When Jennifer and James Crumbley were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter this spring, it was the first time parents were convicted for a role in a school shooting. John Woodrow Cox, enterprise reporter for The Washington Post, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his time embedded with the prosecutor who built the case against the parents of a son who killed four students at his high school – and what it means for future legal cases regarding the actions of minors. His article is “Guilty: Inside the high-risk, historic prosecution of a school shooter’s parents.”
Bad parenting isn’t illegal. Negligence is.
By Sophia Anderson, Think Intern
In April 2024, the parents of a school shooter were convicted of homicide. Their prosecution was unprecedented and its application to future school shooting cases has yet to be determined.
John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter for the Washington Post who shadowed Oakland County district attorney Karen McDonald throughout the two years it took to build a case against Jennifer and James Crumbley. He came on “Think” to discuss his long-form article, “Guilty: Inside the high-risk, historic prosecution of a school shooter’s parents.”
In November 2021, Ethan Crumbley killed four peers and injured seven others when he opened fire at his high school using the 9mm handgun his parents bought him as an early Christmas gift. As is the case with most school shooters, there were many signs that Ethan was mentally ill, suicidal and planning a shooting. As is also the case with many parents of school shooters, James and Jennifer maintain the assertion that Ethan was a good kid who gave no indication of his plan.
As McDonald revealed in her prosecution, the Crumbley household was a tumultuous one. She painted a picture of absent parents who drank often, spent money callously and had extramarital affairs. The first witness the prosecution called established that James and Jennifer spent hours a week and hundreds of dollars on their horses, and a fraction of that on their son.
But, as the defense and critics who followed the case online pointed out, none of those facts are criminal. The real substance of this case was in the behavior of the parents that could be classified as criminally negligent.
Through text messages and testimony, McDonald showed that Ethan was socially isolated and likely experiencing symptoms of a psychotic break of some kind. He had repeatedly texted his parents to tell them he was seeing and hearing demons, begging them for help that he never received. Instead, they bought him a gun.
When Ethan’s teachers found him researching ammunition in class and informed his parents, Jennifer jokingly reminded Ethan not to get caught. Later that week, Ethan was caught drawing guns and writing variations of “help me” and “blood everywhere” on his math homework.
At the request of the school, his parents reluctantly came in for an emergency meeting that lasted eleven minutes, and left without asking if Ethan was okay, or if he had his gun with him. Shortly after they left, Ethan opened fire and his father called 911 upon discovering Ethan’s gun was missing from their home.
Ethan’s case was cut and dry. He was arrested on the scene and later pled guilty and was sentenced to life without parole. But as McDonald and her team began reviewing the facts of his case, she became convinced that Ethan’s parents were partially responsible for the shooting. McDonald eventually convinced her team that their actions amounted to criminal negligence, and she charged both parents with homicide.
Instead of surrendering to the local police department as planned, James and Jennifer disappeared. When police found them hiding in a warehouse, the couple was arrested and jailed with a bail so high that they were forced to remain in jail for the duration of their trials. Even in court, the two were required to be shackled in hand cuffs and belly chains.
An essential point in both cases was how the gun was stored. Despite Ethan’s parent’s original claim to the contrary, the gun was not locked the day of the shooting. McDonald demonstrated in court how to secure a 9mm by threading the lock through the barrel of the gun in less than ten seconds.
Michigan did not have a safe storage gun law at the time of the trials but has since passed one. Unattended guns are now required to be kept unloaded and locked if there is a reasonable expectation of a minor being present on the premises. Cox has heard from readers who say that this case and his article convinced them to be more diligent about locking their guns.
Jennifer and James Crumbley, who remained adamant of their innocence, were given the maximum sentence of ten to fifteen years in prison. They are not permitted to see one another or their son during their incarceration.
“I think ultimately, even if there was not a larger effect, the prosecutors would have said it was worth it because they were very, very, very narrowly focused on the injustice that they thought had occurred here, and that the role that these parents played in the deaths of those four kids at Oxford High School,” Cox said.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd When parents list school shootings among their greatest fears, they’re, of course, terrified of their own child being targeted. But surely some tiny subset of parents has an even more unsettling fear, when they might hesitate to even talk about the fear that their child could be the one pulling the trigger. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think, I’m Krys Boyd.
