Parents of Oxford High School Shooter Apprehended, Charged
After a bizarre sequence of events where they were charged, fled, and then apprehended, the parents of Oxford High School shooter Ethan Crumbley were apprehended late Friday night and now are in the same jail as their son.
Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of the 15-year-old accused of murdering four students at a high school in Michigan, have been charged with four counts each of involuntary manslaughter — an exceptionally rare move the prosecutor said was warranted by laying out a timeline of “egregious” mistakes and missed opportunities to prevent the shooting.
Early Saturday, they were captured after a Detroit business owner spotted their car and tipped off police.
The parents of Ethan Crumbley purchased the handgun used in Tuesday’s shooting at Oxford High School, apparently as a Christmas gift for their son on Black Friday, and stored it improperly, said Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald at a news conference midday Friday.
Then, when called to a meeting Tuesday morning by school officials to discuss a disturbing, violent drawing made by their son, the parents did not inquire about the whereabouts of the gun or inform the school that they had recently purchased a gun for him, said McDonald.
After the meeting, the younger Crumbley was allowed to return to class. Shortly afterward, authorities say, he fatally shot four fellow students and wounded six others and a teacher.
“These charges are intended to hold the individuals who contributed to this tragedy accountable and also send a message that gun owners have a responsibility. When they fail to uphold that responsibility, there are serious and criminal consequences,” McDonald said.
Law enforcement authorities in Michigan had searched for the Crumbleys on Friday afternoon after the charges were announced, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, which released images of the couple and details of their vehicle in an alert urging the public to help locate them.
“The action of fleeing and ignoring their attorney certainly adds weight to the charges,” Sheriff Michael Bouchard said in a statement.
The U.S. Marshals Service said Friday that it was also involved in the search for the parents.
A lawyer representing the parents said they had not fled but rather left town for their own safety, according to The Daily Beast.
“They are returning to the area to be arraigned. They are not fleeing from law enforcement despite recent comments in media reports,” lawyer Shannon Smith told the site.
However, The Associated Press reported early Saturday that the Crumbleys “appeared to be hiding” in the building where they were found, according to Detroit Police Chief James E. White.
If convicted, Jennifer and James Crumbley face up to 15 years in prison for each count. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with 24 felonies, including four counts of murder and one count of terrorism. The younger Crumbley was arrested after the shooting Tuesday.
Asked whether prosecutors were considering charges against any other parties, including school officials who allowed Crumbley to return to class, McDonald declined to answer, saying only that “the investigation is ongoing.”
This is an interesting move. It will be more interesting if it holds up.Report
Serious question. Should it?Report
Good question. Legally, you can’t buy a handgun until you are 21, nor any gun under 18, so let me answer a question with a question…
If an adult provides a minor alcohol, and the minor gets a DUI, is/should the adult responsible?Report
I’m not shedding tears for them and there’s certainly a charge there for giving a firearm to the minor. Also a good case for the victims’ parents suing the living hell out of them. Conflicted somewhat on the manslaughter charges. Guess we will we see where the facts go. The allegations so far sound really bad, but I think we’re always best served to take these early reports with a few grains of salt.Report
Manslaughter seems a stretch unless it’s a novel use of felony murder rule? Or is there something to indicate the parents encouraged, or exhibited depraved indifference?
A weapons charge is certainly appropriate.Report
Not felony murder. Involuntary manslaughter so no intent.Report
And charge the entire GOP as accessories.
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As always should be asked with pictures like these, who are these people thinking of, when they imagine themselves using those guns?
Hordes of invading Canadians? Zombies? The burglars from Home Alone?
No, the answer is, they envision themselves in a shooting war against their fellow Americans.
Happy Holidays, from the Party of Life.Report
In this instance he’s mentally picturing other gun owners voting for him.Report
Who also envision themselves in a shooting war with their fellow Americans.Report
Your turning them into strawmen.
