The father whose son killed four students in 2021 was found guilty Thursday of involuntary manslaughter.
A Michigan jury found James Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter, a move “experts say could set an important precedent for the extent to which parents of school shooters can be held responsible,” CNN reported.
The shooter’s mother, Jennifer Crumbley, was also found guilty in an unprecedented case when a parent was found guilty of a mass shooting their child executed.
“We’re living in a new world now, and that new world is a prosecutor saying, ‘If we’re not going to have legislation, if we’re not going to have significant protections, we’re going to take it upon ourselves to use the law in a way that gets accountability to everyone and anyone who could have potentially been involved,’” CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson told CNN’s Erin Burnett Thursday evening.
Prosecutors called James Crumbley “grossly negligent” when he “bought a SIG Sauer 9 mm gun for his son four days before the attack, failed to properly secure it, ignored his son’s downward-spiraling mental health and did not take ‘reasonable care’ to prevent foreseeable danger,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors say the shooting may have been prevented if either parent had taken their son out of school that day, as a counselor recommended.
They also could have told school officials they bought their son a gun.
Ethan Crumbley, then 15, used the aforementioned gun to kill four students and wound six students and a teacher at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021. He was sentenced last year to life in prison without parole.
Legal experts believe this verdict will be used in future cases to hold parents accountable for their children’s actions.
“If you are a parent and you’re careless because you get your child a weapon – and not only do you get your child a weapon but you fail to secure that weapon – and you have or should have some sense of your child’s mental health maladies and you do nothing to really oversee it or to act in a way that is appropriate in a way that protects the public, then you could be accountable,” Jackson said.
However, the parents’ cases were so uncommon it is unlikely their verdicts will have much of an impact, Frank Vandervort, clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, said before to the trials in January, per CNN.
“I don’t anticipate there’s going to be a lot of this kind of thing filed; I think this is a pretty unique case,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about shootings by teenagers as being run-of-the-mill. Unless you’ve got really unusual factual situations, I don’t anticipate a lot of parents getting charged.”
But the Crumbleys’ verdicts did set a precedent for someone other than the shooter being held liable. Such cases are not that common, experts say.
James and Jennifer Crumbley were each convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, a charge that carries a maximum punishment of up to 15 years in prison, running concurrently. Both are set to be sentenced April 9.
This move could discourage parents from doing the same as the Crumbleys, Jackson said.
“It’s a verdict that nowadays is going to be used as a tool by prosecutors – and very effectively, I would think – in order to deter this type of conduct moving forward,” Jackson said.
