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Guest Essay

By Megan K. Stack

Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer.

As the mother of a school shooter, Jennifer Crumbley’s reputation has stains that can never wash clean. Ms. Crumbley is now spending her days hunched in a Michigan courtroom, weeping at times as she listens to the testimony against her. The jurors may condemn her to prison, or they may absolve her, but she will always be a walking symbol of gun violence and bad parenting.

On Nov. 30, 2021, Crumbley’s 15-year-old son, Ethan Crumbley, drew a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing four students and wounding seven people at Oxford High School. His parents had bought him the gun as an early Christmas present; his mother celebrated by taking Ethan to a shooting range, an outing she called a “mom and son day.”

Both parents face charges of involuntary manslaughter; James Crumbley, Ethan’s father, will be tried later. Prosecutors argue that their indifference to their son’s collapsing mental health, even as they gave him access to the murder weapon, make them criminally responsible for his attack. It’s a remarkable and unprecedented gambit.

Hundreds of mass shootings have struck American schools in recent decades, leading to prosecutions of the shooter and civil lawsuits against schools, administrators or parents. The Crumbleys are the first parents to face homicide charges for a school shooting by their child.

I’ve listened to hours of testimony, in the trial and in pretrial hearings, on the dynamics of the Crumbley family and the events leading up to the shooting at Oxford High School. The more I’ve heard, the less clearly I’ve understood the case against the parents. Ms. Crumbley doesn’t strike me as an insightful or affectionate mom — or even, perhaps, a very nice person. But she’s more complex than the monstrously callous and neglectful figure suggested by her dour mug shot and the few choice details about her personal life that have floated into the headlines. The case against the Crumbleys is more complicated than it sounds.

The prosecution of the parents seems to be motivated, at least partly, by the grief of a local community, and the ambient desperation of a country trapped in the recurring nightmare of mass shootings.

Our politicians are ineffective; the courts don’t make headway; we can’t even agree on what’s causing the bloodshed. Parents are worn brittle by daily awareness that our own child’s school could be next. We can’t fix the interlinked failures behind the slaughter — but we can sue schools and parents and, now, we can drag the unsympathetic Crumbleys into criminal court. We crave villains to blame, a case to try, something tangible to do. Maybe, at least, it makes us feel better.

Some victims and survivors have managed to win damages in civil lawsuits against parents. These cases are often championed by anti-gun violence groups looking to make an example of carelessness.

“I do think it has a deterrent effect,” said Alla Lefkowitz, a lawyer with Everytown for Gun Safety, who has represented survivors against shooters’ parents, gun stores and manufacturers. “Nobody wants to be involved in a lawsuit like this.”

An involuntary manslaughter conviction, however, requires much harder evidence. Prosecutors need to prove that the Crumbleys knew there was real danger of their son attacking his schoolmates but were indifferent to that result and “wantonly” neglected to intervene.

“We are approaching the parents with one of the highest charges in our criminal system, which can lead to the loss of liberty for extended periods of time, based on the conduct of their teenaged son,” said Eve Brensike Primus, director of the Public Defender Training Institute at the University of Michigan Law School. “A lay person thinks, ‘OK, you should’ve known better.’ But that’s not the criminal standard.”

I don’t know how the full trial will play out but, from all I’ve seen, I’m not convinced the Crumbleys had any idea, or any way to know, that their son was likely to kill.

One outstanding oddity of this case: Ethan Crumbley was charged as an adult. He pleaded guilty on all 24 counts, including first-degree murder, and was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole. During his sentencing, Ethan insisted that nobody could possibly have known about his plan, and specified that his parents should not be blamed. “I’m a really bad person,” he told the........

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