(Washington) The mother of an American teenager sentenced to life in prison for killing four students in his high school in 2021 with a weapon offered by his parents was found guilty on Tuesday of involuntary manslaughter.
The 12 jurors, who began their deliberations Monday morning at the court in Pontiac, Michigan, delivered their verdict early Tuesday afternoon. Sentencing for Jennifer Crumbley, 45, mother of Ethan Crumbley, has been set for April 9.
The father, James Crumbley, 47, is due to be tried separately in March.
The parents are being prosecuted for manslaughter resulting from a failure in their legal duty to control the actions of their child, aged 15 at the time of the facts. They face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Mme Crumbley failed in his “basic duty of vigilance,” Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald said Friday on the last day of the hearing, believing that an initiative on his part could have avoided the killing.
“She could have searched his backpack, she could have asked her son where the gun was. She could have locked up the ammo, she could have jammed the gun. She could have told the school that they had just given her a gun. She could have told them about the crisis her son had previously gone through and his call for help,” she said.
But defense lawyer Shannon Smith cited the “unpredictability” of the tragedy.
“Can all parents be responsible for everything their children do? “, argued the lawyer, worrying about a “very dangerous procedure for all parents and one of the first of this type”.
“Stop him from doing harm”
Jennifer Crumbley testified last week that her husband brought home the Sig Sauer 9mm pistol a few days before the shooting as an early Christmas present and that she took her son to a shooting range the next day.
“As a parent you spend your life protecting your child from danger. You never imagine having to stop him from hurting anyone else,” she said.
Despite a summons from parents at the school on the day of the tragedy, the teachers having discovered an “alarming” drawing on Ethan Crumbley’s table and advising them to have him psychologically monitored, they left without bringing him home.
Faced with the number of gun deaths involving minors, pressure is mounting in the United States to punish parents who, often through negligence, allow access to these weapons.
In December, the mother of a six-year-old student who seriously shot his school teacher was sentenced to two years in prison for parental neglect by the Virginia state courts.
The previous month, the father of a man accused of opening fire in 2022 during US National Day celebrations near Chicago, killing seven, pleaded guilty to reckless behavior for helping him buy the weapon used in the killing.
Ethan Crumbley was tried as an adult and sentenced in December to life without parole in an Oakland County court.
The teenager pleaded guilty in October 2022 to bringing the gun with 50 bullets in his backpack to his high school and shooting the high school students.
He killed two girls and two boys aged 14 to 17 and injured six other students and a teacher.