The mother of the teenager who carried out Michigan’s deadliest school shooting testified on Thursday that her son had never asked for professional help with mental health issues, despite what he wrote in a journal. She also said that he was just “messing around” when he sent his parents texts about seeing a demon.
Prosecutors are seeking to hold the mother, Jennifer Crumbley, partially responsible for her son’s rampage at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021. Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, killed four people and injured seven others.
The case against Ms. Crumbley, 45, who faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter, centers on a thorny legal question: To what extent can parents be held responsible for violent crimes committed by their children?
Marc Keast, an Oakland County prosecutor, said that Ms. Crumbley and her husband ignored glaring warning signs and “didn’t do any number of tragically small and easy things that would have prevented all of this from happening.” The husband, James Crumbley, 45, is also charged and will be tried separately in March.
The prosecution in Michigan rested its case before Ms. Crumbley took the stand on Thursday. Over several days of witness testimony, prosecutors introduced text messages from the months before the shooting in which Ethan had told his mother that their home was haunted, possibly by a demon. Ms. Crumbley, they pointed out, did not always respond.
But Ms. Crumbley said on Thursday that Ethan and his parents had joked for years about whether their house was haunted, adding that he had at times played with a Ouija board in the basement. “He was always sarcastic,” she said. “Always messing around with us.”
Earlier on Thursday, a detective guided jurors through the pages of Ethan’s journal, which had been found at the school after the shooting. He had written about a plan to cause bloodshed, adding drawings of guns and pleas for help regarding his mental health.
“My parents won’t listen to me about help or a therapist,” he wrote. But Ms. Crumbley said that she had never seen the journal entries, nor heard her son ask for a therapist.
She also described a meeting with school officials that took place about two hours before the shooting. She and her husband had gone to the high school after Ethan wrote troubling things on a math worksheet, including the phrase “Blood Everywhere.”
Ms. Crumbley said that after a counselor shared his concerns about Ethan’s mental health, they decided together that her son could stay at school rather than go home alone. “We talked about him being sad,” she said, “and he said being around peers usually helps.”
Ms. Crumbley’s defense lawyer, Shannon Smith, had hoped to question Ethan Crumbley, but the judge said she would not require him to testify, because he was expected to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The prosecution of the Crumbleys is at the leading edge of a push by some officials to hold parents accountable when they are accused of enabling deadly violence by their children. In the last few months, parents whose children carried out gun violence in other states have pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct or neglect.
The Crumbleys left their home in Oxford shortly after the shooting, in what prosecutors have suggested was an attempt to flee from the authorities. The couple were arrested in Detroit on Dec. 4, 2021. Ms. Smith has argued that the couple feared for their safety in the face of relentless threats.
On Thursday, Ms. Crumbley testified that she had been planning to turn herself in to the authorities.
Prosecutors spent a significant portion of their weeklong case focused on a trove of electronic communications that they say show Ms. Crumbley could have done more to prevent her son’s deadly actions. They also spent time discussing Ethan’s access to a firearm, but that may be more of a focus in Mr. Crumbley’s trial, because the evidence indicates that his father bought Ethan the Sig Sauer pistol used in the shooting.
In addition to the message about a demon, there were messages that Ethan sent to a friend in April 2021, complaining of insomnia, paranoia and hearing voices. The prosecution also shared messages exchanged by Ms. Crumbley with her husband, colleagues and her friends, which prosecutors said suggested that she was more concerned about taking care of her two horses than she was about her son’s apparent distress.
But Ms. Smith, the defense lawyer, argued that the months of messages had been cherry-picked.
On Wednesday afternoon, the testimony of Brian Meloche, a longtime friend of Ms. Crumbley whom she had texted with after the shooting, took a surprise turn: After an argument between the lawyers and a consultation with the judge, the prosecution and defense agreed to reveal to the jurors that before the shooting, Ms. Crumbley and Mr. Meloche were having an extramarital affair.
In some of her messages to Mr. Meloche, Ms. Crumbley expressed anxiety and regret, saying in one: “I failed as a parent.” But in others, she suggested that school officials were to blame. “The system failed,” she wrote.