Why prosecutors charged Oxford school shooting suspect's parents
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald, a mother of five, says she’s never believed parents are responsible for everything their children do.
As an assistant prosecutor and family court judge, McDonald adds, she often felt “incredible compassion” for mothers stunned to discover their teenage sons implicated in crimes of stupefying violence.
But McDonald’s empathy for the mother of the 15-year-old charged in this week's massacre at Oxford High School was sorely tested when she read a social media post in which 43-year-old Jennifer Crumbley boasted of presenting her son with his own semi-automatic pistol three days before the shooting.
"Mom and son day testing out his new Xmas present," Jennifer Crumbley wrote in a social media post on Nov. 27, a day after her husband purchased the weapon at an Oxford gun shop.
Videotape obtained by prosecutors shows mother and son trying out the new pistol at a shooting range near their home Saturday. “Took my new Sig out to the range today,” the accused shooter wrote in his own Instagram post afterward. “Definitely need to get used to the new sites lol”.
McDonald said the mother-and-son posts are among several pieces of evidence that prompted her decision to charge Jennifer Crumbley and her husband, James, with involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of four students their son has been accused of shooting. The son was taken into custody at the high school Tuesday afternoon and is being held without bond on four counts of first-degree murder, multiple assault and weapons charges, and a single count of terrorism.
An early Christmas gift
In a candid phone conversation before a Friday press conference, McDonald said that evidence detectives recovered after Tuesday's shooting convinced her that the Crumbleys had purchased the Sig Sauer pistol for their son’s use, that they failed to secure the gun properly, and that they ignored multiple red flags suggesting he posed a threat to others.
“I believe they bought that gun for him,” McDonald said of the parents. “I think they’re accountable, that there’s criminal culpability.”
Among the points the Oakland prosecutor cited to support her allegations:
• McDonald said James Crumbley was among about 50 followers of an Instagram account in which his son posted photos of his new gun and made clear his parents had provided it for his use.
• Alerted the day before the shooting that a teacher had found her son perusing the internet for ammunition during school hours, Jennifer Crumbley didn't return the school's call but alerted her son in an email:"Lol I'm. not.mad, you have to learn not.to.get.caught.
• Both parents attended a meeting in which Oxford High School administrators confronted their son the morning of the shooting about ominous messages he had written on a geometry class work sheet. The Crumbleys were summoned to the school after a teacher told superiors she had watched their son write: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me” and "blood everywhere" beneath his sketch of a gun.
• Detectives said neither parent revealed during the meeting that their son might have access to a handgun. Investigators believe the pistol was already inside the backpack the boy carried to the principal’s office, but neither parent searched the backpack, and both left the school after agreeing to seek counseling for their son, leaving him to return to class.
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But McDonald said that when he heard news reports of a shooting at Oxford High a few hours later, James Crumbley hurried home to see if the new Sig Sauer was missing. When he was unable to locate the pistol, McDonald said, the father dialed 911 and confessed to a dispatcher his suspicion that his son might be the shooter.
McDonald, who first learned of the shooting when two of her employees whose children attend Oxford High fielded panicked calls from their kids, and raced out the door to rendezvous with them, says James Crumbley’s starkly different reaction reveals the concerns he already harbored about his son’s state of mind.
“Dad didn’t drive to the school or call his child like other parents did,” she said. “If your first instinct is to go home and look for your gun ...”
The prosecutor's limited options
Under Michigan law, minors are forbidden to purchase a handgun themselves, but are permitted to fire pistols or revolvers under the supervision of a weapon’s owner. So parents who purchase a gun for a teenager’s use haven’t necessarily violated the law, so long as they are present when the gun is being used.
Nor is a parent’s failure to secure his or her own gun where it is inaccessible to children a crime in and of itself. A bill proposed by state Sen. Rosemary Byer (D-Beverly Hills) would make the failure to store firearms securely a misdemeanor punishable by up to 93-days in jail or a $500 fine. But a lack of Republican support makes it likely the measure will die in committee.
Even so, McDonald says, Jennifer and James Crumbley incurred criminal liability for their son’s actions when they failed to block access to his early Christmas gift despite the distress he revealed the morning of the shooting.
“If mom and dad had acted differently, those kids would still be alive,” she said.
Rare, but not unprecedented
When I asked McDonald whether any other Michigan parents had been convicted of homicide charges stemming from a child’s unauthorized use of a parent’s weapon, she cited just two precedents: an infamous 2000 case in which a 20-year-old Genesee County man pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after his 6-year-old nephew used his gun to kill a first-grade classmate at his Mt. Morris elementary school; and a more recent Wayne County case.
Curry Bryson of Detroit was sentenced to 2-15 years in prison in 2015 after his 11-year-old son used Bryson's gun to shoot and kill the 3-year-old daughter of Bryson's girlfriend.
Bryson argued at court that his son had stolen the weapon and that he could not have anticipated or prevented the fatal shooting. But a state Court of Appeals panel unanimously upheld his conviction, affirming the jury's conclusion that Bryson's failure to secure his .45-caliber firearm where his son couldn't get it had been the proximate cause of the 3-year-old's death. So the charges against the Crumbleys, while rare, require no revolutionary expansion of established legal norms.
Like so many other controversies involving handguns, McDonald's decision is likely to precipitate a schism between those who find the Crumbleys' conduct unforgiveable, and sympathizers who argue that their son's rampage was something no parent could imagine, much less anticipate, until it became a horrific reality.
But you can be simultaneously aghast at the parents' bad judgement and sympathetic with their nightmarish predicament. James and Jennifer Crumbley did not shoot anyone, and there is no reason to believe they were any less horrified at what unfolded inside Oxford High School than anyone else.
In any case, McDonald is not on a mission to demonize the parents. Her objective is to uphold her community's wholly reasonable expectation that people who purchase guns legally and plan to use them only for lawful purposes take reasonable care to make sure they are secured.
A teachable moment
This has been a dreadful week for Michigan, among the most horrific I can recall in my 33 years as a journalist here.
But it is also a teachable moment: an opportunity for people who hold all kinds of opinions about guns and government regulation to coalesce around the recognition that to purchase or possess a firearm is to assume a weighty responsibility for its potential misuse.
I wouldn't wish James and Jennifer Crumbley's heartbreak, or the legal ordeal that awaits them, on any parent. But it is an object lesson in the cost of denial, and I hope every gun owner in Michigan is paying close attention.
Brian Dickerson is the Editorial Page Editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.