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A Michigan jury found Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford High School shooter, guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
The jury reached its unanimous verdict after 10 hours of deliberation. Ms Crumbley sat in court, unemotionally, as the verdict was read.
She had pleaded not guilty. The 45-year-old’s husband, James Crumbley, is being tried separately in March.
In December, Ethan Crumbley was convicted of killing four of his classmates and injuring seven others on 30 November 2021.
The prosecution has accused her of neglecting her son’s “downward spiral” and making a gun accessible in their home.
The defence rested its case on Friday after the defendant took the stand. Ms Crumbley’s attorney delivered strange closing arguments, in which she compared herself to Ms Crumbley as “messy” working moms.
The prosecution argued that Ms Crumbley could have taken “tragically small” steps that could have prevented her son from shooting up his school. The prosecutors mentioned that the mother bought her son a gun days before the shooting, recognized that he was “acting depressed” and spent a lot of time alone.
The trial has been chock-full of revelations: an extramarital affair, a shocking admission, and a Taylor Swift reference.
She will be sentenced on 9 April.
The school meeting hours before the massacre
Central to the case was the meeting between the Crumbley parents and school officials that took place mere hours before the shooting.
On the morning of 30 November 2021, a teacher had noticed a disturbing drawing by Ethan, prompting school administrators to call in his parents for a meeting and consult them about whether he should stay in school or be taken home.
The parents decided he should stay in school, where he killed four of his classmates hours later.
The defence underscored that school staff gave Crumbley a choice and didn’t force her to take her son home.
However, a videotaped interview with police in the aftermath of the attack was played in court, showing Crumbley admitting: “I really wish we took him home.”
In an attempt to cut into the defence’s description of Crumbley being a “hypervigilant” mom, the prosecution tried to draw attention to how much time and money the mother dedicated to her horses and to other distractions — including her affair with her former lover.
Brian Meloche, Crumbley’s long-time friend, testified that he and Crumbley had a six-month extramarital affair starting in the spring of 2021. Around this same time, Ethan’s mental health started to decline, the prosecution claimed. His grandmother passed away in April 2021 and his mother told a friend that he was “acting depressed”.
Beyond this affair, Crumbley’s digital footprint also showed that she was using the adultery website AdultFriendFinder.
Despite telling school staff that Ethan should remain in school since both she and her husband had to return to work that day, Mr Meloche testified that Crumbley had text him saying she was free to meet up with him.
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In photos: the Jennifer Crumbley trial
Jennifer Crumbley arrives in court on Monday
Judge Cheryl Matthews gives the jury instructions on 5 February
White House’s remarks on verdict
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, said in a statement on Tuesday:
“We saw the breaking news just not too long ago....without speaking specifically, on today’s verdict, we want to be really careful here. I can say that the President remains committed to stop tragedies like these happening in the first place. … Students who carry carry out K-12 school shootings are using firearms they obtain from home from a friend or family member. We know that to be true.
T”he importance of safe firearm storage cannot be overstated. And the administration will continue to use every tool at our disposal to implement these and other common sense gun safety measures to protect our children, our schools and our communities. Look, when it comes to when it comes to gun violence, the president has said this is an epidemic. It is the number one killer of our kids.
“We’ve done more than two dozen executive actions … He signed … bipartisan legislation to deal with gun violence, legislation that hasn’t passed in 30 years. So he takes this very seriously. We do not want to continue to see and our kids being the number one killer, it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.”
ICYMI: Moment Jennifer Crumbley found guilty of manslaughter
Jennifer Crumbley’s bizarre defence
In closing arguments, Jennifer Crumbley’s attorney Shannon Smith acknowledged that she has a big personality, and asked the jurors not to project any negative feelings they may have toward her onto her client.
The lawyer detailed a series of snapshots into her own personal life as a “messy” working mother-of-four in an effort to relate to her client and suggest that she easily could have ended up in “Mrs Crumbley’s shoes”.
“I say ‘sorry’ a lot,” Ms Smith said, and referred to a TikTok video that apparently shows the attorney apologising throughout the trial.
The attorney told the court that she messes up a lot because “I’m human — and so is Mrs Crumbley”.
The defendant is “not a perfect person or a perfect parent,” she said, and neither is she.