My brother and his family hunt. I have considered arming up because of a nightmare lunatic targeting my family.Report
Having been there once, let me tell you it sucks. Our best police response time was 10 minutes, worst was over 2 hours. And this is in a dense inner ring suburb.
Of course then once you extricate yourself you really have to consider how to handle the safety trade-offs, especially with kids around.Report
That’s why we have trigger locks and gun safes. You can get a pistol box that screws to your bed rails and has digital finger print ID for under $200. Not 100% kid proof but will slow them down enough.
Plus you actually teach them proper safety and handling techniques.
This isn’t hard.Report
Which is why I have little sympathy for people who don’t bother. If you can’t afford a lockbox or the time to teach your kids, you can’t afford to own a firearm.Report
I’m just looking at how the entire right wing is soaked in gun imagery, violent rhetoric, and how prevalent these fantasies of civil war are. Almost none of them offer up the rationale you’re using.
If it seems like a straw man maybe its because we have come to see this sort of stuff as normal.
For perspective, imagine Ilhan Omar posing with a bunch of veiled women holding guns and begging Allah for ammo.Report
Santa is to Thomas Massie as Allah is to Ilhan Omar.
Anyway, one thing to take into account is that ammo has been expensive and scarce over the last few years. Like, you used to be able to waltz into the Big R and pick up a Freedom Bucket for a nice day at the range. Now? You’re going to pay twice as much… or you would if it weren’t out of stock.Report
The great ammo consolidation of 2021: .22LR, .223, 9MM, .308, .45ACP (I hear .380 is available but, pfft.)
Everything else is a snowflake round.Report
I used to own a Winchester .44-40, back in the 90s, and even back then it was near impossible to feed the thing. I guess it would be even harder now.
It was a fun rifle, though. I really enjoyed historic firearms. It’s sad, though, that it was easier to feed my flintlock than my Winchester (on account of the fact I could cast my own ammo for that).Report
Yeah, partially I jest, but there have been times where I couldn’t even get .22 rounds.
Good point about the muzzle loader… never any problems finding .50 slugs and black powder… and while I’ve never been tempted by DIY ballistics, I’d have no issue casting some lead slugs for deer if it came to that.Report
My old roommate had a press, so we could reload spent brass. However, it really wasn’t much easier, as we couldn’t fabricate jacketed ammunition, nor could we make our own smokeless powder, so we still were dependent on supply.
I certainly wasn’t going to send unjacketed ammo down a modern barrel. That was fine for a muzzleloader, but not at high velocity.Report
No rationale?
How many hundreds of buildings has the Left burned down recently over local-news (often local news from other cities)?
That’s a problem, and it creates 2nd and 3rd order problems. Yes, that includes giving the Right really good reason to prepare/expect this sort of thing.Report
How police officers has the Right murdered recently?Report
No clue what you’re talking about there, but my expectation is you’ll nut-pick and pretend the Right somehow supports murdering police officers.
Just like we’re supposed to pretend that the Left has nothing to do with these riots.Report
They only support murdering police officers who stand in their way.Report
I’m still clueless. If you can put up a link you should.Report
Googling it would take less time than writing that comment.Report
Between 1971 and 2020, 100 cops were killed by extremists. 39 Left wing and 61 Right wing. I’m ignoring the 4 others killed by Islamic/misc others.
So basically we average two dead cops a year from extremists, one each from the Left and Right (slight skew to the Right by 2/5 to 3/5).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/984914/number-police-officers-killed-domestic-extremists-perpetrator-affiliation/
And having done your own research for you; I still have no clue what you’re trying to say or what you think this proves.
In a country with a million cops, effectively this rounds to zero for both sides.
None of that changes that the Left is currently on a rioting binge of hundreds per year, which translates into hundreds or thousands of buildings per year.
If you’re looking for why the Right thinks a civil war is just around the corner, it’s because the Left is so darn violent.Report
We’ve discussed this several times.
