In Already-Overcharged Michigan H.S. Shooting, Parents Now Charged with Manslaughter

In the face of public outrage, prosecutors are seeking to write the law rather than enforcing it. Their overreach serves no one’s long-term interests.

P rosecutors in Oakland County, Mich., have announced that the parents of 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with his alleged shooting spree at Oxford High School earlier this week, in which four students were killed and seven other people were wounded. According to the latest reporting, the parents — James and Jennifer Crumbley — have gone missing and are now the subject of an intensive dragnet, as if they had planned and executed the mass murder themselves.

A few quick thoughts.

First, the legal requirements imposed by speedy-trial laws usually have the effect — often, an undesirable effect — of forcing charges to be filed when emotions are raw, and before there’s any chance to deliberate over the prosecution in a detached, thoughtful way. So it is here. The imperative of charging Ethan Crumbley (because he is in custody) did not mean that there was similar urgency to make a charging decision about his parents. That could and should have waited.

But even before today, the Michigan case was overcharged: Prosecutors filed a terrorism count against the teenager.

Now understand: It is within the prosecutors’ discretion under Michigan law to try Ethan Crumbley as an adult. Because they’ve chosen to do so, Crumbley is looking at multiple counts of premeditated murder, each carrying a possible life sentence, as well as scores of additional counts of attempted murder and the use of a firearm in the commission of a violent crime, all of which carry multiple-year sentences of their own. He is looking at literally decades upon decades of imprisonment — he can only live once, but even at 15 he could not hope to live long enough to see through the sentence that is likely to be imposed.

You can argue (as his counsel surely will) about whether Crumbley ought to be prosecuted as an adult, and whether he had the mental capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions. Those are serious questions. Nevertheless, the appropriateness of the murder, attempted-murder, and weapons charges is not in question. They are absolutely the proper charges, and any experienced prosecutor would bring them.

But terrorism?

The state of Michigan’s definition of an act of terrorism includes the requirement that the act be “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or influence or affect the conduct of government or a unit of government through intimidation or coercion.” That is not what happened at Oxford High School.

Yes, Ethan Crumbley intended to intimidate his fellow students at the school, where he apparently claims to have been teased and bullied. But, unlike a terrorist bombing (to take the most prominent example), Crumbley’s crime was not intended to intimidate the broader civilian population.

Moreover, we usually reserve terrorism charges for acts that endeavor to coerce a government into changing policy, and that have been committed by a foreign or domestic organization that is capable of projecting massive force. And even then, prosecutors are often hesitant to bring such charges. Recall how many times jihadists committed mass-murder attacks during the Obama/Biden administration, only for the administration and its law-enforcement agencies to refuse to label the act “terrorism” because they could not connect it to al-Qaeda, ISIS, or some other formally designated terrorist organization.

The Oxford High School shooting is not a terrorism case. It does not diminish the seriousness of Crumbley’s offenses to say that Michigan’s application of terrorism law here trivializes genuine terrorism. Henceforth, the terrorism statute will theoretically be applicable to any act of intimidation in which a few people are targeted. That is overkill.

And now, prosecutors are criminally charging Crumbley’s parents with manslaughter.

To be sure, the parents appear to have been utterly irresponsible. According to the charges filed, in the hours before the shooting they had been urgently summoned to the school, because a teacher had discovered that Crumbley had drawn images of a gun that had been fired at a fallen body, with the added inscriptions, “Blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”

Furthermore, on the day before the shooting, Jennifer Crumbley had sent her son a text — a blood-curdling one in hindsight — laughing off the fact that a teacher had seen her son searching online for gun ammunition: “LOL, I’m not mad at you, you just have to learn not to get caught.” The parents left the gun — a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer pistol that had just been lawfully purchased by James Crumbley — unlocked in a bedroom drawer.

To say this reflects appalling judgment is an understatement. But let’s take a breath and grasp the legal context.

Several states have so-called CAP (child-access prevention) laws that make it a crime for adults to allow children to have unsupervised access to firearms. Such laws have repeatedly been proposed in Michigan, but the legislature has opted not to enact them. Moreover, while prosecutors insisted, in announcing their involuntary-manslaughter charges, that the pistol should have been locked away, with a safety mechanism clipped in place and the ammunition kept separate, there is no such mandate in state law. And, the passion of anti-gun advocates notwithstanding, if such a law were enacted it would face stiff constitutional challenges.

Now, with the legislature having refused to criminalize the conduct in which the Crumbley parents engaged, the prosecutors — whose actual job is to enforce the legislature’s laws — are attempting in the heat of the moment to criminalize the conduct themselves.

It is one thing to say that the parents were egregiously derelict — just as, for example, store owners are egregiously derelict when they sell to suspicious characters substances (including explosive powders) that can be used to make bombs. But that does not make the parents’ conduct a criminal violation, much less make them responsible for homicide — a much more serious crime, even in the form of involuntary manslaughter, than the CAP crime that Michigan has refused to codify.

The Crumbley parents may be looking at significant civil liability, and deservedly so. But we are not supposed to make criminal law by having prosecutors concoct it on the fly. We should particularly resist prosecutorial creativity in the immediate aftermath of an emotionally charged tragedy such as this one. And when legislatures do codify a crime, it should be calibrated to the wrong actually done by the action or omission, not to the horrific downstream consequences. What happened at Oxford High School may have been foreseeable in some abstract sense, but it was certainly not foreseen in concrete reality.

There is already enough tragedy here. Distorting the law to make it fit our sense of outrage can only make matters immeasurably worse in the long run.