Right now there are two inmates of a Michigan jail who are shaking as they await trial. They are James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of Ethan Crumbley, who at 15 years of age took his parents’ latest gift to him, a handgun, and killed four of his classmates, and injured six others and a teacher. The Crumbleys may be charged with involuntary manslaughter, which would be precedent setting. An appellate court made this decision, arguing that it recognized the importance of setting this kind of a precedent, but that the facts of this particular case warranted this action. CNN:

“We share defendants’ concern about the potential for this decision to be applied in the future to parents whose situation viz-a-viz their child’s intentional conduct is not as closely tied together, and/or the warning signs and evidence were not as substantial as they are here,” wrote the panel.

The opinion said that those concerns are “significantly diminished” by the fact that Crumbley’s actions “were reasonably foreseeable, and that is the ultimate test that must be applied.”

In the opinion, the judges cited text messages from the months before the massacre in which Crumbley told his parents about experiencing paranoia and hallucinations, including his belief that a demon was throwing objects around the house. When his mother didn’t reply, he sent her another message asking, “can you at least text back.” His mother did not text back that day and was riding horses with James at the time, according to the opinion.

The Crumbleys are what I call custodial care parents, meaning that they provided their son the basics of life, food, shelter, clothing but the most important thing in life, relating to the kid and understanding him, they didn’t even bother to try. If that sounds like a harsh judgement, take a look at the facts. A child reaches out and says that demons are attacking him and you ignore that and keep enjoying yourself with your horse?

Crumbley also told a friend that he believed he was having a mental breakdown and asked his parents for medical help but that his father told him to “suck it up” and his mother laughed, according to the opinion.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Michael Riordan noted that the case was exceptional because of how clear it was that Crumbley was struggling with his mental health and contemplating violence – and the fact that his parents provided him a handgun anyway.

The kid was messed up and the parents played right into his hands. This is a case that I would love for some psychologist to write a book about because it defies the imagination. It’s another one of these stories where if you wrote it as fiction, nobody would believe it. It seems too contrived.

The day of the shooting the Crumbley parents were meeting with school officials who ordered them to get their son help. They declined to take their son out of school that day. That was the most costly decision they ever made in their lives. Ethan went back to class, got his backpack, unloaded his gun and opened fire.

Crumbley may be sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole on May 1. He has never lived and he never will live, unless you can call a life in prison a life. And who knows? In some pathetic Birdman Of Alcatraz way, he may find himself in this strange environment. The human spirit is a strange and indomitable thing.

It is immensely tragic that this has happened to him. I don’t excuse his actions in any way. He was old enough to understand the difference between right and wrong and he chose wrong. But my heart goes out to him, because he took those actions as a troubled child.

On the other hand, they can throw the book at his parents. I have zero sympathy there. None. They are the kind of infinitely selfish people who should never have children. And now they’ll have a lot of time in prison to think about it.

The story of the Crumbleys is truly an American tragedy. And it’s a MAGA, cultural divide tragedy. Guns are treated as toys in this culture. The four students who were killed that day had their lives cut short, not by a toy, but by an instrumentality of violence, in the hands of a mentally ill person. As a country we need to get a grip on this.

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17 COMMENTS

  1. Such stark and dark facts that make the parents unforgivable. This is a justifiable precedent that requires hideous, foreseeable conduct before parents are tried as criminals for the conduct of their children. In my view, however, there will other righteous convictions of parents.
    Ursula is also right about the blame to be shouldered by right-wing Republican gun proponents. A mentally off 15 year old is given a gun by his parents.

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    • As I said in the piece, if you wrote this as fiction, nobody would believe it. How could any normal parent ignore the signs of a child unhinging mentally? How many kids routinely tell their parents that there are demons in the house and that they hear voices telling them to do bad things — and the parents ignore them?

      The sad part here is that the parents are clearly off the beam as well, but evidently they’ve got whatever it takes to function in society, make a decent living, all that, so they’re considered “normal.”

  2. Until the voters in this country realize that there is a DIRECT CORRELATION to the number of guns on the streets of America to the number of innocents killed, the bodies will continue to pile up. Fact. Whether due to evil parents, accidents, murders, gang fights, domestic violence, alcohol served at clubs, jealousy, racism, antisemitism, etc., it all boils down to accessibility. Thanks to the GOP/NRA, we know there are 400 million guns on our streets. The sheer numbers tell us many are in the wrong hands, and will be used to kill someone. The whole argument about the second amendment is horseshit on so many levels, I won’t bore anyone going through the many fallacies. Add in the fact the GOP fights regulation in every state any time a reasonable law is on the table concerning who gets to own what, how to secure a weapon, or what happens when things go south. It’s mind boggling to me that our society locks up cannabis users who do no one harm, a scientific fact, yet we allow lethal weapons to proliferate with the predictable result of more citizens killed on our streets than any other country in the world. This will continue as long as WE THE PEOPLE are fine with our children being murdered by other children in school for God’s sake. Locking these folks up is a good thing, if, for no other reason than to drive home how owning a gun is a serious, potentially deadly decision. Graveyards full of dead citizens, grieving family members, and, often orphaned children, is a damn high price to pay for hypocrisy and stupidity. It’s heartbreaking because IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! VOTE to end this madness before you or I get killed going to Wendy’s. It could be today. It WILL be today for some poor innocent soul.