We want to believe parents with even the slightest sense that their child could be violent would seek intense and immediate help. Therapy, medication, whatever. We want to believe those parents would fully cooperate with school authorities who had concerns. And of course, we would expect those parents to block their child’s access to deadly weapons. But that is not what happened in Michigan in 2021, when a 15 year old student shot 11 people at his high school, including four classmates who died from their injuries. Ethan Crumbley was charged as an adult, pleaded guilty and eventually sentenced to life in prison. But the county prosecutor overseeing the case became convinced the teenager’s parents deserved a share of the blame. And, as we’ll hear, she was willing to risk her safety and her reputation to hold them accountable. John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter who embedded with prosecutors in Pontiac, Michigan, as they pursued those charges against an entire family. His long form article for The Washington Post is titled Guilty Inside the High-Risk Historic Prosecution of a School Shooter’s Parents. Jhon, welcome to think.
John Woodrow Cox Thanks for having me.
Krys Boyd So you really spent extensive time on this story. What made you decide to devote the better part of two years of your life to this?
John Woodrow Cox You know, I’ve been written, writing about, the impact of gun violence on children in America for, for many years now, since, 2017. I wrote a book about this subject. And, you know, one element that I always thought was undercovered was, just access to firearms, children’s access to firearms. And, you know, we created a database of school shootings going all the way back to Columbine and in analyzing all those events. One thing we could say definitively is that if children did not have access to guns, more than half of those school shootings would never have happened. They just would. They would not have happened. And that’s still true today. If children in need access to guns, then, you know, more than half of school shootings would just end. And, you know, that’s sort of disregarding the huge rate of suicides among, children who live in homes with unsecured firearms. That also ignores the children who find those guns and accidentally shoot themselves or someone else. So it was really viewed it as kind of the low hanging fruit of this issue. And one that, you know, we knew from analyzing, historical cases that very rarely do prosecutors hold gun owners, period, whether the parents or someone else, the adult gun owners. Very rarely are they held responsible. So this struck me as, potentially a watershed case that, I had never seen a prosecutor take this step in charging parents with homicide, as a result of, a school shooting. So right away, it just seemed like something that would be different and significant on this issue. And so I right away, I had hoped to do something deeper.
Krys Boyd So it doesn’t seem like an easy thing to convince prosecutors to open up their offices and their private meetings to you. The only condition, though, that they said appears to have been that you weren’t allowed to write about any of this until after the conclusion of all of the criminal cases.
John Woodrow Cox That’s right. I mean, they I think, Karen McDonald especially. She’s an avid reader. I think she’s a student of history. And I think she understood the significance of the case whether they won or lost. Certainly, though, they were taking a risk, in letting me in, because I could have seen, what would have been, I think for many of them, the low moment of their, careers had they had they lost. So, you know, I think that the fact that I’d written a book about it that sort of helped my case in getting inside, I think that all help, but certainly, yeah, there was there was great risk, to them. I mean, like any story that journalists do, there are elements that are inevitably, off the record, small things that, you know, that are held off the record, which is true on any story. And occasionally they would ask me to for witness interviews or, witness prep, things like that. They would occasionally ask me to step out of the room, but it was really rare. I mean, I was I was in the room for, virtually anything that I wanted to be in the room for.
Krys Boyd So in my introduction, I gave the broadest outlines of the shooting. What context do we need to understand why? Karen McDonald to you mentioned who was the elected, prosecutor in Oakland County, Michigan, became convinced that Ethan Crumbley parents deserve to be held accountable for what their son did wrong.
John Woodrow Cox It began with them. Jennifer and James Crumbley buying their son a firearm. A nine millimeter that they, Mrs. Crumbley characterized as his Xmas present, his Xmas gift. This was obviously in late November, so she framed it on social media as this was sort of his early, Christmas present. They went to the gun range, and tested it out. They they themselves described it as his firearm, not as their firearm that they were letting him use, but as his firearm. There was, evidence very quickly when they reviewed the parents phones. This is after the shooting that showed that, the day before the shooting, that, the teenager had been caught in class looking up, ammunition on his phone, and they had called the school or the school, rather, had called his mother and left a voicemail. And so she text her son. You know, and kind of made a joke of it. She said, you know, did you at least show them a pic of your new gun? And he said, no, I didn’t show them the pic. And then at the end of this exchange, she said, and I’ll just read the quote lol. I’m not mad. You have to learn not to get caught. So that was another element that was, pretty shocking to the prosecution. The most compelling thing, though, was that the morning of the shooting, he had on this math worksheet, basically drawn what he was going to do. He drew a picture of the nine millimeter that his parents bought him. He drew a picture of a person who was shot dead. He, said thing, wrote things like, the world is dead. Yeah. Blood everywhere, blood everywhere. The thoughts won’t stop. Help me. All in a worksheet. So this is found. A teacher sees this, the counselor gets involved. And the counselor immediately calls the parents. So both Jennifer and James come to the office. They’re there, if I recall correctly, for 11 minutes. It’s a very brief meeting. He asks if they can, take him home, and they declined to do that. They say that they have work demands. Jennifer returns to an office, a real estate company, where she was, worked in marketing, where, by the account of other parents there, they often brought their their kids with them to work. James Crumbly was a DoorDash driver, and he started making deliveries. And, you know, by the account of the, the witnesses there, neither of them gave their son a hug. Neither of them asked about the gun. They didn’t ask if he had it with them, if it was in his backpack. They left, and a few hours later, he opened fire, killing four students and wounding seven other people in the school.
