PONTIAC, Mich. — Prosecutors in the criminal trial of James Crumbley, the father of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley, opened their case Thursday by showing jurors an image of the gun’s unused cable lock still in its original packaging — teasing out evidence meant to suggest he failed to prevent the looming rampage.
“That nightmare was preventable, and it was foreseeable,” Oakland County prosecutor Marc Keast said of the shooting spree at Oxford High School in November 2021 that left four students dead and several wounded. Crumbley, he added, was "the adult out of anyone in the world in the best position to prevent these kids' deaths."
Keast said that Crumbley isn’t accused of knowing that Ethan, who is now imprisoned, sought to commit the worst school shooting in Michigan's history but that "the question becomes how is it a father can be held responsible for the intentional acts of his teenage son?”
“It takes gross negligence, it takes causation of death, and it takes the other person’s acts to be reasonably foreseeable — those are the three elements that must be proven,” he told the jury in a trial that could last about two weeks.
But in her opening statement, James Crumbley’s lawyer defended his actions in the months leading up to and on the day of the shooting, telling jurors that he was simply unaware of his son’s planned attack.
"You will not hear that James probably even suspected that his son was a danger," Mariell Lehman said.
“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 he had a duty to protect other people from his son,” she added. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s not true. He didn’t know.”
Crumbley, 47, faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter, each representing one of the victims in the massacre at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit days after Thanksgiving.
His wife, Jennifer Crumbley, 45, was found guilty on the same charges last month and will be sentenced in April. She faces up to 15 years in prison per count, as does James Crumbley if he is found guilty.
The prosecution’s and the defense’s opening statements Thursday walked jurors through similar presentations to those in Jennifer Crumbley’s landmark trial — the first time in the U.S. that a parent was held partly responsible for their child’s school shooting rampage.
Prosecutors said James Crumbley had bought Ethan a 9 mm Sig Sauer as a gift, at a time in his son's life when he was struggling emotionally because his best friend — whom he had texted with far more than anyone else and confided in — had moved away.
"The decision that James Crumbley made to buy that gun as a gift for his son was made even though he knew that his son was in the midst of total and complete social isolation and had been in a downward spiral of distress that had been going on for some time," Keast told jurors.
He went on to say Crumbley had further opportunities to prevent the violence, including by properly locking the weapon and by telling school staff members he was aware his child had access to a firearm when he and his wife were summoned for a meeting the morning of the shooting about a drawing of a gun and a person shot on Ethan's math homework.
Keast suggested that Crumbley could have returned home to check on the gun after that meeting but said GPS evidence will show he didn't go home until after an active shooter alert had gone out to Oxford parents. But Lehman told the jury that Crumbley, a DoorDash driver, didn't do anything differently on the day of the shooting because he was oblivious.
"When you're not aware of an imminent, immediate danger, why would you do anything different than you'd normally do?" Lehman said. "You wouldn't because you wouldn't have any reason to."
James Crumbley, dressed in a suit and glasses, mostly stared straight ahead, using an over-the-ear device to help with his hearing.
His wife’s trial was marked by emotional testimony, with video and photos of the shooting shown to jurors, and Jennifer Crumbley at times audibly sobbing in her seat. She took the stand in her own defense, testifying that she left control over storing and locking up the family's firearms to her husband.
Among the first witnesses Thursday were two people who testified at Jennifer Crumbley's trial: an Oxford High School teacher who was shot, tearfully recounting the day of the massacre, and a former detective who investigated security video of the shooting, as well as messages between the Crumbleys.
Edward Wagrowski, formerly of the Oakland County Sheriff's Office, discussed a series of text messages between James and Jennifer Crumbley about concerns over Ethan's health and his state of mind several months before the shooting.
"Dude. Chill. He is fine. AND I am trying to [expletive] work," James Crumbley wrote to his wife.
Meanwhile, Ethan sent texts to his best friend that he was having "bad insomnia" and paranoia and suggesting he had reached out to his parents and specifically asked his father to take him to the doctor.
"He just gave me some pills and told me to 'Suck it up,'" Ethan texted.
He also sent his friend a video of him holding a gun about three months before the shooting. "My dad left it out so I thought, 'Why not' lol," Ethan texted.
Opening statements in James Crumbley’s trial came after two days of jury selection in which 15 people were seated, 12 of whom will be randomly chosen to deliberate the verdict.
Similar to the jurors in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, the jurors in James Crumbley’s trial aren’t being sequestered, but they are being asked to avoid watching or reading any news about the trial. In addition, the majority of jurors in his trial are also parents and either are gun owners, grew up around guns or have family or friends who have them — highlighting how firearm exposure is a familiar facet of this region of Michigan, where hunting is a popular activity.
During jury selection, the defense signaled how it might portray James Crumbley at trial, underscoring how parents oftentimes try their best but aren't perfect, while getting many of the jurors to admit that it's normal for teens to keep secrets from their parents or tell one parent a different version of events from the other parent.
Themes of parental responsibility and safe gun storage will hang over James Crumbley’s trial, as well.
But there are some differences. At least two new witnesses are set to testify: the original owner of the 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, who sold the weapon and a cable lock to a gun store where James Crumbley bought it, and a student who was injured in the shooting.
Some evidence will also be new or withheld compared with the first trial. For instance, text messages between Jennifer Crumbley and her son that were shared while she and her husband were riding horses won’t be heard this time; the texts bolstered the prosecution’s case to propose that Jennifer Crumbley was a negligent mother while her son was in distress and complained that there were "demons" in the family’s home. Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Matthews ruled Thursday that the texts were inadmissible because there’s no evidence that James Crumbley was aware of them.
Matthews had emphasized during jury selection that James Crumbley’s case is separate from his wife’s, with different evidence, and asked jurors whether their judgment was so clouded from the media coverage that they couldn’t be impartial.
“Are you able to set aside any sympathy that you feel and decide this case based on the evidence and the facts?” Matthews asked.
The judge dismissed potential jurors with pointed views about school shootings, including a man who said he was bothered by the rate of incidents across the country and another who believed prosecutors were bringing charges only to satisfy an angry public.
As with Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, son Ethan won’t be testifying in his father’s case.
Ethan, now 17, pleaded guilty in 2022 as an adult to murder, terrorism and other crimes and was sentenced in December to life in prison without parole.
Loved ones of some of the four shooting victims — Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Hana St. Juliana, 14; and Justin Shilling, 17 — attended Thursday’s opening statements.
It’s unclear whether James Crumbley will take the stand.
Selina Guevara reported from Pontiac and Erik Ortiz from New York.
