James Crumbley, the father of the Oxford High School shooter, was found guilty Thursday of involuntary manslaughter for his role in the killings of four students in 2021.

The verdict will not bring back anyone’s children, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said at a press conference after the verdict was read, flanked by the parents of the students who were killed.

“I will forever remain in awe of their strength and perseverance that they have shown in the last two and a half years,” McDonald said. “It’s a privilege to do this and we know that it can’t take the pain away, but It’s one small step towards accountability.”

The decision in Crumbley’s case follows the February conviction of Crumbley’s wife, , on the same charges, one involuntary manslaughter charge for each child their son killed. The cases mark the first time in the U.S. parents of a mass shooter have been held directly responsible for the deaths their child caused.

The shooter was sentenced to life without parole in December.

The prosecution had the task of proving that Crumbley’s actions or inactions made the shooting possible, as Crumbley had the legal duty as a parent to prevent his child from harming others and should’ve taken reasonable actions to mitigate possible harm.

Nicole Beausoleil, the mother of Madisyn Baldwin who was killed in the shooting, thanked the other parents standing with her over the course of the two and a half years since the shooting for their friendship and support through all three prosecutions. All four families of the victims are forever changed and will continue fighting for accountability on behalf of their children, she said.

“This is not just a verdict for attention or media,” Beausoleil said at the press conference. “This is a verdict that actually needs to be put to the platform that it is: How are we going to use this verdict to actually make that change?”

For five days, , witnesses relayed the events leading up to and following the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, as well as the horror and violence individuals faced as James Crumbley’s son opened fired at teachers and students, injuring seven people and killing four of his classmates: Baldwin, Hana St. Julianna, Justin Shilling and Tate Myre.

There were several small actions Crumbley could have taken to prevent the shooting and signs of mental distress from his son that a parent should have acknowledged and sought out help for, McDonald said in her closing arguments Wednesday.

“There were 1,800 students at Oxford High School. There was one parent who suspected that their son was the school shooter and it was James Crumbley,” McDonald said, , telling the operator that a gun was missing from his house.

Crumbley’s lawyer, Mariell Lehman, told the jury during her closing arguments that although the prosecution has shown them “haunting things; tragic things,” they have not shown evidence that Crumbly knew that his son was a danger to others. If they had evidence to prove Crumbley knew what his son was planning, jurors would have seen it.

“The prosecution wants you to find that James could foresee that his son was a danger to others and that James acted in a grossly negligent manner or breached a duty that he owed to other people, despite having no information at the time,” Lehman said during her closing arguments. “You saw no evidence that James had any knowledge that his son was a danger to anyone. You heard no testimony and saw no evidence that James Crumbley knew what his son was planning.”

Crumbley had bought his son the gun used in the shooting four days before the killings, having taken him to the shooting range on several occasions and supervising his usage there.

But during Crumbley’s trial, as well as that of Jennifer Crumbley, questions were raised on .

Ultimately, it would have taken “just one tragically small measure of ordinary care to avoid four deaths” McDonald said calling attention to the meeting the Crumbleys were called to at the school the day of the shooting after the shooter drew a sketch of the gun his father had bought him days prior on his math assignment.

Shawn Hopkins, the school counselor at the meeting the day of the shooting, testified during Jennifer Crumbley’s trial that he was , or that their son would be able to access it. In addition to the drawing of the gun, there was a drawing of a body with blood coming out of it and a few statements including “the thoughts won’t stop” and “help me.”

Hopkins said on Monday that he didn’t tell either parent that they absolutely had to take their son home and the shooter expressed interest in returning class. Hopkins said he did insist that the parents seek out mental health care for their son who had told him that he was experiencing sadness over the recent death of his dog and grandma and was missing his friend who had moved away.

And though neither parent told their son at the meeting that they cared about him after Hopkins told him at the end that he cared about him, Hopkins said James Crumbley did speak to the shooter.

“He was talking to his son and mentioned that, you know, ‘You have people you can talk to; you can talk to your counselor; you have your journal; we talk’ and it felt appropriate at that time,” Hopkins said.

If the shooting had not happened, Hopkins said it was his plan to check in with the shooter to see if his parents had sought out any mental health services for him. And if not, he said he would have called Child Protective Services.

On Tuesday, Oakland County Sheriff’s Office Detective Lt. Timothy Willis offered insight on the shooter’s journal saying that in all the 22 pages the shooter wrote in, he referenced wanting to commit a school shooting. There were also passages where the shooter talks about wanting to get help.

One entry reads: “I have zero HELP for my mental problems and it’s causing me to SHOOT UP THE F—ING SCHOOL.” Another entry reads: “I want help but my parents don’t listen to me so I can’t get any help.”

Later entries chronicle the shooter receiving his gun from Crumbley and detailing his plan to kill people at his school.

Edward Wagrowski, an Oakland County Sheriff’s detective at the time of the shooting, testified last week, showing the jury text messages between the shooter and his friend months before the shooting detailing mental health struggles, including hearing voices.

One text from the shooter reads, “I actually asked my dad to take [me] to the Doctor yesterday but he just gave me some pills and told me to ‘Suck it up.”