Krys Boyd How did Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents, try to disappear themselves in the days after the shooting?
John Woodrow Cox So there was, obviously an intense this was at the time I mean, this is this has been, this sort of says something I think about, gun violence and mass shootings in this country. But at the time, a shooting that many people now sort of don’t remember, it was the biggest news story in the country, for a moment. And obviously there was a lot of interest in the parents really early on. They. Ultimately left that area. They went to a hotel. And then, there’s a lot sort of in dispute about whether or not they were fleeing. But ultimately these charges were issued. They did not turn themselves in. There was a massive manhunt in the state of Michigan, and they were found in a, warehouse, this sort of commercial building in Detroit, where police had been searching for quite a long time bashing doors in. And they were found, sleeping, laying down. That’s a little bit in dispute whether or not they were awake or not. When the police finally broke this door in and, and arrested them.
Krys Boyd But this was long before they had been formally charged themselves. Right. And it’s not a regular thing for parents to be charged in connection with their children’s crimes. In fact, parents of a school shooter, as I understand it, had never before, been charged following a homicide committed by their kids at a school. Did they ever say why they went on the run?
John Woodrow Cox So they had never been charged with homicide? There have been parents who have been charged with lesser crimes, in the years in the last 25 years. But this was certainly the most serious charges that parents had ever, had ever been charged with. The that that element, though, when they were, I think, accused of fleeing that did occur after these charges were formally issued. They had left their own home, though certainly before they were charged. Part of that was I think the media scrutiny certainly was intense. They’re also their home was being searched. I mean, it was sort of it wasn’t considered a crime scene, but it was certainly a scene of evidence. So the, you know, the police were going through, every single element, every single of anything in that home, you know, for, for, digital evidence for, other firearms. And so they had been asked at a point to, to leave because they, they had to search the house. The police had taken their phones away. So I think they did what I think most people would do, in these situations and what we’ve seen other parents do where they sort of go stay in a hotel. And then there was this sort of additional step that certainly the defense would not say that they were fleeing. The prosecution certainly did say they were fleeing. And ultimately the the judge in the case thought that was credible. I mean, one really unusual thing about this case, these people would have been released on a lower bond, and they would not have spent the last, you know, two and a half years in jail if not for the element of flight. The judge certainly thought there was compelling evidence that they were fleeing. Hiding. You know, unlike most parents in this situation, without a criminal history, they would have been released. They would have been living out in the world, but instead they they spent all this time waiting for trial, behind bars.
Krys Boyd John, let’s shift back to the prosecutor here, Karen McDonald. In pursuing these unorthodox, unprecedented charges against the parents of the shooter, did she have a broader goal besides bringing in these two individuals she thought might be partially culpable? And, like, was she looking to send a message of some kind?
John Woodrow Cox She was always insistent that. That this was a unique case, that the, with a unique set of facts, that, she wouldn’t have charged them without those set of facts, but certainly in her head her initial press conference, in charging this, she did talk about sort of the responsibility of broader gun ownership, and that, you know, people needed to take care of their guns and, and prevent them from falling into the hands of their children. I think, though, that, repeatedly she went back to this idea that, you know, even if, however, she felt about this issue politically, that if not for these really what she considered egregious set of facts, an egregious label of negligence, that she would not have, pursued it? I think certainly there was hope among all the people who worked on this that there would be, it would be a thing that people would pay attention to. And, and, potentially would save lives, you know, beyond Oxford.
Krys Boyd From the outset, John, the prosecutor, Karen McDonald, faced resistance within her own office in bringing charges against the parents, James and Jennifer Crumbly. What were the concerns of the people who worked for Karen McDonald about these charges?
