of papers that was literally several feet high,” said Quinn Klinefelter, who is covering the story for WDET in Detroit.

One of the pieces of evidence here is a confession of a sort. It’s video the shooter took of himself, the day before the massacre, where he explains exactly what he’s about to do. This video was played in its entirety in open court, back in July. “It was a bit rambling. It even mentions how he realized that he was going to get a life sentence because of his actions,” Klinefelter said. “The phrase he used was, ‘I’m going to rot in jail like a tomato.’ ”

He seemed to know what would happen to him. And he did plead guilty back in the fall. But that wasn’t the end of the story, because the district attorney has put Ethan’s parents on trial, too—Jennifer and James Crumbley. They are accused of missing signs that Ethan’s mental health was in crisis, even buying the gun Ethan used to hurt so many of his schoolmates.

In that video he made before the shooting, Ethan apologized to his parents, saying, “I’m ruing my life and not yours.” It turns out he was pretty wrong about that. “When he was sentenced, he specifically said, ‘My parents didn’t know about this. It’s not their fault,’ ” Klinefelter said.

But Ethan Crumbley didn’t have the final say here. A jury did. And that jury just found his mother guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. She now faces years in prison. On a recent episode of What Next, we discussed how this Michigan case may change the way courts—and the rest of us—think about who is responsible for gun violence. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: This shooting at Oxford High School took place in November of 2021. But according to the prosecution, Ethan Crumbley started to show signs of mental illness months before that. And he wasn’t suffering from simple depression. Eight months before the massacre, Ethan started texting his mom, saying he was seeing things around the house.

Quinn Klinefelter: He was afraid that he was having hallucinations, that he was lonely in the house, that there was a demon throwing bowls around everywhere, that somebody slammed the door in the bathroom and it’s haunted. There was a psychiatrist later that showed this was a sign of psychosis. The mother claims that Ethan had got a Ouija board at that time, him and his friend, and that they liked to pretend that it was a haunted house and that they would actually fake things like slam a door and say, “Oh, did you hear the ghost do that?” And so she thought that he was just messing around with her, that he wasn’t seriously having any kind of a breakdown.

Later on, Ethan wrote to a friend and said that he wanted to call for a doctor himself, call 911, but that he was afraid that “his parents would be really pissed about that.” He worried that he was going to have a mental breakdown. He wrote later that when he had said something to his parents about it, they just laughed at him, his mother did. And his father told him just to take a pill and suck it up.

Now, the defense argues the exact opposite. Much of those came from messages that Ethan Crumbley sent back and forth with a friend of his about what the........

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