First, the violence of the protests last summer was done by at least as much by the Right as the Left, with the bulk done by hooligans without any political affiliation.
Second, the primary violence in America over the past few decades is from the Right and there isn’t even any debate on that point.
More importantly, the rise in violence both threatened and performed by the Right has sharply risen in the past 5 years.
There is virtually no political violence being performed by the Left today.
There is no leftward equal to the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys or any of the other various militia groups who are acting as the paramilitary wing of the Republican Party.
Finally, what brings us to Massie, is that all the talk on the Right about resisting tyranny and watering the tree and so on literally is advocating the killing of government agents.
The first point of contact between citizens and the government is the local police force.
Under any imagined tyranny, it will be the local poilce or sheriff who show up at Mr. Massie’s door to serve a summons or enforce a warrant.
Those guns in Massie’s Christmas card will be aimed at the police officers.
Now, groups like the Boogaloo Boys understand this which is why they are so open about their plans to murder cops.
People like Massie assume one of either of a few things:
One, that he will join in and murder police officers or;
Two, that he will be the one standing with the police, enforcing a warrant on behalf of the tyrant.Report
Chip, the left really did itself a disservice by pretending that the right-wing and unaffiliated violence was somehow anti-police.
At the time, the narrative was that these were legit protests that got out of hand.
Man, the incuriosity of our media really bit us in the butt.Report
We have great info on the Rittenhouse events. One of the people attacking him was a local violent lunatic not interested in politics. The other three were true believers of the Left and had criminal records for violence and/or poor judgement.
The Van Diagram of the Rioters and the Protesters intersects.
If we’re going to claim the riots are about frustration over police culture and impunity, then that’s the Left taking ownership of them.
Ditto when the Left points to rioters and call them “innocent protesters” when they get shot. Ditto when the Left insists that only a white supremist could oppose the burning of buildings.
And having announced, repeatedly, that the riots were because [a rapist got shot resisting arrest in another city] then we really shouldn’t be surprised if average people from the Right look at this and decide the Left is violent and insane.Report
You might not consider the “hooligans” part of the Left but they themselves seem to and big parts of the Left seem to claim them. You’re also claiming if there are 300 Left wing rioters and one Right wing guy set it off by breaking some windows, what they did is on him.
True, if we define the riots as “non-political” and focus on Terrorism. By that definition the Left has done nothing recently and the Right is slightly higher than ISIS.
However, for every dead body “political violence” creates the Left has between 5 and 100 riots (depending on definition and source). Big picture terrorism rounds to zero but the riots don’t.
After McVeigh, the militia movement cleaned up its act and understood they had to self police their lunatic members and/or hand them over to the police. We might see something like that again.
Alternatively, as long as the we’re talking about single digits worth of corpses (with local law enforcement arresting the perps) maybe the movement as a whole never learns.Report
We can also say that the riots, even at their most exaggerated number amount to a “rounding error” when measured against the total economy.
Even 9-11, in terms of deaths and property damage, rounds to zero.
But that doesn’t matter.
Political violence and terrorism is treated more seriously than hooliganism because everyone understands that it is meant to intimidate and shut down the democratic process.
1/6 was political terrorism on a level not seen since the Civil War and the various rightwing militias count among their friends and supporters members of Congress, law enforcement and the military.
The police understood the message of 1/6 very well- “Stand in our way and we will kill you.”
There is no counterpart on the left for this.Report
We got here by you saying the Right preparing for a civil war was totally unreasonable. Include the Left’s threat of violence against every city in the US and it looks very reasonable.
We do. The really crazy part about 1/06 was the rioters thought they were there to restore the democratic process.
That’s why all of the dead were protesters. It’s also arguably why law enforcement was so unprepared.Report
No the insurrectionists intended to destroy the democratic process. But thanks for trying to launder treason into “mistakes were made”.