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    • I don’t know if you ever saw Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling For Columbine. If not I highly recommend it. If you can believe this, the week after the Columbine massacre, Charlton Heston came to Denver to address the NRA convention. He was president of the organization at the time. He was asked by the mayor of Denver not to come and he ignored that plea.

      He glowed about We The People and basically didn’t give a damn about the Columbine parents protesting in the streets. Columbine was the first school shooting in 1999. Since then, how many have there been?

      I always admired Heston’s acting but now, I must say, in retrospect, I regard the man as either an idiot or a monster, or both, for having contributed to this.

    • Lest we forget.

      The LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH OF CHILDREN in the USA today is gunshot. IN NO OTHER COUNTRY IS THIS TRUE, including actual countries at war like Yemen, or Ukraine.

      How can this be accepted as normal?

      What are we doing to our children, our future, by letting this happen?

    • I’m a Brit living in the US & to me this is the MOST obnoxious thing about this country. I simply do not understand what is so wonderful about having a lethal weapon in your house or carrying one in your pocket. I think it’s a fantasy in people’s heads about “Cowboys & Indians” the old films that all of us watched as kids – including us Brits, but WE knew it was all just stories, somehow many Americans grew up thinking those stories were real history, THEIR history & they needed to be ‘ready’ for the nest Apache Uprising !?!? If ever there was a need for a dictator it is for that purpose – get the damned guns out of the hands of ordinary people. Australia did it many years ago, it can be done ! Sensible people know this is a stupid situation for a so-called civilized nation !

    • These were not responsible parents. Neither were mine. I had a brother ten years older than me who went insane. He was a paranoid schizophrenic (at least that was the diagnosis) and he also saw things that weren’t there, imagined things that weren’t happening. I was way to young to help him, obviously, and my parents did nothing.

      He was never able to function, get a job, have a life, drive a car, have a girlfriend. He started to go in and out of mental institutions when he became more violent and he was murdered in a mental institution at the age of 32. As awful as this will sound, it was a blessing. He was the most miserable, screwed up person I have ever known and I was powerless to do anything. My parents totally dropped the ball, as did these parents.

      My parents didn’t believe they were responsible. They just figured that if you give a kid custodial care, the kid figures it out. In my case, I did. My brother did not.

  3. Damn Ursula. I’m so sorry about your brother. Having run psychiatric assessments at Duke and a private hospital, I have encountered folks like your brother. It’s tragic how our culture throws people away while spending trillions on ways to kill us all. Your brother had a true psychiatric illness that had to be managed by medication. Not many patients in locked facilities are in that situation. Untreated, almost anything can happen. I’m glad you didn’t suffer the same illness. Having grown up with a Dr jekyll/Mr Hyde alcoholic my mom shot in self defense after I was grown, I know another survivor when I see one. Glad you made it. No one knows what lies beyond, but I do know your brother suffered terribly while living, and he no longer does. I hope you find comfort in that.

  4. Were they his real parents ? You mention that they were “custodial “ parents .Is that the same as foster parents or were they just parents who didn’t give a f**k. I’d like to know just how this boy ended up in a situation like this to begin with . This sounds like it could have been preventive if someone,somewhere had intervened.

  5. There is a similar case discussed in “People of the Lie” by M. Scott Peck. In it, the parents gave to their ~16 year old son for Christmas, not just a gun, not just the same make and model but the. same. gun with which his ~18 year old brother had committed suicide. One of the things they said to Peck was that the gun was “expensive” (and therefore presumably desirable.)

    IMO “People of the Lie” deserves a reissue, now that they are not merely all around us, but literally taking over the government.

  6. Meanwhile, the Missouri GOP voted to allow children to carry weapons without adult supervision. I can see it now – “You flirted with my girlfriend” BLAM!

  7. Yeah I I had friends that killed themselves. The one that always pops up is this kid who was the son of my dad’s best friend. He had just got out of an institution and daddy believing he couldn’t begat a child with any problems was always yelling at him. He got this nice mustang cheap and said the kid could have it if he cleaned it up. Of course there were other stipulations that went along with that. Anyway he found the keys and daddy’s 45 and went out to some parking spot and shot himself in that mustang. I knew it was going to happen even tried to say something but I was just a kid.

  8. My best friend growing up got a little too fond of intoxicants when we were teenagers. Got himself thrown into some rehab ward at the local hospital for his efforts, rather than attending twelfth grade as he should have been. His younger brother, about fifteen at the time, gave him a new belt for his birthday.

    The outcome was as predictable as this case, and I still miss him to this day. That little brother became a Nazarene preacher in Nebraska. I doubt that’s sufficient penance, but I guess it’s a start.

  9. Why not just shut down the gun manufacturers?
    Simple.
    It’s a jobs program. It creates jobs for corrupt politicians, police and the health insurance cabal.

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