On November 30, 2021, a 15-year-old boy stepped out of a bathroom and into the halls of Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, gun in hand. He opened fire down the busy hallway, where hundreds of students were moving from one class to the next, killing four of his classmates — Madisyn Baldwin, 17, Hana St. Juliana, 14, Tate Myre, 16, and Justin Shilling, 17. The shooter, Ethan Crumbley, pleaded guilty to 24 charges, including first-degree murder, attempted murder, and terrorism, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in December.
Three days after, Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald, a former teacher and mother of five, took an unprecedented step: She filed criminal charges against Ethan’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, who purchased the gun for their son mere days before the deadly attack. “I am angry. I’m angry as a mother. I’m angry as the prosecutor. I’m angry as a person that lives in this county,” McDonald said in a press conference announcing the charges. “There were a lot of things that could have been so simple to prevent.” In her brief, McDonald wrote that this was the first time criminal charges had been brought against the parents of a mass shooter.
The trial of Jennifer Crumbley began on January 25, and on February 6, after two days of deliberations, the jury reached a unanimous verdict, convicting her of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Her sentencing will take place in April, and she faces up to 15 years in prison per count. Her husband James Crumbley’s trial is set to begin in March. Here’s what you need to know about the landmark case.
What was the core of the case against Jennifer?
Jennifer and her husband were accused of gross negligence for buying a gun for their son — who was exhibiting symptoms of a severe mental-health crisis — and also for failing to inform school officials about the weapon.
Ethan began experiencing hallucinations in March 2021, writing in texts to his mother that he was hearing voices and seeing a demon in their home. He later began torturing baby birds and cutting their heads off, and he joked about shooting up the school in a text to a friend. In November, he spent hours and hours on a website about school shootings.
Ethan seemed to know he was in danger. In April, he texted his friend about how poor his mental state had become, saying he was considering calling 911 on himself, but feared his parents would be “really pissed.” He told the friend he asked them to take him to a doctor but said his mom laughed and his dad told him to “suck it up.” “I want help but my parents don’t listen to me so I can’t get any help,” Ethan wrote in his journal sometime before the attack. “I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the fucking school.”
One day before the shooting, a teacher saw Ethan looking up bullets on his phone and alerted school officials, who contacted Jennifer. Jennifer allegedly did not call the school back but spoke lightheartedly about it in texts to her son. “Lol, I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote.
The morning of the shooting, a teacher contacted guidance counselor Shawn Hopkins after seeing Ethan watching shooting videos on his phone. Another teacher said he had drawn disturbing images — including a gun and a person riddled with bullet holes — on his geometry worksheet. “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” he wrote on the page. “Blood everywhere.” “The world is dead.”
Jennifer and James were called into school, where Hopkins urged them to seek immediate mental-health care for their son — preferably that day — warning that he was showing signs of suicidal ideation. But Jennifer allegedly refused, saying that “today is not possible” since they had to go back to work.
The meeting lasted only 11 minutes and ended “very abruptly,” assistant prosecutor Marc Keast said in his opening statement, according to the Detroit News. The parents left the school, leaving Ethan there, and said nothing to school officials about their son’s gun. Afterward, Jennifer texted Ethan to ask if he was okay and said she was there if he wanted to talk. “[I know] thank you. I’m sorry for that. I love you,” he replied. Ten minutes later, he opened fire.
“The two people in the world with all of the information, all of the background, to put this drawing into context were James and Jennifer Crumbley,” Keast said. “In that meeting, they didn’t share any of it.”
What was Jennifer’s defense?
In her opening statement on January 25, Jennifer’s defense attorney, Shannon Smith, argued that the charges against her client were meant “to make the community feel better, in an effort to make people feel like someone is being held responsible.” Smith, who was also on Larry Nassar’s defense team, said she’d listened to Taylor Swift on her commute that day and invoked some of the singer’s lyrics.
“There was a line in one of her songs that summarized what this case is about: ‘Band-aids don’t stop bullet holes,’” Smith said in a slight misquote of Swift’s “Bad Blood.” “And that’s what this case is about — it’s about the prosecution attempting to put a Band-Aid on problems that can’t be fixed with a Band-Aid … In this case, a Band-Aid will never bring back the lives that were lost.”
One part of Smith’s strategy was to attempt to shift blame onto James. Though the family owned guns and had gone to shooting ranges together, Jennifer was not particularly knowledgeable about firearms, according to Smith. “Jennifer Crumbley didn’t know anything about guns. She went to the shooting range one time with James and the shooter,” Smith told the court. Smith emphasized that Jennifer was not present when James bought the gun for Ethan. Even so, she has not denied knowing about it; in an Instagram post shortly before the shooting, she referred to it as Ethan’s “new Xmas present.”
