PONTIAC (WWJ) — James Crumbley has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the deadly November 2021 Oxford High School, carried out by his teenage son.
Closing arguments were made Wednesday afternoon after five days of testimony from 15 witnesses, and the jury adjourned for the day after more than an hour of deliberations.
The jury returned its verdict around 7:15 p.m. Thursday, finding the 47-year-old Crumbley guilty of all four four counts of involuntary manslaughter. His wife was found guilty of the same four counts in a separate trial last month.
Each count represented the four students killed by their son, Ethan, on Nov. 30, 2021: Madisyn Baldwin, Justin Shilling, Tate Myre and Hana St. Juliana.
Involuntary manslaughter carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison. Both Crumbley parents are scheduled to be sentenced on April 9.
Prosecutors argued Crumbley bought the 9mm Sig Sauer his son used, just days before the shooting and failed to securely store it. Prosecutors also contended he ignored warning signs.
Among key evidence presented by prosecutors was a meeting Crumbley and his wife had with school administrators the morning before the shooting in which they were shown a drawing their son had made with the words “HELP ME” and “blood everywhere.”
Prosecutors argued he failed to share crucial information — including that he had recently bought the gun — during that meeting and that he had ample opportunity to intervene prior to the tragedy.
"Despite what they knew, despite what they thought, James Crumbley and his wife — neither one of them — mentioned anything about the gun being purchased for him four days before the shooting," Assistant Prosecutor Marc Keast said on the opening day of the trial. "James Crumbley didn't say a word about how that picture that his son drew looked identical, that you will see, to the Sig Sauer 9mm. He didn't say anything about the prior requests for help."
The prosecution also argued that Crumbley raced home to search for the gun when he learned of the shooting at the high school, with Keast saying “that’s because he knew.”
The jury heard a frantic 911 call from Crumbley after he couldn’t find the gun in his home, in which he said his son may have taken the gun.
Keast told the jury on the first day of the trial “there was one and only one person who called the police that day to identify their kid as the suspected shooter. It was James Crumbley."
Defense attorneys argued that Crumbley could not know what his son was going to do.
"You're not going to hear that James Crumbley purchased that gun with the knowledge that his son was going to go harm other people. But what the prosecution wants you to believe — the part that's not true — is that James Crumbley knew what his son was going to do, and knew that he had a duty to protect other people from his son,” attorney Mariell Lehman said in her opening statement of the trial.
The Crumbleys are the first parents in U.S. history to be held criminally responsible for a school shooting carried out by their child.
Their son, who was 15 years old at the time he shot and killed four students and wounded six other students and a teacher, pleaded guilty in 2022 to multiple charges, including murder and terrorism. He was sentenced last December to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a sentence that his legal team plans to appeal.
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