PABLO SCARPELLINI Los Angeles
The Angels
Updated Tuesday, February 6, 2024-22:52
USA How (not) to raise a son who will be a murderer
Event A 15-year-old student kills three high school classmates in the US
Jennifer Crumbley
will pay up to
15 years in prison
for her teenage son's crimes. After 11 hours of deliberation, a jury in Pontiac
, Michigan
, found guilty the mother of Ethan Crumbley, who at the age of 15 entered Oxford High School on November 30, 2021 and murdered
four students between the ages of 14 and 14 in cold blood.
and 17 years,
in a judicial decision that marks important history in the United States.
Crumbley, 45, was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the boys her son, now 17, killed. Ethan Crumbley, who
was sentenced last year to life in prison,
did not testify at his mother's trial, a trial that hinged on the parents' level of responsibility for the killing. They were the ones who gave Ethan the gun that he used to commit the massacre.
According to the jury,
Crumbley did not alert the school about the weapons they kept at home
and to which his teenage son had access
. She also did not detect the moment of depression
he was going through to have prevented him from committing the barbarity. In the words of one of the prosecutors, Marc Keast, the defendant "didn't do any of the tragically small and easy things that would have prevented all of this from happening." Her father, James Crumbley, 47, will be tried in March for the same crime.
The verdict is historic since
it is the first time that a father has been found guilty
of a massacre committed by his son at a school in the United States, in a country where this type of incident has become tragically common. In 2023, 83 school shootings were recorded and in 2022, 46 people lost their lives in educational centers. It was the year of the Uvalde massacre, in Texas, when a teenager killed 19 children and two teachers.
Crumbley defended herself against the allegations during nearly three hours of testimony, and her attorney, Shannon Smith, described her as a "hypervigilant" mother to her son. This despite the fact that at school he had been warned about a drawing that the young man made for a mathematics assignment in which a gun, an injured man and worrying phrases about his mental health appeared.
"The thoughts don't stop. Help. The world is dead. My life has no meaning
," she wrote.
At the parents' subsequent meeting at the school, located in a suburb about 70 kilometers north of Detroit, they could have reported on the gun that they had given to their son and that he already handled with ease. But they didn't say anything. Two hours after that meeting, the boy went on a shooting rampage with his companions, leaving
seven wounded
in addition to the four fatalities.
Crumbley's lawyer said that this is a
"very dangerous case for parents out there"
because of the fate that many of them may face in similar situations. The responsibility no longer lies solely with disturbed young people.