Ms Smith said that as a working mother, she sometimes doesn’t have time to take a “true shower” but has to “just grab a handful of wipes and scrub off the best I can”.
“I realised I am Jennifer Crumbley,” Ms Smith said, outlining similarities between the two women.
“Calling your child an oopsie baby was designed to try to make her look bad with no context,” Ms Smith argued, adding that she calls her son an “oopsie baby” all the time.
Ms Smith said that she has called her child a “psycho” or a “nutcase,” just as Ms Crumbley called her son “weird” in texts to her friend.
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The prosecution’s successful argument, revisited
In opening statements, the prosecution argued that Jennifer Crumbley was well aware of her son’s “deteriorating mental health” and despite this, she and her husband bought him a gun and took him to a gun range.
“They weren’t in a car crash. They weren’t sick. They were murdered in an act of terror committed by Jennifer Crumbley’s 15-year-old son,” Oakland County assistant prosecutor Marc Keast said in opening statements.
“Jennifer Crumbley didn’t pull the trigger that day. But she’s responsible for their deaths,” he added.
Ethan Crumbley was in a “downward spiral” when the gun was purchased, and his mother knew that the prosecutor said. Still, “this gun was gifted”, he added.
“They didn’t do any number of tragically small and easy things that would have prevented all this from happening,” the attorney said of the parents, calling the tragedy “senseless”.
He also accused Ms Crumbley of trying to “downplay and downright lie” about her knowledge of what was going on with her son. Her “first instinct was to lie, second was to run”, he said.
This trial is about her “willful disregard of the danger that she knew of”, he said.
The defence, on the other hand, insisted that her son’s mental condition was “not on her radar”, emphasised her husband’s love of guns, placed blame on the school, and described her as a “hypervigilant” mother.
Jennifer Crumbley found guilty in historic trial
A Michigan jury has found Jennifer Crumbley guilty of manslaughter in the Oxford High School shooting, after she bought her teenage son a firearm and ignored multiple warning signs about his disturbing behaviour in the lead-up to the deadly attack.
Jurors reached the verdict on Tuesday morning after deliberating for more than 10 hours.
Crumbley, 45, had pleaded not guilty to four counts of involuntary manslaughter in the case, one for each of the four classmates – Madiyson Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14 – murdered by her son.
Her son, Ethan Crumbley, was sentenced in December to life in prison without the possibility of parole after he shot and killed four of his classmates in the 30 November 2021 mass shooting.
The verdict handed down to the shooter’s mother is historic, as no parent has ever been charged, tried or convicted for their alleged role in a mass school shooting perpetrated by their child.
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What do involuntary manslaughter charges mean in Michigan?
In order to be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in Michigan, the prosecution had to prove at least one of two theories to jurors beyond a reasonable doubt.
The first theory relies on gross negligence. This theory, as the Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald explained to the court, means that the defendant “caused death” by acting in a grossly negligent manner.
The second theory hinges on a failure to perform a legal duty. This theory means that the defendant had a legal duty to the victim, yet “willfully neglected or refused to perform” that duty – and that this “failure to perform it was grossly negligent to human life”. Ultimately, it means that a victim’s death was directly caused by the defendant’s failure to perform this legal duty.
Judge Cheryl Matthews defined the legal duty in this case when giving the jury their instructions.
“In Michigan, a parent has a legal duty to exercise reasonable care to control their minor child so as to prevent the minor child from intentionally harming others or prevent the minor child from conducting themselves in a way that creates an unreasonable risk of bodily harm to others,” she said.
If either or both of these two theories are proven, that is “sufficient to establish the crime of involuntary manslaughter,” the judge said.
“It’s not necessary that you all agree on which theory has been proven. As long as you all agree that the prosecutor has to prove at least one of those theories beyond a reasonable doubt.”
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Nick Suplina, Senior Vice President for Law and Policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, issued a statement
“Today’s verdict underscores the important responsibility of parents and gun owners in preventing children from having unsupervised access to deadly weapons.
“Plain and simple, the deadly shooting at Oxford High School in 2021 should have — and could have — been prevented had the Crumbley’s not acquired a gun for their 15-year-old son. This decision is an important step forward in ensuring accountability and, hopefully, preventing future tragedies.”
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2024-02-07 08:53:16Z
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