He ‘didn’t have a prayer as a child’: Oxford High School shooter's former neighbor opens up
For more than a year, Suzanne Jinerson has agonized about the sad boy who lived next door to her on Walters Lake in Clarkston, Michigan.
His name was Ethan Crumbley.
He was about 6 when she met him, an aloof boy who rarely left the house or played with the neighborhood kids, Jinerson recalled. She never saw him laugh or smile, except for the one time she snapped a photo of him fishing with her son and another boy, she said. Sometimes, he would wander over to her house because his parents had left him home alone, she said, and he was afraid to be by himself.
"He was never, ever OK — and I honestly believe he could have been," Jinerson said of the boy whose fate weighs heavily on her mind and heart.
The boy grew up to be a school shooter.
"This haunts me, big time," Jinerson said. "I will always wonder, 'What else could we have done?'"
It's a gut-churning experience more and more Americans live with as mass shootings proliferate. Nashville on March 27. Memphis on Feb. 19, less than a week after three students were killed at Michigan State University. The Gun Violence Archive has counted 130 U.S. mass shootings in 2023 after more than 600 last year. After each, friends, relatives, classmates and coworkers of the shooters face the pain of wondering what else, what if, why?
Mass killing database: Revealing trends, details and anguish of every US event since 2006
Jinerson reached out to the Paste BN Network after the Michigan Court of Appeals in March ordered the Crumbleys to stand trial on involuntary manslaughter charges, concluding the tragedy was "reasonably foreseeable" and therefore the charges were warranted.
'He did not have to turn out that way'
Jinerson, 60, a retired officer with the U.S. Air Force who now lives in Texas, has spent the last 16 months tormented by the story of Ethan Crumbley, who is 16 now and behind bars awaiting sentencing for the mass shooting at Oxford High School that left four students dead and seven others injured. He carried out the 2021 massacre using a gun his parents bought him as an early Christmas present — a gift that would lead to involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents for their alleged roles in the shooting.
Jinerson was working in Dallas when she learned about the tragedy — and the shooter's identity.
"I was floored. I cried. Because I knew," Jinerson said, struggling to relay the thoughts she has kept to herself since the shooting.
"It sounds terrible. And I don't want to say it's not his fault — but it's not his fricking fault," Jinerson said. "I just know with all my heart he did not have to turn out that way."
That's why she is speaking out now.
"I need people to understand that this was a 6-year-old boy at one time," Jinerson said. "I know he's quote-unquote a monster for doing what he did, and I'm not trying to excuse it."
After staying quiet for more than a year, Jinerson is compelled to share her memories of the boy she wished she could have saved — the boy who lived next door to her for a year, came over for barbecues, went fishing with her husband and son, and skied with her family.
But Ethan was a troubled and lonely boy who needed help, she said. And people need to pay attention to the Ethans of the world, she stressed.
"I think of all the other kids who are out there, who people aren't paying attention to," Jinerson said. "I want them to pay attention. Pay attention to what's going on in your neighborhood."
More: Parents of gunman to stand trial in Oxford school shooting, Michigan appeals court orders
'They seemed nice enough'
Jinerson's comments follow a major development in the novel criminal case against James and Jennifer Crumbley, who are the first parents in America charged in a mass school shooting.
Jinerson, a military mom who raised three sons and describes herself as "very Second Amendment," said she's "thrilled" that the parents were charged. Her husband added of Ethan: "He shouldn't have had a gun, plain and simple."
In an exclusive interview with the Paste BN Network, the Jinersons talked about the year they lived next door to the Crumbleys on Lakeview Boulevard, where they moved in March 2013. The Crumbleys were already there. James Crumbley worked from home in information technology and his wife was studying for her real estate license.
Among Jinerson's first memories of the Crumbleys was the dad helping her when she locked herself out of the house. She asked James Crumbley for help, she said, and he used a credit card to open her door and let her in.
"They seemed nice enough," Jinerson recalled. "They invited us over for wine and dinner on their patio. We met Ethan. Ethan was very shy."
How young Ethan Crumbley behaved in the neighborhood
Jinerson's husband had few interactions with Ethan, but thought something was off.
"As soon as I met him I told my wife, 'There is something wrong,'" Jeff Jinerson recalled. "He never looked anyone in the eye."
According to the Jinersons, the Crumbleys did not let their son socialize with other children in the neighborhood, where Ethan was the youngest of five boys on the block, ages 6 to 10. Jinerson said Ethan went outside only if his parents were with him and recalled pleading with Jennifer Crumbley to let her son go fishing with her son and husband "and be a kid for a day."
Two months after the Jinersons moved in, Ethan went fishing with the new neighbors and another boy. Eight months later, Ethan would go skiing with the Jinersons at Pine Knob, and then out to dinner with them some weeks later at Buffalo Wild Wings — though the night ended on a sour note.
Jinerson said the Crumbleys got so drunk that they ended the outing early.
According to the Jinersons, the Crumbleys often left Ethan home alone at night when they went out socializing, and punished him if he wandered over to neighbors' houses when they were away.
"They would go out and drink and leave him home alone," Jinerson said, echoing allegations from Oakland County prosecutors. "He was scared. He would come over to my house and say, 'I can't be here because I'm going to get into trouble.'"
The Crumbleys' attorneys, who along with prosecutors are barred by the court from speaking publicly about the case, have said in filings that prosecutors have unfairly characterized the parents.
"At the end of the day, (Ethan) was cared for and loved by his parents," defense attorneys argued in a September filing. "They sent him to summer school, summer camps and took family vacations. They attended parent-teacher conferences and emailed with teachers about their son."
Jinerson said she ended up having a falling out with Jennifer Crumbley.
Jinerson said she was concerned that Ethan was spending so much time indoors with no friends that she offered to babysit him for free so he could play with her then 12-year-old son.
But Jennifer Crumbley wouldn't hear of it, she said.
"We got in a huge fight over Ethan’s welfare — a seriously bad argument," Jinerson recalled. "We never spoke again after that. ... We all knew Ethan wasn’t OK. I never felt more powerless."
The Crumbleys moved from the neighborhood in March 2014. Another seven-plus years would pass before the Jinersons heard the name Ethan Crumbley again.
'I will never forget that phone call'
When the Oxford school shooting first made the news, Jinerson initially didn't recognize the shooter's face on the TV news. She was too concerned about the loss of life, the traumatized students and the fact that a tragedy of this magnitude had struck Oxford — a community she enjoyed, having dined there and where she had ridden her motorcycle.
Then the phone rang.
It was her stepdaughter from Michigan.
"She said, 'Suzanne, do you realize who that is? Oh, my God. It's Ethan, Ethan Crumbley,'" Jinerson recalled of the conversation.
"I'll never forget that phone call," she said, noting that the memories of young Ethan came flooding back.
"Ethan didn't have a prayer as a child," she said, adding: "As I mentioned earlier, I don't know what we could have done differently."
Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com