The Excerpt: Jennifer Crumbley's trial could change how parents manage kids' mental health

On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: In 2021, a then 15-year-old Oxford, Michigan student named Ethan Crumbley, shot and killed four students and injured seven others. In a groundbreaking case, both of Ethan’s parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley, have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. When is it appropriate to hold parents criminally responsible for the acts of their children? And might this case impact the crisis in school shootings? University of Michigan law professor Ekow Yankah joins The Excerpt to discuss the remarkable nature of this trial and the significance it could have on future litigation.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Tuesday, February 6th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Gun violence in American Schools is a crisis we can't seem to figure out. Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde. The list goes on. In 2021, A then 15-year-old Oxford, Michigan student named Ethan Crumbley, shot and killed four students and injured seven others. He's been sentenced to life in imprison without parole, a sentence he plans to appeal. In a groundbreaking case, both of Ethan's parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

When is it appropriate to hold parents criminally responsible for the acts of their children, and might this case impact the crisis in school shootings? We're joined now by Ekow Yankah, Thomas M. Cooley, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Ekow.

Ekow Yankah:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

This case is particularly notable because it's the first of its kind and could set precedent that would impact parents across the nation. The details, of course, are chilling. I want to ask you specifically about the evidence against both parents and why the prosecution believes they have a case based on the days prior to the shooting. What actions or inactions by both Jennifer and James Crumbley is the prosecution pointing to?

Ekow Yankah:

Well, you're absolutely right that it's the details that make this case what it is. As you pointed out, it's a precedent breaking case. What we teach in very first days of criminal law and law school is precisely that when somebody else takes an action, you are not responsible for that act. You may be an accomplice, but unless you're a co-actor, you're not going to be responsible and that would seem to take care of this case. But as you mentioned, the details of this case are so troubling that the prosecutor felt the need to push against this basic legal principle. So the Crumbleys buy Ethan a gun in the days before the shooting. It's an early Christmas gift and it's not a gun... I mean, a gun might be troubling enough, but they're buying a gun for their son who has long had mental health issues, who has cried out for help, who's asked them for therapy and they still buy him this gun.

Ethan is then caught researching ammunition and some really troubling kinds of things, and his parents seem to ignore this. Indeed, there's a troubling text message from his mom that says, "I don't care that you're searching for these things, but you just have to not get caught doing this. Laugh out loud." And it goes on and on like this until the last critical day. On the last critical day, Ethan is found by a teacher to be drawing really terrible images of shootings and dead bodies on a piece of homework. The teacher takes the paper away, scribbles it out. Ethan is taken to the principal's office and the principals ask the Crumbleys to come in and they ask them to take Ethan home, they're so disturbed by this. And the Crumbleys declined to take home their son, and it's only a few hours after that that he begins his rampage that claims the life of four students. So it's fact after fact after fact like this that makes one think even as against the standard legal principles that this was just too much.

Dana Taylor:

So let's talk about that day. The parents also chose not to disclose that Ethan had access to a gun. What does Michigan law say about the actions of the parents that day? Did anyone have an obligation to help him?

Ekow Yankah:

Well, the parents certainly have an obligation to take care of him. As all parents know, it's a difficult thing to know what you're required to do for any one child. There is no laws near as I can tell that would require anything like getting your child therapy. And so in that sense, they're not responsible. The stunning thing about this case is precisely, as you say, the parents not only didn't take him home, but they didn't tell the school that he had a weapon and that he had a weapon on him. And Jennifer Crumbley seems to be upset that the school didn't search his backpack for a gun, when indeed she could have just told them that he had a gun. And so the easier, more straightforward case would be trying the Crumbleys for some form of negligence on their own, for having done something wrongful. It's just when you put these facts next to each other, the prosecutor is so outraged that she's taken the next step and is trying them for his shootings, and that's the legal step that is really quite remarkable.

Dana Taylor:

Well, in testimony, we heard that hours after Ethan killed those four students at his Michigan high school, his mother said, "He's going to have to suffer." That's what an investigator testified to. How might this play out in the court of public opinion?

Ekow Yankah:

The Cumbleys, by anybody's measure, are deeply troubled parents, and I think it's not surprising that if you explain the facts of this case to a friend across a drink at a bar, that everybody's outraged. As you say, her reactions to the entire thing seemed really quite peculiar in the court of public opinion. When the news of the shooting starts spreading. She texts her son and she says, "Ethan, don't do anything stupid." She testifies she meant don't kill yourself. But it seems as though she was aware that her son was really on the precipice of dangerous behavior, and then the Crumbleys actually flee. They run to Detroit, they take several thousand dollars or a few thousand dollars of cash with them. They're hiding out. So in the court of public opinion, the worry is it looks like somebody who knew their son was troubled, knew their son could do something very dangerous and then flee immediately after hearing that somebody is shot up the school. These are pretty damning facts.

I do think there is another side of the court of public opinion though that we should mention. That is to say, despite all these damning facts, I think lots of parents are going to be out there worried about both the moral and the legal precedent that this sets. Lots of parents have children that are troubled, lots of parents are trying to stop their kid from doing drugs, misbehaving, taking a car on a joyride. And so I think the other side to the court of public opinion is going to be some set of parents thinking, at what point does bad parenting become criminal behavior? At what point am I not responsible for my child's behavior? At what point is doing my best the only thing I can do? And at what point is this young man, 15, 16, 18, at what point am I no longer responsible for my child's behavior?

