Their son, Ethan, is serving a life sentence for the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting.
The parents of a Michigan school shooting teen were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison on Tuesday in an unprecedented and high-profile case.
Jennifer Crumbley, 46, and her husband James, 47, are the first parents of a school shooter in the United States to be convicted of manslaughter for their children’s actions.
Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Matthews sentenced them to 10 and 15 years in prison, respectively, for the 28 months they have already spent behind bars.
Their son, Ethan, now 17, is serving a life sentence for the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting at Oxford High School, 45 miles (70 kilometers) north of Detroit, which killed four students and injured seven others. .
“Parents are not supposed to be psychic,” Matthews said during an emotional sentencing hearing in Pontiac, Mich., which was also attended by the victim’s parents.
“But these beliefs have nothing to do with poor parenting,” Matthews said. “These convictions establish that their repeated actions or inactions may have stopped the oncoming runaway train.”
Craig Shilling, the 17-year-old father of one of the dead students, Justin Shilling, spoke in court before the sentencing, telling the Crumbleys, “You have our kids on your hands. of blood.”
Steve St. Juliana, the father of another victim, Hana St. Juliana, 14, said her murder “destroyed a lot of my soul. Most of it”.
“I will never have the opportunity to hold her or her future children in my arms,” he said.
‘panic’
In separate trials, the Crumbleys were accused of ignoring warnings that their son suffered from mental health problems.
Jennifer Crumbley testified during the trial that her husband had purchased the 9 mm SIG Sauer pistol he used in the attack for his son days earlier as an early Christmas gift.
The day after the purchase, she took the boy to a shooting range.
On the day of the shooting, the Crumbleys were summoned to school after a teacher was alarmed to find a violent drawing on Ethan’s desk.
They saw the painting and suggested they needed to get the boy into counseling. The parents allegedly refused to take their son home and he returned to class.
He then entered a bathroom, came out with a gun hidden in his backpack, and fired more than 30 times.
Amid a spate of fatal gun incidents involving young people in the United States, pressure is growing to punish parents who allow their children to obtain weapons.
The father of an Illinois man accused of killing seven people in July 2022 pleaded guilty in November to a misdemeanor charge of “reckless conduct” for helping his son obtain an assault rifle used in the mass shooting.
A Virginia woman whose six-year-old son shot and wounded his teacher was recently sentenced to two years in prison for felony child neglect. She was sentenced to a further 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to unlawfully obtaining a firearm.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
