--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On Tuesday, something happened in Michigan that's never happened before. James and Jennifer Crumbly are the first parents in the United States to be held responsible for a mass shooting by their child.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: James and Jennifer Crumbly were convicted of involuntary manslaughter for failing to secure the gun that Ethan used to kill four of his classmates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The parents of a school shooter were sentenced for a crime their kid committed. On Today Explained, we're going to hear from two Michiganders. One is going to remind us what happened in Oxford, Michigan back in November 2021 and tell us what happened in the subsequent trials. The other is going to tell us what prosecuting the parents in this case means for future ones.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pause] Let's start with the basics. Quinn Kleinfelter is a senior news editor at WDET, public radio in Detroit. He was one of the first reporters to show up to Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan after the shooting. Quinn, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let's go back to November 2021. What happened that day?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Ethan Crumbly, who was 15 years old at the time, came to the school. He had had some problems beforehand in terms of looking up ammunition for guns in class. And then on that morning, he drew pictures of a gun shooting a figure that was bleeding and had phrases like, "blood everywhere," "help me," the thoughts won't stop, that kind of thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was very concerning to one of the teachers that saw it. So they took a picture of it on their phone, sent it to the counselor.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: The counselor took Ethan down to his office. In the meantime, Ethan had scribbled out some of those words and replaced them with things like, "my life rocks."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the counselor had the original already from the teacher on the phone and looked at it and said, "well, this is concerning." This drawing also gave me a lot of concerns of suicide.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: When I looked at it and I saw one body, when I looked at it and saw words that were internalized of the thoughts won't stop, help me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The parents came in and talked with them for what, by all accounts, was a fairly short and somewhat terse meeting, where the counselor said, "look, you've got to get him counseling. You know, this is some problematic incidents."
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: And they said that they were both working, and they really didn't want to try to take him out of class at that point yet, but they promised they would get him counseling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was clear they weren't going to take him that day. So my first thought was, I don't want him alone. I want to make sure somebody who's experiencing... Why didn't you want him alone?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Because I don't want a student who may be suicidal alone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they put him back in class with his backpack, and the parents left off to their jobs.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: A couple hours, I think roughly afterwards, Ethan took the backpack into the bathroom where he got out a high-powered handgun, which had been bought for him by his parents as a Christmas present just about four days before that, and came out and began methodically shooting at students and teachers in the hallway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is what we do know. Based on what the undersheriff reported, we have three students who are dead, six people injured, including a schoolteacher. They've been taken to various hospitals.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: This all went down in a matter of about five minutes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What happened to Ethan Crumbly after he committed this heinous crime?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: About a year later, he pleaded guilty to all the counts. He had many, many counts, not just of murder, but of terrorism, because the prosecutor said that he had so traumatized the entire community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He pleaded guilty to all of those charges, and so the judge sentenced Ethan to life without the possibility of parole, which his court-appointed attorneys now have been in the process of getting set to appeal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell us how this case plays out against the parents. How does the prosecution make its case?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Well, there was two things they basically said. Whether or not they were too lax in allowing access to the gun that Ethan Crumbly got. James Crumbly bought that gun that his son used to kill as a gift for his son four days before the attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: James Crumbly failed to secure that gun in a way to prevent his son from accessing.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: They said that you had to look at what a reasonable person would do in such a situation. You deny in April of 2021 the evidence shows that your son told his only friend that he had asked you for help.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You also don't deny that he told his only friend that you laughed at him.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: I do not deny that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The reasonable person thing, it was in regards to what Ethan Crumbly had said or did and that they ignored it, is what the prosecution charged.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: He had written in his own journal himself, Ethan Crumbly had, he had texts that he sent to a friend, where he said he was hearing hallucinations, he was seeing things, and that he'd asked his parents to take him to a doctor, and that they had refused.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That his mother had laughed at one point. He said in the message that my dad just gave me some pills and told me to suck it up.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: And he was saying that he thought maybe he should just call 911, you know, or fake something so that they would get him to be looked at by a doctor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he thought his parents would be really pissed if he did that.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: So, you know, he wasn't going to do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, that's what Ethan was claiming. Whether he, in fact, did that was a question, you know. And that's what the defense would argue, is that the parents had no idea that he was writing or saying any of this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What the prosecution would also say was that the parents were too self-involved to notice these situations.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Um, the other part was whether or not they secured the firearm enough so that Ethan couldn't get to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jennifer was saying, you know, it's James is the one that was supposed to keep it secure.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: James is the one that hit it. You know, we hit it in the, in this drawer and we had the bullets hidden elsewhere, you know, under jeans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there was never any saying that it was locked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did lawyers defending the Crumbly parents make their case?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: They claimed that the Crumblies were never aware of what Ethan was writing, that the things that were sent in the text or written in his own journal, they were not aware that there was any kind of a spiraling downward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They said they knew he was depressed, but they didn't think he was either suicidal and certainly not homicidal.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: And they would say that because they would say that the counselors, the school officials that they talked to are supposed to be trained in such matters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they had said it's OK to leave him at school.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How long did it take the jury to decide that both of these parents were guilty?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Super short amount of time, which, you know, was pretty obvious they were going to find him guilty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A little over a day, maybe, which I have to say, as an outside observer, you know, they would go on at length about the home life of them and whether or not they had noticed things that Ethan had been doing that, you know, you should have picked up on as a parent, those kinds of things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I kind of wondered at times, just covering it, you know, well, I wonder if you really put this kind of microscope on anybody's life, would anyone escape looking, you know, completely innocent?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I want to bring this back to this community that you seem to know pretty well, Quinn. You know, did the people of Oxford, Michigan want this to play out the way it has?