John Woodrow Cox I mean, these were these are really credible attorneys, people who had, prosecuted a great many cases, and some of it was highly technical. It was issues of the law, whether or not they could actually, prove these charges before a jury. And a lot of it was around this idea of whether the parents, actions fit the definition of gross negligence that Michigan law required, to convict someone of involuntary manslaughter. So part of that process in those early days was just pouring through, these Michigan statutes. Her team was just pouring through these records to figure out whether or not it did, in fact, fit the definition. Ultimately, she decided that it absolutely did. And, you know, there was a point, I think, when she made it really clear that, you know, there was this sort of dramatic meeting where she gathers all of her senior attorneys, she’s reviewed all the evidence. She’s she’s looked at the law and they’re still very much undecided. There’s still resistance. And she walks into this meeting and says, I want to hear your opinions. You know, be honest with me. But, you know, no, this we’re charging the parents. She made that decision because she just she felt, in her bones, that it was the right thing to do and that the law supported it. So at that point. Everybody got on board and really started digging into it and on how they would, write these charges because it was, you know, involuntary manslaughter is a lot different than something like first degree murder. And, it’s a lot of it is highly technical. And that really was a lot of their resistance in the early going was does the law, the letter of the law actually fit this case?
Krys Boyd So as you mentioned, involuntary manslaughter often requires prosecutors to prove gross negligence. What does that term mean legally?
John Woodrow Cox So that is, is complicated. Is that is complicated. And, could take the rest of the segment.
Krys Boyd Cyou give us some general understanding of it?
John Woodrow Cox Yeah. So that is, is a is a really technical thing that actually the prosecutors spent a huge amount of time, trying to to determine exactly how they would explain this to jury and the jury in a way that was both factual but also understandable, because it is, it is highly technical the the way that the prosecutor, the assistant prosecutor, Mark Keast, explained it is that, you know, involuntary manslaughter, unlike something like murder, it is by definition unintentional. And it’s rooted in this idea of, of negligence. And it’s committed when, someone’s basically their acts or their failure to act, means that they failed to perform a legal duty. That is what happened here. That’s what they allege is that the parents of Ethan Crumbly, that he had a legal duty to the other students at that school, and specifically in this case, they were alleging of these four kids who were killed, that they had a legal duty, to act in a way to protect them. And it had to reach this point of, obviously of gross negligence. And what they allege was that that specific meeting these parents by their son, a gun, they know that he has access to that gun because it’s not locked up. They go to school, they see this math worksheet that is, clearly somebody who’s thinking about committing a violent act, or at least that act is in his mind. And they walk away and they don’t do anything to intervene. So they determined the prosecution determined that that meant that sort of legal duty, that they had failed in their duty, to protect these other students at that school.
Krys Boyd It’s my understanding that prosecutors often, lean heavily, at least on the recommendations made by local law enforcement. But the sheriff’s office in Oakland County didn’t initially suggest charging the parents. Is that right?
John Woodrow Cox That is right. Yeah. So, Lieutenant Tim Willis, he was the lead investigator on this case. And and early on, after they had, come to the prosecutor’s office and presented, the evidence against the shooter. Karen McDonald immediately sort of pulls aside this lieutenant from the sheriff’s office and says, you know, what do you think about charging the parents? And he said, absolutely not. I mean, that was his recollection. That was her recollection. He was he was totally resistant to it and part of it. Everybody involved, including the attorneys in her office, that part of the resistance was rooted in this idea that it just hadn’t been done before, that there was not precedent. Certainly, attorneys want to base their actions on precedent. Our legal system is built on precedent. And but that is also really true for for law enforcement oftentimes as well. Is is, Lieutenant Willis was not familiar with this having been done before. Also, he was exhausted, having spent hours, working the most horrific crime scene of his, of his career. And he was very much focused on the shooter at that point. So part of it was his mind just sort of hadn’t come around to this idea. Certainly over time, he became, fully on board somebody who absolutely believe they should have been charged. And he was their their key witness, one of their key witnesses in the case.
Krys Boyd People in Karen McDonald’s family describe her. People have known her her whole life, described as having been a strong willed kid who didn’t care all that much about grades. She was a risk taker who didn’t necessarily feel bound by all the rules. It doesn’t sound like the classic profile of somebody who grows up to be a prosecutor, but I’m curious about the evidence that you saw of those early attributes in the energy she brought to these particular cases.
