A School Shooting In Michigan Moves The Debate From Gun Control to Parental Accountability

ACROSS AMERICA — Last week’s fatal school shooting that left four dead in Michigan has sparked a reckoning over why it’s so easy for kids to get their hands on their parents’ or other adults’ firearms and gun down their classmates.

The push for change isn’t taking place in Congress, where it’s been squashed by the gun lobby, or outside the White House, where the father of one of the students killed in Parkland, Florida, has been standing for more than a week in a demand for a meeting with President Joe Biden.

It’s playing out in the Oakland County Circuit Court system in metro Detroit, where Prosecutor Karen McDonald is plowing new legal ground with charges that seek to hold people beyond the accused shooter responsible for the crime.

McDonald, 51, a mother of five and former circuit court judge who stepped down in 2019 to run for county prosecutor, has moved seamlessly in public remarks from a lawyer who measures her remarks to a frustrated and angry mother, and then back again, articulating clearly the echo in many Americans’ hearts:

This has to stop.

Is this latest pronouncement that “enough is enough” really enough? Maybe. Here are some things that make the case different from the more than 300 school shootings since the Columbine massacre in 1999 opened America’s eyes to school violence:

• Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old accused of using a handgun that was an early Christmas present from his parents to gun down 11 people faces not only murder charges as an adult but also terrorism causing death — a charge allowed by Michigan’s version of post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation, which is tougher than most states’.
• His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, are charged with four counts each of involuntary manslaughter. Charging parents in school shootings is rare — even though a 2019 assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security found guns came from the home of a parent or close relative in 76 percent of school shootings involving firearms. Half of the time, the guns were easily accessible, The Associated Press reported.
• Investigators are looking into whether to criminally charge school officials. In the days since the shooting, McDonald has moved from a position in which she was reluctant to criticize school officials to one in which she has asked critical questions about why school officials allowed Crumbley to return to the classroom without checking his backpack after seeing a drawing that reportedly showed a handgun, a bullet, “blood everywhere” and the words “the thoughts won’t stop — help me.”

At the news conference announcing charges against Crumbley’s parents, McDonald made clear investigators were casting a wide net. When a reporter asked if school officials should have told police about the drawing and other concerning behavior, she said:

“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.”

In news interviews in the days since, the prosecutor has continued to leave the door open on charges against school officials but says the matter is currently in the hands of investigators.

“We should all be looking at the events that led up to that horrific event,” McDonald told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in a Monday interview. “And as a community, as a school, as a nation, talk about what we could have done different so that didn’t happen. And in this case, a lot could have been done different — I mean, at that meeting he was allowed to go back to school.

“We know that he either had that weapon with him or someplace where he could have stored it in the school. But he had it in the school, there's no question. And leaving the decision to parents about whether he goes home or not …,” McDonald added, leaving her sentence unfinished.

David Leyton, the prosecutor in nearby Genesee County, told news station WDIV that any charges against school officials would likely be equal to those filed against the accused shooter’s parents.

“And that’s involuntary manslaughter,” Leyton, a Democrat, told the news outlet. “And then she’d have to prove that they, the school officials, were grossly negligent, pretty much being able to prove that they knew or should have known that this man was going to do these horrific things.”

Pete Lucido, the prosecutor in the metro Detroit county of Macomb and a Republican, told WXYZ that “based on the small amount that I know, it's a slippery slope to start charging school officials, and the reason why is, I think that that needs to be played out in a civil arena and not the criminal arena.”

That’s already happening.

On Thursday, Oxford Community Schools, its superintendent, principal and other school officials were named in two federal lawsuits, each seeking $100 million in damages. The lawsuits were filed on behalf of a student who was shot in the neck and her sister, who was next to her when she was shot.

• RELATED: School District Faces Two $100M Suits After Oxford Shootings

Mike Kelly, a metro Detroit attorney who represents students facing expulsion, told Patch that school officials’ hands weren’t tied when Crumbley’s parents “flatly refused” to take him home after discussing the graphic drawing and other concerning behavior.

They could have discussed the situation with the school resource officer or gone directly to Michigan Child Protection Services, Kelly said. Because they didn’t, “there is some culpability and responsibility here on the part of the school,” he told The New York Times.

“The school could have kept the student secluded from other students for the remainder of the day,” Kelly told Patch. “Instead, the administration assumed the risk that Ethan Crumbley posed no risk of harm to himself or others by remaining in class.”

• RELATED: Oxford School Officials Could Have Done More, Lawyer Says

Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and an expert on student rights, told The New York Times the decision allowing Crumbley to return to the classroom was “truly astounding” and that when the parents refused to take him home, school officials could have acted legally within their rights and removed him.