The crux of Smith’s defense centered on the idea that Jennifer could not have done anything to predict or prevent the shooting, which Smith called “absolutely not foreseeable.” Jennifer took the stand for three hours on Thursday, during which time she denied withholding mental-health care from her son. Though she was aware Ethan was struggling — particularly since his only friend left school to go to a treatment facility — she claimed she didn’t realize things had gotten way worse than typical anxiety over grades and homework and his plans after high school. “He expressed those concerns (about his future) to me but not to the level that I thought he needed to see a psychiatrist,” she said in testimony. She thought his texts about seeing demons were just him “messing around,” she said, noting that for years he had joked about a ghost living in their house.
Jennifer reiterated her lawyer’s claim that she wasn’t very knowledgeable about firearms, saying that “guns aren’t really my thing.” It was James who dealt with locking up the family’s guns, and she had never unlocked them herself, she said. She defended herself as a mother, saying she never imagined her son would commit such an act of violence.
But texts Jennifer sent in the immediate aftermath of the shooting made that a hard case to argue — after an email to parents went out alerting them to an active-shooter situation, James discovered the gun was not in their home and told Jennifer. The two quickly realized it was likely their son. “The gun is gone and so are the bullets … Omg Andy he’s going to kill himself he must be the shooter,” Jennifer wrote in a text to her boss, also asking him “not to judge her.” She also texted Ethan, “I love you too,” “You ok?” and “Ethan don’t do it.” Meanwhile, James called police to say the gun was missing. “I don’t know if it was him, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m really freaking out,” he told police.
There were a few other signs that Jennifer had concerns about her son before the shooting. One day before, she was searching online for “research clinical depression treatment options.” And on the morning before the shooting, in some text messages before the meeting at school about Ethan’s behavior, Jennifer said she “was worried he was going to do something dumb,” according to testimony from Brian Meloche, whom she was having an affair with.
Who is Brian Meloche, and why was he important?
Meloche, a firefighter and longtime friend of Jennifer’s, was having an extramarital affair with her at the time of the shooting. In the days that followed, Jennifer and Meloche texted frequently. “I failed as a parent. I failed miserably,” she wrote in one message, according to the Detroit Free Press.
After charges were announced against Jennifer and James, the couple withdrew thousands of dollars from their son’s bank account, bought burner phones, and went into hiding in an acquaintance’s warehouse art studio. Police found them and took them into custody less than a day later. They denied fleeing, claiming they left town “for their own safety,” but texts between Jennifer and Meloche don’t paint such a clear picture. In one message, she told him they were “on the run again” and later told him to “clear your cache.” Meloche told her she needed to “disappear”; according to his testimony, he wanted her to stay safe amid widespread threats against her.
In messages to Meloche days after the shooting, Jennifer blamed school officials for allowing Ethan to go back to class after the meeting. “They should have never blown it off and made it seem of no concern and gave him the option to go back to class. It could of been prevented,” she wrote to him.
“His f—g backpack was with him,” she wrote in another message. “Why didn’t they search it?”
Jennifer spoke to Meloche about the devastation she felt over her son’s violent act, telling him she would “never be okay.” “I lost my son,” she wrote to him. “And he’s a murderer and I’ll forever have to live with the guilt of that. I’m not even sure life is worth living anymore. I have nothing left to live for he was it.”
“We will never be the same,” she said in another message. “It’s like mourning the death of my child.”
Who else testified?
Several other witnesses have taken the stand in the case, including Hopkins, the guidance counselor, and Kira Pennock, the owner of the farm where the family kept their horses. Earlier on the day of the shooting, after her meeting at the school, Jennifer had sent Pennock a photo of Ethan’s disturbing drawings that she and James were called in about. “My first thought is that I knew who the shooter was, by the math test that was sent to me,” Pennock said in her testimony. “It’s not normal for someone to try these things on a test in school or even really think about these things.”
One of the first police personnel to respond to the shooting, Detective Lieutenant Sam Marzban of the Oakland County sheriff’s office, testified about the carnage he found inside the school. He recalled having to move blood-soaked hair out of the face of one of the victims, Madisyn Baldwin, to identify her.
Lieutenant Timothy Willis of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, who also took the stand, was shown photos of the four deceased victims and wept as he described where each of them was shot. Surveillance footage of the shooting was played, during which officers were seen running past victims. Assistant prosecutor Keast asked him why they were running by.
“Because the situation was active and the killing hadn’t stopped, you can’t stop to render aid,” Willis replied, fighting sobs. “I know those officers. And that is the hardest thing they’ve ever had to do in their life.”
What was at the center of the jury’s decision?
The jury deliberated for 11 hours. In an interview with CBS News Detroit, the jury foreperson revealed that a piece of information they focused on was the fact that Jennifer Crumbley was the last adult in possession of the gun before Ethan brought it to school on the day of the shooting.