John Woodrow Cox Yeah, I think she had a really strong sense of justice like early on, in fairness, even, even like some of her earliest memories were, you know, sitting at the kitchen table at her home and she was one of three girls, and one of her earliest memories. She must have been, you know, 4 or 5 years old is sitting at the table, and her mother was yelling and just sort of thinking like, this isn’t right, that this is wrong. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. And it’s one of sort of these formative moments. And she felt kind of that sense all the time. I mean, an anecdote that wasn’t in the the story that I thought, illustrates that idea is, is she and her sister, she had a twin has a twin. And, once they were, you know, they were teens and her sister had just started driving and someone, struck her sister’s car. And, Karen was in the passenger seat. And as her sister remembered it, Karen immediately springs out of the car to go confront the driver of this other car who was at fault, basically, to tell him that he had done this thing that he shouldn’t have done and that he was in the wrong, and that how could you do this to my sister? So those sort of protective instincts, kicked in.
Krys Boyd Maybe that does sound like exactly the sort of person who would grow up to become a prosecutor.
John Woodrow Cox I think there were elements there. I do think there were elements there. I mean, she was always sort of disinterested, though, in grades and and, you know, she was not somebody who was ever striving to be the valedictorian. I think part of it was she just sort of hadn’t found her place in the world. And also, I think part of that could be attributed to the, sort of the chaos at home. But she did always, I think, have a really, clear sense of right and wrong and, and also that paired with. An extreme work ethic that, once it once you sort of found things that she was interested in, she would outwork, anybody and to, a really deep well of empathy. She is a an extraordinarily empathetic person. And I’ve spent enough time to know that that is real, you know, a great many 90% of that, you know, didn’t make the story, just because, you can only write stories to be so long. But, it is a lot of empathy to a job that we probably don’t typically think of as being that, kind of central quality that a prosecutor would have. But that certainly shapes the way that she thinks about the job.
Krys Boyd It was significantly risky for her to take this on. I mean, she’d only been on the job after having been elected. It had been less than a year, right, since she took office. And then she was getting threats, and these were not they didn’t feel like idle threats.
John Woodrow Cox No, I mean, the very first day. She she was getting inundated with threats that are on her phone, email, social media, very specific threats about, killing her, raping her. I mean, really violent, vile threats. And they never ended, you know, and they were so intense that very quickly they realized and they seemed credible enough, that very quickly they realized they need to have security for, I think that was in the over the course of this trial. That was certainly in the back of everybody’s minds. But, you know, it fundamentally changed her life, her ability to just be a normal person and go out and do normal things, to take walks with her dog, to go to the grocery store. Those were all things she she quit doing. I mean, she has, a detail that really stuck with me was she has a glass front door and, she really regretted that after this, and she quit walking in front of it because, you know, not only was it easier to see through, it would be easy for somebody to to shoot through.
Krys Boyd So these cases would turn in part on the Crumbley parents failure to properly secure this weapon so it couldn’t be used by their son to harm anyone. But Michigan had no law requiring gun owners to secure their weapons. Is that correct?
John Woodrow Cox That is correct. Yeah. There was no safe storage law in Michigan at the time, and certainly that would have made the argument. I think the legal argument cleaner and easier and simpler had that existed. It does now, since the shooting occurred, the state of Michigan did pass a safe storage law. But no, it did not at the time. And the prosecutor decided that she did not need that to prove that this met the criteria of involuntary manslaughter.
Krys Boyd So what McDonald and her team had to demonstrate. What was that? Securing the gun would have been a simple, common sense thing that pretty much any responsible person would do, and no to do.
John Woodrow Cox So they argued it in a number of different ways. So they said that, as they put it, there were innumerable tragically small ways that this could have been stopped. One of those ways not be way, but one of those ways was if they had secured this firearm and, you know, the gun came with a cable lock, which is a very simple device that, you can thread either through the barrel of a gun or, through the magazine. Well, that makes it inoperable. And they had that and had never used it. The evidence showed. So that was one of the arguments. You know, another argument that certainly they made is they could have just taken their son home. They could have said, is the gun in the backpack? There were other things that, other interventions that they argued to the jury, that that could have occurred. And they, they argued that this was this was one of them, certainly in the minds of jurors. That was a key element.
Krys Boyd I think. Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty and expressed remorse. Did James or Jennifer Crumbley express any remorse at any point?