If Crumbley had done the simplest of things, as he knew his son was struggling, four kids would still be alive, McDonald said in her closing arguments. If he had listened to his son or read his journal and believed what it said, he could have intervened as the violence his son was planning was foreseeable.

“He sees that drawing that morning when he goes to the school and what does it say? It says, ‘help me.’ How many times does this kid have to say it? He says it in his journal. He says it to his friend and what is he saying? ‘I asked my parents; I asked my dad,’” McDonald said. “And if that isn’t enough, he writes the words “help me” on a piece of paper and his parents, James Crumbley is called to the school to see it and what did he say? He says, ‘We gotta go work.’”

The defense only called on one witness as the burden of proof was not on them. Crumbley’s sister, Karen Crumbley, talked about seeing her brother and nephew, the shooter, in April and then again in the summer, months before the shooting.

Crumbley, who lives in Florida, said she and James Crumbley had been in the hospital with their mother as she was sick at the time. Karen Crumbley said their mother died on April 6, 2021, and the shooter came to Florida to visit shortly after. She didn’t observe anything that would have raised concerns for her.

When she came to Michigan for a summer 2021 visit, she said she didn’t observe anything that gave her reasons to worry about her nephew’s mental state or what kind of care he was receiving from his parents. When asked by the defense if she would have done anything had she observed anything wrong, she said she would have.

“I would have addressed it and if I would have known anything I would have talked to him. I would have took him home with me if there was any kind of inclination that anything was wrong,” Karen Crumbley said. She added that she would have told her brother if she thought something was wrong, but there was nothing she was concerned about.

Moving forward, more needs to be done to address the ways in which children in America are dying from gun violence, Steve St. Juliana, the father of Hana St. Juliana, said at the press conference after the verdict reading. More needs to be done to tackle kids’ declining mental health and other issues and people can’t simply stand behind Second Amendment rights and not talk about what is killing kids.

“We can put people on the moon; we can build skyscrapers, huge monuments like the Hoover Dam and we can’t keep our kids safe in schools?” St. Juliana said. “I think people just need to wake up and take action. Stop accepting the excuses. Stop buying the rhetoric. It is not a Democratic or Republican issue. It’s nonpartisan. Do not accept any excuse from any of the politicians. This needs to be solved and it needs to be solved now. We do not want any other parents to go through what we’ve gone through.”

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She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”

The images were pivotal to an unprecedented conviction this week that legal scholars predict could create a new tool for prosecutors as the nation looks for ways to stem a record-setting uptick in mass shootings.

“This is the last picture we have of that gun until we see it murder four kids on Nov. 30, and the person holding it is Jennifer Crumbley,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said before a jury convicted the mother on four counts of involuntary manslaughter — one for each of the students her son gunned down at Oxford High School. 

“She’s the last person we see with that gun,” McDonald said. 

Crumbley is the first parent to be held directly responsible for a school shooting carried out by their child, turning on its head a bedrock legal principle: People cannot be held responsible for the actions of others.

“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

And if other parents are charged in connection with shootings acted out by their children, Yankah said, the Crumbley conviction may make them more likely to accept a plea deal behind closed doors.

“Prosecutors will be tempted to use this power in ways that we don’t see,” he said. “A prosecutor is going to sit across from a parent when people are crying out for somebody to be held accountable and the prosecutor is going to be able to say, ‘I’m offering you three years to five years in prison, but if you don’t take this deal, I will prosecute for 15 years.’ ” 

For gun control advocates and the parents of children killed in their classrooms, the landmark trial’s outcome was welcomed. Craig Shilling, the father of Oxford shooting victim Justin Shilling, told a local TV station the conviction is “definitely a step towards accountability.” About three-quarters of school shooters obtain their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to a . In about half of cases, the guns had been readily accessible. 

The conviction is in many ways a watershed moment that hinged heavily on portrayals of Crumbley as a neglectful mom who paid more attention to her horses and an affair than to the son she’d gifted a gun to as he struggled with his mental health and exhibited violent behaviors. 

In this case, the gunman was charged as an adult while his mother was found guilty of crimes that stemmed from her role as an egregiously aloof and reckless parent. The gunman pleaded guilty in October 2022 to 24 charges, including first-degree murder and terrorism causing death, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in December. 

The shooter’s father, James Crumbley, is scheduled to face a similar trial next month. 

Yankah, the UMichigan law professor, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ he wasn’t aware of any other cases where a parent was held liable for the crimes of a child who was simultaneously considered “a legal agent” and therefore responsible for his own actions. 

It’s not the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Still, experts said the Crumbley case does present a significant escalation in a generations-long push to hold parents accountable for the misdeed of their kids.

One , published in the Utah Law Review in 2008, noted that such efforts appeared cyclical, noting that “every couple of decades or so” lawmakers claimed to “discover” the idea of holding parents to account for teenage crimes. 

Punishing parents

which impose civil or criminal liability on adults under the premise that their failures to take control as parents led to their kids’ bad acts. There is research that ties youth delinquency to poor parenting. 