Dana Taylor:

Well, as we've talked about, both parents are facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter and rarely does the law hold one individual accountable for the actions of someone else. Does that hold true even in cases involving minors?

Ekow Yankah:

Yeah, so generally you're not responsible for anybody who themselves is responsible. So of course, if it was somebody terrifically young, we might think, let's say I left a gun lying around for a three-year-old, and that three-year-old would then pick up a gun and shoot somebody else. You could then imagine a case for involuntary manslaughter. That is, we just don't think three-year-olds are at all responsible. There are some really exotic cases where, for example, somebody renders another person insane and then that person hurts another, and then the first actor, the person who caused them to be irresponsible is held to be the legal actor. So, so long as somebody irresponsible does something, you could still be the causal agent.

But usually when somebody's responsible, even under really troubling circumstances, their actions, in legal terms, sever the causal chain. So there are terrible cases that we all find disturbing. A man is strangely enough, sitting with his wife's lover, his wife's lover is upset with himself and is contemplating suicide. The man offers him a gun for sale. The lover says, "I can't buy it." He says, "Well, I'll give it to you." And the lover uses that gun to kill himself. In even cases like that, the courts have said, "Look, so long as you're a responsible agent, when you decide to act, nobody else is responsible." So that's the legal principle that's at stake in this case.

Dana Taylor:

In the wake of this case, a new Michigan law was passed, which makes it a crime if a gun owner fails to secure a weapon and a minor gains access. Was there already a law in Michigan requiring adult supervision for anyone under 18 in possession of a weapon? Does this law clear the way for holding irresponsible gun owners liable in cases such as this one?

Ekow Yankah:

As is so often the case, it takes something shocking and truly something that makes an entire state or sometimes a nation grieve for us to suddenly respond legally. Michigan has actually not passed any gun laws in decades until this shooting, and the shooting spurred a slew of new gun laws. As you mentioned, the most prominent among these are the sort of safe storage laws that require adults to store their guns. There have also been what we colloquially call red flag laws, which allow people to signal or police to intervene with somebody who's otherwise deeply troubled and take away their gun. Domestic violence abusers can now be stripped of their right to have weapons. So we have this new slew of gun laws that were inspired by the shooting. The trouble is, as is often the case, it's not clear that these laws would've stopped this particular shooting.

That's not to say that they're not good ideas. I certainly think if they stop another set of shootings, that's all for the better. But when you're dealing with a young man who's 15, I mean, we all make jokes about how quickly it is that your child starts teaching you how to log onto your computer or some version like that. When you're dealing with somebody who's a young adult, it's not obvious to me that they wouldn't be able to figure out how to open most standard gun boxes, and that's what makes this case in that sense, a legal precedent.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, this isn't the first case where an attempt has been made to hold an adult at least partially accountable for the actions of an underage school shooter. I'm thinking specifically about a case last year that was brought against the former Parkland, Florida school resource officer Scott Peterson, who allegedly fled the Parkland School shooting. He was found not guilty on multiple counts of child neglect. Is there any precedent for charging the parents of a school shooter who's a minor with child neglect?

Ekow Yankah:

Oh, with child neglect, perhaps. Yes. And I should say, though this case is in some ways unprecedented, it's not totally unheard of. There have been some smaller cases where shootings, not mass shootings, but shootings by children have been laid at the parents' feet. The reason they haven't gotten so much national attention is because in one case, I know of at least there was a plea bargain, and so there was not a sort of test of that legal principle. The child neglect case in the Parkland shooter is an interesting one because again, remember, one is not usually responsible for another's actions, nor is one responsible for saving others, except for people like security guards or police officers who are statutorily required to rescue people. And so when they failed to rescue, there's a charge that they had done something wrong. They had failed their legal standard.

But notice even in those cases, we don't have quite the step that the prosecutor here has been driven to take. That is, it's one thing for you to accuse me of neglecting my child and being responsible for any harm that that causes. It's quite another thing for you to say that my neglect of my child makes me responsible for my child then hurting a third person. So rather than the child neglect here, the case is for involuntary manslaughter, as though I accidentally killed another, and that is both I think in our ordinary thinking, but certainly in the law, a really significant next step.

Dana Taylor:

If either Jennifer or James Crumbley are ultimately found guilty of manslaughter in the Oxford Michigan case, is there reason to believe that we may see a bipartisan effort to keep guns away from kids who might use them to hurt or kill?

Ekow Yankah:

I certainly hope so. As I said, it is way too often the case that we have to wait for something truly shocking before we take legal action. And I want to be clear, even though I mentioned that it's not obvious to me that any one law would've stopped this particular shooting, I think we shouldn't let our politics be held hostage to the idea that if we can't stop every shooting, we ought to do nothing. And so what you do hope is that shooting after shooting, as you said at the top of our conversation, I live just an hour and few minutes away from Oxford, from this high school. I live an hour and a few minutes away from Michigan State University, usually our rival at teams and sports where we clash and make fun of, even though I grew up there. And yet still, just in the short time that I've returned to my home state, I've had to counsel students through grieving because friends of theirs have been on campuses where they've been shooting. I've had to stop class to address whether or not we all feel safe.

Frankly, I've had to hold myself up for myself breaking down because when I see these students walking around campus, they feel like my students. Forgive me, it's a long answer, but what I mean to say is you would hope that not being able to drop off your child and take your mind off their safety would affect every politician across the aisle in the same way, and we would finally be able to make some progress.

Dana Taylor:

Thank you so much for joining me, Ekow.

Ekow Yankah:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.