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: Among the ones I've heard in Oxford, a lot of them are family members of the victims or people that were wounded or they know them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it's a fairly tight-knit community. And they think that justice should be done, and that includes holding those responsible for this kind of thing.
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: They had press conferences afterwards where one of the fathers in particular, I remember, was saying that his daughter had been killed by Ethan Crumbly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he said, "you know, no matter what happens, nothing's going to bring my daughter back."
--:-- Quinn Kleinfelter: He said, "but maybe, maybe, if this kind of thing goes forward, Maybe in the future, some parent will see this or think of this, and they'll think twice before they let their kid go off, the way the Crumblies did with Ethan."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Quinn Kleinfelter, WDET, Detroit Public Radio. You can find and support his work at WDET.org.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we're back on Today Explained, we're going to ask a law professor how much the Crumbly case is going to change how prosecutors prosecute parents for what their kids do.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More days to hitchhike from Saginaw. I've come to look for...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, joined now by Professor Echo Ayanka.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm the Thomas Cooley Professor of Law and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Philosophically speaking, what do you make of these verdicts for these two parents?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I do think there's a kind of big philosophy question here, and it's one that's embedded all the way in our law and in the ordinary way we speak to each other.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: And there's a baseline legal intuition that we teach in first-year criminal law that if somebody else acts, that's not on you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With a few exceptions for being a co-conspirator or an accomplice and a small set of exceptions for felony murder.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: The law just says, you know, if I give you a gun and you shoot somebody, I might be responsible for a lot of things, but I don't count as a murderer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is the fundamental question that hit land in this case.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Beyond that, this is sort of an unprecedented moment in our legal history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, this is pretty close to unprecedented.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: What the prosecution argued in this case was not that the Crumleys were responsible for what their child did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, I can be responsible for what my child does. If I give a three-year-old a gun and they fire it off, then I'm going to be responsible because a three-year-old just isn't a legal agent in the world, right?
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: By the way, that's also true if I give a gun to somebody who's quite literally insane, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If they have no idea what's happening in the world and they shoot it off, I'm going to be responsible.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: But when somebody is responsible for their own actions, then that severs the causal chain is what we call it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is, it's not your action anymore. It's on them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ethan Crumley was tried as an adult, right?
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: He's going to spend the rest of his life in jail, and he wasn't found non-responsible by reason of insanity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very clear he had deep mental health issues.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: And in that sense, it's clear that lots went wrong.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, even the defense had to admit, these are not parents who were doing as well as they could have.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: But one of the innate tensions in this case is that Ethan Crumbly was found responsible for his own actions and tried as an adult, and yet still his parents were found liable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's what makes this case slightly unprecedented, or close to unprecedented.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Other people out there right now who are seeing these verdicts and these sentences and saying, were these crumbly parents found criminally liable for being bad parents?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, look, I mean, that's what the defense was betting on, is that at some point you shouldn't be punished just because you're a bad parent.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: That there's something dangerous about a case that makes parents liable for what a young adult who knows what to do, like, you know, he's at least old enough to know where to go get a gun, where to find it, how to unlock it, how to shoot it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what the defense lawyer really wanted to make sort of vivid in the jury's mind is that cases like this pose a danger to every parent out there, including, frankly, everybody who falls short of being a perfect parent, but even good parents who are doing their best, right?
