A Michigan jury has found Jennifer Crumbley, mother of 17-year-old school shooter Ethan Crumbley, guilty of involuntary manslaughter. She pleaded not guilty to four counts of involuntary manslaughter and faces 15 years in prison and there will be a trial for her husband, James Crumbley, in March. Ethan Crumbley is serving life in prison without parole after he killed four students and injured seven other people at an Oxford, MI high school in 2021. He was sentenced in December. One victim, Justin Shilling, 17, was shot point-blank and another, Hana St. Juliana, 14, was shot twice, once after already being down on the ground. Crumbley said he had “to finish the job by shooting her again,” per CNN. Prosecuting the shooter’s parents for being responsible for their son’s rampage is an unusual legal approach — and prosecutors asserted two different theories as to why Mrs. Crumbley should be charged for manslaughter. Judge Cheryl Matthews read them out (in part) in court. “The prosecutor asserts two different theories to support the charges of Involuntary Manslaughter,” she said. “Those theories are two different ways to prove the same crime. Either or both of these theories, if proven, are sufficient to establish the crime of involuntary manslaughter.”One theory is that Mrs. Crumbley failed to perform a legal duty and second, she was grossly negligent. “Jennifer Crumbley didn’t pull the trigger that day, but she is responsible for those deaths,” Oakland County assistant prosecutor Marc Keast said in the trial's opening statements, per CNN, stating she disregarded the risks by buying a gun for Ethan four days before the shooting, despite his mental health struggles and contemplating violence. Further, prosecution asserted the parents should have told school officials about the gun while in a parent-teacher meeting analyzing the teenager’s disturbing drawings just prior to the shooting. When the shooting happened in November 2021, Jennifer Crumbley wrote messages criticizing her own ability as a parent to her then lover, Brian Meloche, a firefighter captain. “I failed as a parent. I failed miserably,” she wrote at the time, as shown in court during the trial. She knew her son “was going to do something dumb” the morning of the shooting, Meloche testified, and went to the school. Mrs. Crumbley told the firefighter the gun was in her vehicle, not with the boy. This claim was refuted in court with another testimony the gun was in her son’s backpack at school.
