The Christmas present came at the beginning of the year. The morning after Thanksgiving 2021, James Crumbley went to a gun store with his 15-year-old son to buy him a nine-millimeter Sig Sauger semi-automatic rifle, which Ethan, the boy, described on social media as his “new beauty.” . . Four days later, the boy secretly brought the gun to his high school in Oxford, a suburb about 37 miles (60 kilometers) from Detroit, Michigan. He enlisted in the military, took the revolver out of his backpack and began shooting everyone he met: he killed four schoolmates between the ages of 14 and 17 and injured seven other people, including a teacher. His mother, Jennifer Crumbley, was just convicted of reckless homicide by a popular jury of six men and six women. This is a decision that sets a historical precedent regarding the responsibility of parents for their children's behavior in massacres such as this one.
There are two things in particular that contributed to the guilty verdict, which was passed unanimously on the second day of deliberations after around ten hours of debate: the fact that she took Ethan with her to test the weapon at a training camp. She shot this weekend , and a message he sent when the school required the marriage because a teacher who had seen the boy searching for information on his cell phone the day before the tragedy was alarmed, how he could get ammunition. They were summoned by telephone, a call that left a trace on the answering machine, and by email. They didn't respond to either message, but the mother wrote the following text to her son: “LOL [carcajadas]. I'm not mad at you, but next time don't get caught.
Jennifer and James Crumbley appear in court on February 8, 2022. Paul Sancya (AP)
The defense of 45-year-old Jennifer Crumbley tried to blame her husband for not locking up the gun during the trial in Pontiac, Michigan; to the school for failing to inform them of the youth's behavioral problems; and his son himself for pulling the trigger and murdering two women and two men. “Can all parents really be responsible for everything their children do, especially when it is unpredictable?” asked attorney Shannon Smith in her closing argument. “It was unpredictable. Nobody expected that. “No one could have expected this, not even the Crumbleys.” In another post, Smith quoted part of the lyrics to “Bad Blood” by Taylor Swift, a singer-songwriter whose influence is hard to ignore in the United States today. in which she says, “Band-Aids are no good for bullet holes.” According to her argument, the prosecution wanted to “solve problems that cannot be solved with a Band-Aid; “A Band-Aid will not help restore the lives lost. Regarding the gift of the gun, the defendant testified: “We didn't just give him a gun by saying, 'Here you go, son.' We just gave it to him so he could only use it when we went to the field [de tiro] in the family”.
Life imprisonment
The prosecution, for its part, presented the court with a picture of an unpredictable mother who was more worried about her horse hobby and an extramarital relationship than about the symptoms of her only son's deteriorating mental health.
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Ethan Crumbley was charged with terrorism, which allowed him to be tried as an adult and ultimately received the maximum sentence last December: life in prison without the possibility of review. After learning what their son had done, the couple fled. They found her a few days later not far from home: in the city of Detroit, when they were in a shopping center. That Saturday morning, charges were filed against the couple and the arraignment was heard via video conference, after which they pleaded not guilty. The father will go on trial in March for the same crimes as her.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen D. McDonald used the indictment of the couple as an opportunity to teach a lesson to the parents, who, the jury proved, could prevent their son from committing the massacre when they became alarmed Hours before. the facts that he was caught at school pulling a gun into a notebook with a text that read: “Thoughts don't stop. Help me. My life is useless, the world is dead.” The Crumbleys went to school but, according to the accusation, were negligent by not forcing the teenager to show them what he had in his backpack. Also because she refused to take him home and allowed him to return to class.
In December, McDonald didn't hide her frustration as she presented the case to jurors: “I'm angry as a mother, I'm angry as a prosecutor, I'm angry as a person who lives in this county, I'm angry,” she added. “[La tragedia] It could have been prevented so easily…”
When the first news came that there was an active shooter at her son's school at 1:22 p.m., 32 minutes after Ethan left the bathroom armed, the mother wrote him another message: “Ethan, don't do it.” James Crumbley then ran home where he found the gun was out of place, in a place where there was no lock. She later called police at 1:37 p.m. to warn that she suspected her son might be the attacker. When she showed up at the institute and reduced, the boy still had 15 cartridges left.
This massacre prompted Michigan to pass a law regulating minors' access to their parents' guns. There is little precedent for convicting Ethan's mother of involuntary manslaughter. The idea of a high school massacre has been a recurring nightmare in this society since Columbine High School in 1999, where two friends killed 13 people and ushered in a new era of mass shootings in the United States. Some of those that have caused the greatest trauma since then have occurred in educational centers, from Sandy Hook in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut; 26 deaths, 20 of which were minors, to 2019 in Parkland, Florida; 17 fatalities, or those of a few years ago Uvalde (Texas, 19 children and two teachers). The Crumbley murders were considered the deadliest school shooting of their year.
Associations advocating for gun control in the United States have supported the idea of prosecuting Ethan's parents, but dissenting voices have also been heard: In an opinion piece published by The New York Times, Megan K. Stack asked about the meaning of judging one Judging a minor as an adult in order to sentence him to the maximum punishment while making the parents responsible for their son's actions. “The persecution of children as adults is one of the obscenities of our justice system. (…) And there is a logical contradiction between the fact that parents are held responsible for negligence in their upbringing. Either he was a boy or he wasn't. Either his parents were responsible for his actions or they weren't. Can the state argue both things at the same time? “The prosecutors are convinced.”
As shown this Tuesday, a jury in Pontiac (Michigan) is also there.
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