Setting a precedent in accountability for juvenile crime

As we continue to explore what it means to be safe, one topic we’ve revisited a number of times is how safe our young people are — from school bus rides and curfews for minors to accountability failures at the juvenile detention center .

When it comes to youth violence, the same core question arises: Who is to blame when children hurt others? Is it them, the people surrounding them, the systems that fail them — or an influential mix of those things?

The 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School carried out by Ethan Crumbley , who was 15 years old at the time, has prompted reflection on these questions. Juries in the recent trials of his parents, James Crumbley and Jennifer Crumbley , have decided that the couple shoulders a criminal amount of blame for the actions of their son. Prosecutors insisted that the parents knew Ethan was struggling with mental health issues and failed to get him help, and both were convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Meanwhile, school officials — who some argue also failed Ethan Crumbley in multiple encounters — are protected from prosecution under the state’s qualified immunity laws .

We spoke with Detroit Free Press courts reporter Tresa Baldas , who has covered the trials, about the nuances at play in juvenile crime and the impact of the precedent these cases set.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Outlier: James and Jennifer Crumbley were the first parents to be charged in a mass school shooting carried out by their child. How did the prosecution decide to bring these charges?

Tresa Baldas: What was unique about this case, and the prosecutor said this from the beginning, is that there were numerous egregious facts in this case. This was a different type of situation in that there were so many things the parents did, or more so didn’t do, that caused this to happen.

When the defense attorney would ask parents (on the jury) questions about whether parents should be held responsible if their child does something bad, she put it to them like this: How many of you have teenagers and you bought them a car as a gift? And most of them said: Yeah, we have.

Then the defense asked: When you give this car to the child, do they think it’s theirs? They said yes — to which she said: But who actually owns this car? And they said: Well, we do, we have the keys.

And then the defense went a step further and said: So if your child steals your car in the middle of the night, takes the car out and does something bad with it, and you don’t know, is it your fault?

And this was the analogy to the Crumbley case.

The prosecution said you bought the child that gun, and the kid went out and did something awful with it. And the parents’ defense in this case argued that it really wasn’t a gift, that they didn’t really give it to him. It was hidden in their room. It was only to be used with adult supervision, they didn’t know he got it, didn’t know he was going to do this, and that they had no idea.

Tell me more about why prosecutors thought the parents were responsible here.

The prosecution claimed this was a rare fit for this type of prosecution for a couple of reasons.

One, the prosecution maintained that this family had a troubled child who was spiraling out of control. He had mental health issues, and the parents either knew them or should have known about them. And if they were paying more attention to their troubled child, then he would have gotten him help instead of getting him a gun.

And, when they had the opportunity to disclose that gun to the school, they didn’t. In Michigan, there is a law that parents have a legal duty to control their minor child and to prevent that child from causing harm to others, when there is foreseeable harm.

So in other words, the prosecution maintained the Crumbleys had a child who was problematic, who was suffering from mental health issues, and they had a duty to protect other kids from him. But instead of protecting other kids from him, they gave this troubled child a gun.

In terms of setting a precedent, are experts expecting more parents to be held accountable for their children’s crimes?

You have two arguments to this. You have some who look at this and say: Oh, it’s such a slippery slope, and we’re gonna see a ton of these cases. Then, you have more moderate positions that say we’ll probably see a handful of them. We’re not going to see everybody go crazy and try to charge every parent with every crime, because it is hard to prove.

The shooting took place more than two years before the state’s firearm storage laws were implemented. Why did the prosecution focus so much on safe gun storage when it wasn’t required at the time?

That was just one of many little things. The gun storage issue came up a lot during trial, and the prosecutor actually demonstrated for the jury how easy it is to put a cable lock on. She did it in like, 10 seconds.

The prosecution, through its witnesses, was able to argue that the gun that was used in the killing was not locked in a safe, the box that it was in was not locked, it did not have a cable lock on it, and there was no trigger lock on the gun itself. So all these little things they could have done to make it more difficult for this kid to get the gun did not happen. These were the small things the parents could have done, and I think resonated with the jury.

Based on my conversation with the jury foreman… it wasn’t just one piece of evidence that was stronger than anything else.

Overall, what was your key takeaway from these trials?

We kept hearing during this trial that this is not about parental responsibility, but it was.

What you had was a set of parents who had a gun in their house, a deadly weapon, that got into the hands of their kid somehow, and he did the unthinkable with it.

It’s more of a message to parents who have guns in their house that if you’re going to be a gun owner, you’ve got to be more careful. And I think that it’s resonating out there even for those of us who don’t have guns. The trials definitely raised awareness for parents everywhere that you need to be more mindful of what your children are doing and how your children are feeling, because this could happen to you.

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