Prosecutors in Michigan on Thursday accused James Crumbley of failing to secure the gun that his son used to open fire in a high school hallway and kill four students — one of several ways they say he could have stopped the deadliest school shooting in state history.
“Those kids would still be alive today had James Crumbley seized any one of the tragically small and easy opportunities given to him to prevent his son from committing murder,” Marc Keast, an Oakland County prosecutor, said in opening statements.
The cable lock for the 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun that Mr. Crumbley bought four days before his son’s rampage on Nov. 30, 2021, at Oxford High School was still in its original packaging after the shooting, Mr. Keast told the jury, and appeared to have been unused.
The gun was an early Christmas present for the teenager — one that Mr. Crumbley failed to mention to school officials when told that his son, who had expressed concern about mental health issues, had been making violent drawings in class just hours before the shooting.
“That nightmare was preventable, and it was foreseeable,” Mr. Keast said.
Mariell Lehman, a lawyer for Mr. Crumbley, countered in her opening statement that her client was unaware that his son had access to the gun, and had no reason to think he was going to act violently.
“James Crumbley did not know what his son was going to do,” she said. “He did not know that his son could potentially harm other people. He did not know what his son was planning.”
The trial of Mr. Crumbley, 47, is among the most high-profile attempts to hold parents responsible for gun violence committed by their children. Testimony began Thursday in the same courtroom in Pontiac, Mich., where his wife, Jennifer Crumbley, was convicted by a jury last month.
Like his wife, Mr. Crumbley, who requested a separate trial, faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the four students killed by their son, Ethan, who was 15 when he gunned down Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14.
The teenager pleaded guilty last year to 24 charges, including first-degree murder, and was sentenced in December to life in prison without parole. But prosecutors have also sought to hold his parents criminally responsible, saying they neglected warning signs about the massacre, which also injured seven people.
Text messages and journal entries indicating that their son was struggling with mental health issues and planning to attack his classmates played an important role in the trial of Ms. Crumbley, 45. “My parents won’t listen to me about help or a therapist,” Ethan wrote at one point, though it was unclear if his parents had seen the note.
Not all of those messages will be allowed in her husband’s trial. Before opening statements on Thursday, Judge Cheryl A. Matthews, who has presided over both parents’ cases, ruled that some texts sent by Ethan to his mother, and one to a friend on the day of the shooting, would be inadmissible in Mr. Crumbley’s trial, because there was no evidence his father was aware of them.
The judge had previously ruled, however, that the journal entries and some other texts would be allowed as evidence.
Testimony began Thursday with the same witness who took the stand first at Ms. Crumbley’s trial. Molly Darnell, a teacher at Oxford High who was shot in the arm, described the moment she locked eyes with the shooter through a glass window, as well as her frantic efforts to barricade her classroom door even after she had been wounded.
The second witness, Edward Wagrowski, a former detective and computer crimes expert with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office who also testified at Ms. Crumbley’s trial, walked the jury through a timeline of the shooting, much of which had been captured on school security cameras. He also used cellphone data to trace Mr. Crumbley’s whereabouts that day.
Mr. Crumbley was working as a delivery driver for DoorDash in November 2021. He and his wife were called to school the morning of the shooting, after a teacher saw their son making violent drawings, which included an object that looked like the gun his father had purchased for him.
Neither the Crumbleys nor school officials searched the teenager’s backpack, in which he was carrying the weapon.
After the meeting at the school, Mr. Crumbley made several food deliveries, according to cellphone data, Mr. Wagrowski testified. But shortly after 1 p.m., an email from the school alerted him to an emergency. Mr. Crumbley called his son, but got no answer.
Shortly after that, he went home and called 911, telling the operator that there had been a shooting at his son’s high school and that “I have a missing gun at my house.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Crumbley will testify in his own defense, as his wife did, and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. Prosecutors said on Thursday that neither Ms. Crumbley nor her son would testify against Mr. Crumbley.
The teenager is still eligible to appeal his sentence. Ms. Crumbley’s conviction can also be appealed. She will be sentenced next month and faces up to 15 years in prison.
Source Agencies