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Good parents who, frankly, may know that their son is tempted to do something dangerous or stupid or illegal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the defense is asking us quietly, at what point do you get to say those are his actions, not mine?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What kind of precedent is this set here? Because I think that's what a lot of people are wondering.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: This wasn't the first school shooting. It won't be the last, but it is the first time the parents are held on the hook.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does that mean for future school shootings or, you know, future drunk drivings or who knows future my kids went to a party and over overdosed on some drugs and the parents should have been responsible there there's so many possible scenarios you put your finger right on it right so i mean look there's a kind of old legal saying that bad facts make for bad law and i'm not yet saying this is bad law i mean this case was heartbreaking um but the point is these facts were horrendous and they were stunning and they were heartbreaking.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: But, you know, exactly as you say, law lives on precedent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's what lawyers are trained to do, right? You train your students to see an argument and make the next analogous argument.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: If there is a school shooting, the law enforcement will now look to the parents and they're going to ask the same questions that were asked in this case.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And every prosecutor who sees this case is going to use it to make a precedent argument, an argument from precedent in the next time that somebody is violent, somebody takes a weapon and fires it, or maybe you know your kid is struggling with drugs and alcohol and they go for a joyride and hurt somebody, right?
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: This precedent will live in those cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One other thing we have to worry about is over the last few generations when we have tried to use criminal law to solve fundamental social problems, we've rarely gotten at the thing we need to do.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: So for example I think about a set of laws that reform criminal law scholars worried about greatly but went under the radar when we started punishing over a generation in the 90s in particular mothers of children who were truant in school.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco. Right.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: So it was another kind of instinct to use criminal law to punish people for their children's behavior.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what we discovered was what we almost always discover when we use criminal law to address social problems.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Right. A mother who's struggling to keep a sick child or a child who's not going where they're supposed to be, a child who's skipping out on school, mother who's working a job or two.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing she needs in her life is support, not criminal law coming in and throwing her in jail for a couple of days.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: And what we also discovered, surprising nobody, is that these laws became heavily focused on poor and minority communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They became just a bludgeon for poor black mothers who were trying desperately to keep their kids in school.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: They didn't address the failing school. They threw those black mothers in jail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so one thing I worry about is when we systematically look at social problems and instead of addressing the underlying problem, we aim the criminal law at the most vulnerable among us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Given that we as a nation have found it, you know, most states in our entire country seems to find it impossible to aim at global solutions for gun violence.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Frustrated prosecutors are going to reach for whatever tools they have, including these kind of cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I also think the important thing is that, you know, if I'm perfectly honest, it will be hard for us to know when these kind of precedents are used.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Because I have to be perfectly honest, I've had conversations about this case from Australia through Europe through everywhere in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The problem is the next set of cases will not be as spectacular as the Crumley case.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: They will not all be international news.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There will be some quiet case where a prosecutor uses this precedent to extract a plea bargain out of a parent who truly doesn't believe they're guilty.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: But a prosecutor will say, look, you can either take the two years I'm offering you or I'm going to prosecute you for 15.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one question that we should all ask is, in those cases where no jury will have a chance to vote and no scholar will have a chance to criticize, no judge will have a chance to weigh in, and no newspapers will carry that story, are we comfortable with this being an ordinary basis of liability from prosecutors in their daily work?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the end of the day, I think, you know, irrespective of how Americans feel about guns, no American wants to see schools being shot up.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Do you think the Oxford school shooting or these verdicts for Ethan Crumbly and his parents will bring about any changes to the likelihood that we see more school shootings in Michigan or anywhere else in the country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a great question. I mean what I can say is uh the oxford school shooting did lead to a set of gun laws being passed in michigan these are the first gun laws being passed in michigan in decades if you're going to have a weapon like this and it's going to be unattended in your home and there's going to be a child around it has to have one of these now on it it's a gun lock but there's also something else gun owners need to know and that is if you're a prospective gun owner, you want to buy one, it's going to take a whole lot longer.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: Including red flag laws for those who might be going through mental health crises and even a domestic violence restriction on gun possession.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it is true that the most painful moments finally led to legislative action.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: I am not one of the people who thinks that just because I can't figure out a law that will solve the entire problem tomorrow, we should do nothing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think one of the really painful things about our gun debate is that when people propose quite sensible gun regulation, somebody raises their hand and says, but that wouldn't have stopped this one particular shooting in this one particular place.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: And that strikes me as an insane way for us to go forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that being said, if what we want to do is tackle our epidemic of gun violence, one that looks unlike any other in the industrialized world, the idea that what we should do is pick these extreme cases and try to legislate parental liability for shooters strikes me as just a really frustrated, bordering on hopeless way to go about it.
--:-- Professor Echo Ayanka: If we want to do something about gun violence, we probably have to do something about guns.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Professor Echo Ayanka, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He also sits on the board of the Innocence Project.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our program today was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hadi Mawagdi was also in the house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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