A place to discuss this case and new precedent.
Well done Mimsy! (I can't help but wonder what any tubes who find this thread are going to think of your avatar!A place to discuss this case and new precedent.
The parents seemed incredibly negligent, totally uninterested in their son. It's going to be interesting to see what effect this verdict has on these kind of cases going forward.Oooh thank you Mimsy for starting a thread - for those that don't know, here's an article on the case
Basically it was a new precedent to convict a parent of manslaughter in the case of neglecting to get their child help in the lead up to them murdering somebody else - in this case a school shooting. The parents had bought the son a gun, denied him help with mental health when he asked, and cut short a meeting at school about his behaviour, just before he committed the shooting.
Generally I'd say it would be very difficult to prove in many cases a parent liable for their childs actions but in this case? I personally think they directly contributed to the shootings.
The dad will be guilty by default too. It seems to me they’re happy to blame everyone and everything except themselves and their son. Such a different outcome if they took parental responsibility before it ended so tragically.The parents seemed incredibly negligent, totally uninterested in their son. It's going to be interesting to see what effect this verdict has on these kind of cases going forward.
I think it's the only outcome they could have reached once they took the step of charging the parents. At the same time it does seem like it's a way of being seen to do something about gun violence in schools without actually doing anything about gun control. Or school bullying and kids mental health.The dad will be guilty by default too. It seems to me they’re happy to blame everyone and everything except themselves and their son. Such a different outcome if they took parental responsibility before it ended so tragically.
I truly wonder if he was trying to get her attention as he seemed very alone and felt worthless. When he failed he decided to do the ultimate attention seeking crime. When your child is upset, depressed, and hearing things you don’t buy them a f**king weapon of war!"In the prosecution’s closing argument, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald stressed Ms Crumbley’s role in the lead-up to the mass shooting saying she could have done a few small things that may have changed the course of what happened. But instead Ms Crumbley “has done the unthinkable and because of that four kids have died”, she said.
“She is not somebody that used ordinary care to prevent what was reasonably foreseeable,” she said.
Jurors were shown a slide, titled “What Jennifer Didn’t Say,” which listed all of the potential warning signs about her son, starting six months before the shooting. The list included that the gun was accessible to him, that he had asked for help to go to a doctor, and that he had mentioned seeing demons. Ms McDonald said there were “tragically small” things Ms Crumbley could have done to have prevented the shooting. On the morning of the shooting, the Crumbley parents had been called in for a meeting with school staff after a teacher found a disturbing drawing of a gun.
Ms Crumbley “didn’t engage with her son at all in the entire 11 minutes she was there,” Ms McDonald said. “She did not hug him goodbye.”
The prosecutor argued that Ms Crumbley could have stopped by their home to check the gun was where it should have been following the meeting at the high school. She could have locked the gun away out of reach of her son, she could have taken him home from school, she could have taken him to work, she could have told the school that they had gifted him a gun, Ms McDonald said."
The kid/killer was 15 who was tried as an adult and is now behind bars for life. He was mentally ill and failed by the system but just lock him up and throw away the key. This story flags up how tit CPS and the schools are but I already knew that from the AFE tit show. The kid was neglected by tit parents and no one did anything.
"As early as March 2021, he started sending his mother "disturbing texts about his state of mind", which included claims about "demons" and "ghosts" inside the home. He also reportedly videotaped himself torturing animals, made Molotov cocktails, and drew a sketch of himself committing a school shooting, which he also joked about with a friend via text message. At one point, Crumbley allegedly kept a baby bird's head in a jar, which he later placed in a school bathroom."
All the above is a 'cry for help' which never came. I think the mother bought him the gun hoping that he would kill himself.
This is a really good point. I think it’s clear in this case that the parents were negligent but I’d be interested to hear about the input from the school in other cases too.I think it's the only outcome they could have reached once they took the step of charging the parents. At the same time it does seem like it's a way of being seen to do something about gun violence in schools without actually doing anything about gun control. Or school bullying and kids mental health.
She sounds like the kind of "mother" who only had a child because she was too bleeping lazy to bother with birth control, and because it was the expected thing to do in her social circle. Ethan did terrible, terrible things, the animal abuse I personally find very hard to overlook. But with the kind of parents he had, it's no surprise he went down this path. As you said, he was doomed from the start. Like you, I agree that pretty much everything he was doing was a cry for help.I wonder if the title should be changed to "Jennifer and James Crumbley", seeing as he's going to go on trial next month?
This was an informative piece on Jennifer. It mentions a blog post she wrote where she complains about working hard but not being able to support her family on her salary, yet she neglects to say a lot of her money went on keeping horses.
What Ethan did was appalling and evil - he murdered four young people - but in my opinion, he was crying out for help in the years before. I cannot understand all the warning signs his parents missed: their neglect of him starting from a young age; how they refused to listen to the school regarding their concerns about him; how they ignored his declining mental health; and of course, how they bought him the gun. It seems that from a young age Ethan was left alone a lot of the time, in squalid conditions. Of course that was going to affect him mentally and contribute to how he turned out, and to what he did.
Jennifer cared more about drinking, her horses and her affair than being a mother to Ethan. He was doomed from the start. She even referred to him as being "weird". She cared so little that she didn't even put him on her work's health insurance plan (details contained in this good article).