Oxford HS Staff Should Have Searched Teen, Experts Say

OXFORD, MI — After new details surfaced last week about potential red flags raised leading up to the Oxford High School shooting, school safety experts are questioning the school's decision not to search the belongings of the teen charged with murder and terrorism in the massacre, which left four teens dead and wounded seven other people.

While determining whether a student's behavior constitutes a threat presents a significant challenge for school officials, some experts said there were clear warning signs and school officials should have checked the backpack of 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley.

The superintendent said in a short video that “no discipline was warranted” stemming from the meeting between school officials, Crumbley and his parents. He has also said that reports that the gun was in the boy's backpack haven't been confirmed by law enforcement officials or the school district's investigation.

Experts Question School's Decisions

Even so, Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, told The New York Times she found the school’s reaction “truly astounding.”

“If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school to remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves,” Ross told the Times.

She said the school was well within its rights to force the teen to leave campus, Ross said. And if the parents refused to take their son home, the school had a legal and ethical responsibility to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

Moreover, Dr. Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, told Patch on Monday that school officials have “extensive latitude in searching students for weapons if they have reasonable suspicion that a weapon is present.”

“In the best of worlds, school officials should have a set of threat assessment protocols that would include a school resource officer or the local police on their threat assessment team,” he said. “The officer could then conduct the search for school officials.”

When asked whether the school should have reported the teen to law enforcement, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald told reporters last week: “Any individual who had the opportunity to stop this tragedy should have done so. The question is what did they know and when did they know it.”

Furthermore, McDonald told the Associated Press the ongoing investigation will determine whether or not to charge school officials or not.

"You can’t even in an airport mention anything that even remotely indicates that there might be some sort of violence on a plane," McDonald said. "You’ll be immediately extracted. And yet we have a kid who is ... saying some pretty concerning things and he was allowed to go back to school, and neither parent mentions that he had access to a weapon."

Warning Signs

Four days before the Nov. 30 shooting, authorities said Crumbley's parents bought him a gun as a Christmas present. The teen boasted about the gift on Instagram, and his mother described the weapon in a social media post as a gift for her son. The day before the shooting, Crumbley was caught in class searching online for ammunition, leading the school to contact his parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley.

Then on the morning of the shooting, a teacher found a note on the boy's desk that contained a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun pointed at the words: "The thoughts won't stop. Help me." In another section of that note, he drew a bullet with the words: "Blood everywhere."

Between the drawing of the gun and bullet was a picture of a person who was twice shot and bleeding, prosecutors said. Below that was a drawing of a laughing emoji, and further down were the words "My life is useless." To the right of that read the words: "The world is dead."

It "alarmed [the teacher] to the point she took a picture of it on her cell phone," McDonald said.

The school pulled the teen out of class and summoned his parents.

But the parents didn't ask their son if he had his gun with him, and didn't inquire about the weapon's whereabouts, authorities said.

Over the weekend, Oxford Community Schools Superintendent Tim Throne said he wants a third-party investigation into the teen's interactions with students and staff leading up to the shooting, and defended the school's counselors who met with the teen and his parents hours before the gunfire began.

The parents never told counselors about the recent gun purchase, Throne said. The parents left, and the teen was allowed to return to class.

McDonald said prosecutors have evidence suggesting that the couple “purchased that weapon for their 15-year-old and bragged about it online — thought this was some joyous occasion as a present."

And she said the teen had access to the gun “whether it was locked or not" at his family's home.

When a reporter asked whether school staffers could also face charges, prosecutors only said the investigation remains ongoing.

“There are a lot of things that could have been so simple to prevent,”McDonald said.