'The shooter didn't snap': Prosecutors say Michigan dad could have prevented mass killing

Attorneys made their initial arguments, and a survivor shared the worst moments of her life, on the first day of James Crumbley’s trial Thursday. His son killed four classmates at Michigan’s Oxford High in 2021.

Crumbley faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter – the same charges on which his wife, Jennifer Crumbley, was convicted a month ago. She was the first parent in America to be held criminally accountable for a school shooting. Their son Ethan Crumbley is serving a life sentence.

An all-white jury of nine women and six men – three of whom will be designated as alternates before deliberations begin – was seated Wednesday.

Prosecution: ‘Nightmare was preventable’

Assistant prosecutor Marc Keast began his opening statements by talking about the massacre.

“On November the 30th, 2021, James Crumbley’s 15-year-old son walked out of a boys bathroom holding a 9mm handgun ... he pointed. He aimed ... and fired that weapon at teachers, at students and teachers. Killed four. Wounded seven,” Keast said. “That nightmare was preventable.”

James Crumbley bought that gun, Keast said, and failed to secure it, “even though he knew” his son was in distress “and had been in a downward spiral.”

The students would still be alive today if Crumbley had “seized on any small opportunities” to prevent the shooting, Keast argued: “The shooter didn’t snap. The shooting was foreseeable, especially to his father.”

Keast introduced perhaps the most damning evidence: the troubling drawing Ethan Crumbley drew on a math worksheet the morning of the shooting. It depicted a gun, a bloody human body and the words: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”

“It took that counselor all but 20 minutes that parental involvement was required,” Keast said. But when the parents arrived, James Crumbley never mentioned the gun they had purchased four days earlier, or that their son’s best friend had just moved away. Rather, the parents left their son at school and went back to their jobs. For Crumbley, that was a DoorDash run.

Two hours later, after an active shooter alert went out, Crumbley went home to check for the gun. Keast asked the jury to consider that no other school parent that day is known to have gone home to check for a gun.

Keast stressed that Crumbley is not accused of knowing what his son would do that day: “There is no claim that James Crumbley gave him that gun hoping he would kill four students.”

Rather, Keast said, Crumbley is accused of engaging in gross negligence, for failing to use “ordinary care.” Looking at the drawing in the counselor’s office, “his failure to act, right there, is his willful disregard of danger.”

Defense: Crumbley didn’t know

Defense attorney Mariell Lehman acknowledged to jurors that the shooting undeniably wrecked families.

“But this case is not about what happened inside of Oxford High School,” she said in her opening statement. “This case is about what happened outside of Oxford High School.”

The prosecution, she said, alleged that Crumbley knew that his son was a danger to others; that he knew his son could and would hurt other people; and that he failed to take steps to protect others.

“That simply is not true,” she said.

Crumbley did not purchase the gun knowing his son might use it against other people, Lehman said. He “did not know that his son could potentially harm other people, he did not know what his son was planning.” He did not even suspect his son was a danger.

Access to the firearm was not allowed, she said, and Crumbley was not aware that his son had access to it.

Lehman told jurors that the prosecution repeatedly asked them to follow the law and said she was asking them to do the same. If they do, she argued, they will find James Crumbley not guilty.

‘He was aiming to kill me’

The shooter exchanged tens of thousands of messages with a friend in the months before the massacre, said Edward Wagrowski, who worked in the county sheriff’s computer crimes unit.

Among them: In April 2021, the shooter wrote that he had asked his father to take him to the doctor “but he just gave me some pills and told me to ‘suck it up.’”

In August, he sent a video with him holding a handgun, with a round in the chamber. “My dad left it out so I thought, ‘Why not’ lol,” the shooter wrote to his friend.

The friend abruptly left the state for care in October, and after that the shooter communicated with “hardly anybody at all,” Wagrowski testified.

Wagrowski, choking up, described reviewing the surveillance footage from the day of the shooting, describing how the shooter exited the bathroom with a “proud chest” and started firing.

But the most dramatic moment of the morning unquestionably was the first witness, a teacher who was shot in the arm and came eye-to-eye with the gunman during his rampage.

Through tears, her voice shaking, Molly Darnell detailed the horror as it started to unfold. According to her testimony:

Confused, Darnell saw a rush of students go past her office door. She was confused. The principal announced over the PA, “We’re headed into lockdown. This is not a drill.”

Then a “pop pop pop.”

Then doors slamming – so she closed her door as well and grabbed a “night lock” to secure the door when through a window she saw someone in a hoodie, mask and skull cap. She saw his eyes.

“I realize that he’s raising a gun to me. I remember thinking in my head, ‘There’s no orange tip on that gun,’” she said, meaning it wasn’t a BB gun.

Darnell felt as if she had been stung by hot water – the bullet hitting her arm. She crawled to the door, put the night lock in place, then pushed a rolling cart in front of the door.

She felt blood going down her arm and used her cardigan as a tourniquet. She texted her husband to say “I love you,” and her daughter to say she was barricaded and safe.

When police arrived and took her to a hospital, she saw nurses and doctors lining the hallways.

“They were prepared for a disaster,” she said through tears, adding: “He was aiming to kill me.”