But you unwittingly touch on a truth that white militias are a response to black people’s demands for justice.Report
I’m pretty sure most aren’t being tried for “treason”. Now maybe that would be an appropriate charge for Trump, but we seem to have stopped with impeachment.
“Justice” means burning thousands of buildings over a rapist being shot while resisting arrest?
Exactly as with 1/06, there is a serious disconnect between the narrative and the reality.Report
Hundreds? You’d think I’d have heard that news.Report
The media seems determined to look away from it.
How many buildings burned in Kenosha?
The only reason I know “between 40 and 140” is because of Rittenhouse and following the trial. 40 burned to the ground and another 100 were damaged, IDK what “damaged” means.
Similarly, I know 5 buildings burned down in my local community over Floyd, but that’s because of local news. Nationally it’s dog-bites-man, not news at all.
Far as I can tell, 93% of BLM protests are peaceful, which means we’ve “only” had more than 500 riots. You start examining them and we’ll have “700 buildings damaged in Minneapolis” riot. “330 buildings damaged in Saint Paul riot”.
16 major cities have had their police chiefs fired. Total property damage is between 1 and 2 Billion dollars. wiki: 2020–2021_United_States_racial_unrest
No one seems willing to total the number of burned buildings from all of these but I don’t see how the grand total can’t be in the hundreds and thousands seems reasonable.Report
There’s no damn way Santa’s getting down that chimney this year!Report
Not after they mined it.Report
Basic definition of involuntary manslaughter is, “If you hadn’t broken the law, the deceased would not have died.” Perhaps the most common situation is, “If you hadn’t run the red light the pedestrian in the crosswalk wouldn’t have died.” In this case, “If you hadn’t provided the minor with some or all of a pistol, magazines, and ammunition, four people would not have died.” Typically on the order of three years per charge if the crime is a misdemeanor.
Full disclosure: My uncle sold my services as a squirrel assassin as a 12-year-old to farmers in NW Iowa who had wood roofs on their (very old) corn silos. Short barrel single shot carbine, .22 long rifle military ammo that my uncle the Green Beret colonel gifted Dad most Christmases. Dad counted out the rounds, and was pissed off if the expended rounds did not equal the squirrels I brought home plus the ones left with the farm wife.Report
That’s the thing. When I was young, “gun culture” was kids with .22s, shooting tin cans (or squirrels I guess). It was not buying a teen a 9mm tactical handgun. That’s way too much gun for a kid.
I can easily see a family who hunts buying their teen a 30-30, or something comparable. It’s enough to take down a deer, but still, a modest weapon for a teen.
People have gone crazy. Contemporary gun culture seems all-in on guns as tools to kill people, even for their kids.Report
For the record there are plenty of us whose firearm ownership has a political dimension to it that find this sort of thing stupid and insane. Again, assuming the facts as reported so far are true, complete, etc., etc., disclaimer, yada yada.Report
Hrmm, I always understood manslaughter to require the defendant to be the proximate cause of the death. Once another person with the ability to have intent to harm entered the equation, manslaughter was no longer a concern.
But, IANAL, so…Report
This is very likely what will be the main issue in the case i.e. did they cause the deaths.Report
So it’s not a stretch to charge it, but proving it might be?Report
Correct.Report
Isn’t that what Negligence and Gross Negligence were invented for?Report
That’s part of it but not the whole thing. Not familiar with the specifics of MI but generally the state has to prove not merely gross negligence but that the defendant’s gross negligence caused the death.Report
You know your kid is mentally ill and is thinking about shooting up the school, so you buy him a gun.
Assuming good intentions:
Presumably you’re doing this to get rid of the demons in his head, i.e. prove to him that he’s not really serious.Report
Within the margin of error (from what the news is saying), the parents knew the kid had serious mental issues, including violent images of him shooting up the school, and the responded to that by insisting there was no problem and purchasing him a gun.
The gun seems to have been his.
The school informed the parents more than once there was a problem.
“Within the margin of error” because it’s early, the news could be wrong (and normally is).Report