One recent parental responsibility law, , specifically addressed guns. It imposed civil liability on parents for negligence or willful misconduct if they allow their minor children to use or possess guns if the child has been adjudicated delinquent, was convicted of a crime, has the propensity to commit violence or intends to use the weapon unlawfully. 

Efforts to hold parents accountable for their children’s behaviors are rooted in the very origins of the nation’s juvenile justice system in the early 1900s, which authorized the state to intervene when parents failed in their duties, and their constitutional implications. By the 1970s, the report notes, lawmakers began to place a greater emphasis on parents as a factor in juvenile crime and turned to

Little is known, however, about whether such efforts have been effective in reducing juvenile crime. Eve Brank, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that she is unaware, after decades of researching the emergence of parental responsibility laws, of “any empirical research that shows that imposing punishments on parents because of the actions of the children will decrease juvenile crime.”

She is also unaware of any data indicating how frequently those laws are used. In 2015, she , who reported infrequent enforcement. Through her research, Brank has identified three types of such laws: civil liability, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and parental involvement. 

Under the statutes, parents can be held responsible for helping or encouraging their child to commit a crime and financially liable for damages. They can also be required to pay fines or attend parenting classes due to their children’s criminal acts. 

Among them are truancy laws, which require students to attend school. In New Jersey, for example, parents who don’t compel their children to attend school can face disorderly conduct charges and fines. Such efforts, however, have been heavily criticized — including during the 2016 presidential election when Vice President Kamala Harris was that imposed jail time and fines on parents in truancy cases while she served as state attorney general. 

In 2017, Pennsylvania lawmakers reformed state truancy rules and made them less punitive after a Reading County woman was found dead in 2014 while serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy because she was unable to pay a $2,000 fine. 

“Many of those statutes came under a lot of strain in the last say 15 years,” including ones around truancy, Yankah said, adding that people were skeptical about whether they addressed the root causes underlying the social problems they sought to address and could uphold long standing racial disparities in the judicial system. “Frankly, communities of color really learned that — as is so often the case — when we pass more criminal statutes the people who are in the crosshairs are politically vulnerable. It was a lot of Black mothers, and so those statutes kind of faded out of popularity.” 

In some cases, parental responsibility laws have failed under court scrutiny. Among them is an ordinance in Maple Heights, Ohio, that for “failing to supervise a minor” if their child committed what would be considered a misdemeanor or a felony if it had been carried out by an adult. The in 2008 after a parent faced charges after her 17-year-old son was accused in juvenile court of carrying a concealed weapon, resisting arrest and failing to comply with a police officer. 

Meanwhile, officials have also sought to hold parents responsible when their children bully other kids. In 2016, the city council in Shawano, Wisconsin, passed an ordinance that on parents who failed to address their child’s harassment directed at other kids. 

In a high-profile cyberbullying case from 2013, a Florida sheriff bemoaned his of a girl who was charged criminally for harassing a 12-year-old classmate so relentlessly online that it led the girl to die by suicide. Among the harassment was an online message encouraging the 12-year-old to “drink bleach and die,” yet the parents continued to give the bully access to social media. 

“I’m aggravated that the parents aren’t doing what parents should do,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters at the time. “Responsible parents take disciplinary action.” 

A new category of parental responsibility

Crumbley’s conviction, Brank said, “doesn’t fit into any of these categories” of traditional parental responsibility laws and is instead a first-of-its-kind extension of the manslaughter statute. 

As officials seek to crack down on mass shootings, the Crumbley case is one of several recent examples where prosecutors sought to hold parents accountable when their children carried out what once were unthinkable acts of violence.

In December, a Virginia mother was for felony child neglect after her 6-year-old son brought a gun to his Newport News elementary school and shot his first-grade teacher. In a separate prosecution, the mother pleaded guilty to using marijuana while owning a firearm and for making false statements about her drug use. 

In a separate prosecution that may have laid the groundwork for the Crumbley case, to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges that stemmed from a shooting carried out by his son at a 2022 Highland Park Independence Day parade, which left seven people dead. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license. 

At the time of the massacre, the gunman was too young to apply for a firearm license so his father sponsored his application despite knowing his son had a history of behaving violently. Several months before the attack, a relative reported to police that the teenager had a large collection of knives and had threatened to “kill everyone.” 

In the Highland Park case, was explicit: The father’s guilty plea, he said, should be a “beacon” to others that parents can be held accountable for the actions of their children. 

“We’ve laid down a marker to other prosecutors, to other police in this country, to other parents, that they must be held accountable,” Lake County State Attorney Eric Rinehart said. “The risk of potentially losing this innovative prosecution — and not putting down any marker — was too great for our trial team.” 

Yankah said it’s important to look at new parental accountability efforts through their historical contexts. 

“Looking back at history,” he said, “shows us that our historical experiments with this kind of liability for parents has rarely solved the underlying problem,” he said. “Maybe this kind of case will have an effect, maybe parents will be more attentive. But to speak honestly, I think what a case like this shows is how many different things we as a society have to work on if we really want to be free of this violence.”