Ross suggested school officials failed in their legal and ethical responsibilities when they did not “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

School officials have defended their actions. In a videotaped statement last week, Oxford Superintendent Tim Throne said Crumbley didn’t have a disciplinary history and “no discipline was warranted.”

In a letter Wednesday, Throne said the school is cooperating with investigators but cannot comment further on the events leading up to the shooting.

‘I Expect Parents ... To Have Humanity’

At a news conference announcing the involuntary manslaughter charges against Crumbley’s parents, McDonald noted the “egregious” facts of the case, including their apparent nonchalance about their son’s drawing.

“This doesn't just impact me as a prosecutor and a lawyer — it impacts me as a mother,” she said. “The notion that a parent could read those words and know that their son had access to a deadly weapon that they gave him is unconscionable and, I think, criminal. It is criminal.”

She went on:

“When you give your child access to a deadly weapon, when you indicate that you're buying a weapon and you sign that it's for yourself, yet — clearly, based on the statements of the shooter, the statements of mom — that was his gun.

“Then we have the searching of ammunition. We have mom saying, 'At least you didn't get caught.' We have, the next morning, drawing essentially, almost explicitly, what he was about to do. I expect parents and everyone to have humanity and to step in and stop a potential tragedy.”

Is Outrage Enough?

As straightforward as McDonald believes the case against the Crumbleys is, proving it is hardly certain. If she’s successful, though, the case could break new legal ground.

Parents have faced charges before, but typically it’s very young children who are killed with their unsecured guns, Reuters reported, but this appears to be the first time parents face charges that their actions were a contributing cause of a school shooting.

There are a couple of close out-of-state examples:

• Elsewhere, the mother of an Indiana teen who killed himself after firing shots inside of his school in 2018 was placed on probation two years later for failing to remove the guns from her home after her son, who was mentally ill, threatened to shoot his classmates. No students were injured.
• In Washington state, the father of a boy who killed four of his high school classmates in 2014 was convicted of illegally possessing firearms. Although one of his guns was used in the shooting, the father wasn’t charged with abetting the crime.

In Michigan, some precedent is found in a 2000 case in which a Flint-area man pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter after a 6-year-old used his handgun to shoot and kill a classmate.

Eve Brensike Primus, who teaches criminal procedure at the University of Michigan law school, told the AP that involuntary manslaughter is not only an “unusual charge to bring” but also a difficult one to prove.

“The prosecutor is going to need facts to support the argument that these parents really knew there was a risk that their son would take a gun and shoot people dead,” Primus said. “Not just that their son was troubled in some way. This is a homicide charge that carries years in prison. This is not a small charge.”

The difficulty in the case against the Crumbleys that the prosecutor didn’t have in the case involving the 6-year-old is that young children cannot have criminal intent, Robert Leider, a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, told Reuters.

“Here you have a teenager who can form his own criminal intent," Leider said. "That weighs in favor of breaking the chain of causation" between the Crumbleys and shooting at the high school.

Other legal experts told Reuters the prosecutor’s ability to prove the charges against the Crumbleys depends on how the case is framed.

The best strategy may be to build the case around what the parents did — buying their son a handgun, even though he may not possess a firearm, except in limited circumstances — rather than what they failed to do, according to Eric Ruben, a professor at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law.

In the latter scenario, the parents’ defense could be that they couldn’t have reasonably anticipated their actions would culminate in a school shooting, Ruben said.

Ruben said the parents would likely defend themselves by arguing that they could not have reasonably foreseen that their actions would lead to the shooting, meaning they could not be responsible for causing it.

Leider told Reuters the facts of the case outlined by McDonald seemed “egregious.”

“They clearly knew their child was very troubled and seemed to have gone out of their way to arm him,” he said.

New Ground With Terrorism Charge

The AP said gun control advocacy groups that regularly track school shootings weren’t aware of similar terrorism charges.

Michigan’s post-9/11 anti-terror law broadly defines a terroristic act as one against the community as well as against the government. Most states define terrorist acts as they relate to threats against government entities.

The terrorism charge is “not a usual, typical charge,” McDonald said at a news conference, but said it was appropriate given the number of people who were affected by the violence. She added:

“We also need to respect the hundreds of students that were in that school that day, running for their lives out of the building, hiding underneath desks, in bathroom stalls, and sending messages. I've had an opportunity to look at some of the messages ... those kids were sending their parents, and I can't even imagine what that must have been like. Receiving a text that your teenager is saying ‘I love you so much, I think I'm going to be killed.’

“What charge addresses that? And the answer is the terrorism charge. I think it's appropriate.”