John Woodrow Cox You know, I think they certainly expressed sorrow for the parents. You know, James Crumbley in jail calls, describing himself as a martyr. More than once, and felt like he was the victim. Jennifer Crumbly took the stand, and she was asked by her attorney if she considered herself a victim. She thought for several seconds about how to answer that. Ultimately said that she didn’t want to call herself a victim because, she didn’t want to sort of offend the families, but that she agreed with her, her attorney, that she had, quote, lost everything. And she also said that she wouldn’t have done anything differently. She said on the stand, looking back, that she would not have done anything differently.
Krys Boyd Did James Crumbley also make threats? Maybe not directly to Karen McDonald, but against her.
John Woodrow Cox He did repeatedly in jail calls that he knew were being recorded because he would comment often. I know these are being recorded really profane threats, intense threats. He promised retribution. He called her terrible names. He said that she was effed. When I get out, she would be sucking on a hot rock down in hell soon. Very direct threat. Yeah, and they were all recorded and he knew it at the time to.
Krys Boyd A huge part of any criminal case decided at trial is selecting the jury panel to hear and decide on the evidence. How did McDonald’s team approach that process?
John Woodrow Cox That was a really fascinating thing to to witness. I mean, it took them days and days and what they did is, is they they got these names, both sides, as in any case, they get these the names of the people in the pool in advance. And they did kind of what journalists would do. They looked on social media. They googled their names just to try to find any clues that would suggest whether they might be a good juror or one that would not be a good fit, that they that they don’t think would be sympathetic to their case. And then they created a spreadsheet. They took notes. They added questions. If these people actually made it into the jury box. So they did a huge amount of preparation in advance of both trials.
Krys Boyd What was McDonald’s able to learn about whether juries came in with any preexisting bias against her as the person pursuing these unprecedented charges, presumably in a community where lots of people might own firearms?
John Woodrow Cox There was a lot of worry and paranoia about that. Ultimately, she wanted her colleague Mark Keyes to lead jury selection, but a jury consultant had told her, like, look, if people show up with this bias against you need to take it on straight away. You need to, you know, flesh it out and undo it. And there were certainly people in the larger pool who whose opinions worried them. None of those people that I recall made it into the jury pool. People who said at least they volunteered that they had strong opinions one way or the other about the prosecutor. But it was a thing, certainly, that they were concerned about and had prepared for it.
Krys Boyd John, are there particular challenges faced by women prosecutors in how they present themselves before a jury that are perhaps less of a concern for men in the same job? That might account for why, for example, Karen McDonald wanted her colleague Mark Keyes to do jury selection?
John Woodrow Cox Yeah. I mean, there’s a there’s a huge number of of challenges that are unique to being a female prosecutor rather than a male prosecutor. I think, you know, a lot of that probably could be credited to sort of television is kind of the, in the same way we only think about coaches or people in these sort of positions of authority that, qualities that are seen as beneficial in men are often seen as, somehow a negative in a woman. So, you know, she was preparing for this. There was so much she had to think about. The way she dressed was, was I mean, she was very deliberate. And she she wanted to make these strangers feel comfortable to reveal, you know, their prejudices. Right? So she she wanted to be committed and not controlling. She had to be smart, but also not condescending. She had to figure out if they own guns without making them feel judged about whether they owned guns. And she needed to be likable. And, you know, I think some of those are things that certainly a a male prosecutor would think about. They all want to be likable. That is that is for sure. I mean, you talk to jury consultants or prosecutors, they know that it is important to win a case, which is a little bit scary if we think about sort of our system that the likability or dislike ability of a prosecutor or defense attorney can actually maybe influence the way that jurors think. But, these were all things that she was hyper aware of and was very careful in the way that she responded to any juror. And, if they gave her pushback or if they said anything that was derogatory about her or the case or any of it, and that did happen. I mean, there were people who spoke up and sort of slammed the case, but she had to be very careful about the way she approached it, because she knew there would be a different level of scrutiny entirely because of her gender.
Krys Boyd Setting aside her gender, I mean, sometimes a person decides that a particular cause is something that they will pursue at whatever risk to their career and their sort of personal well-being. It’s another thing entirely to sort of get the rest of the team on board. I’m I’m curious about what fellow prosecutors who work under her say Karen McDonald is like as a boss and a mentor and a colleague.
John Woodrow Cox I mean, she she has real devotion around her. And I it’s a big team of people and they are truly devoted. And, you know, I spent enough time to know, to be able to recognize whether that was real or not. And I also saw these people at their most exhausted and vulnerable and their guards gone. And there was without question, there was devotion. I mean, I think they they believed in her belief also. You know, some of it goes back to that element of empathy. She was always really aware of how everybody around her was doing. She was checking on them not to say that she didn’t have a hard edge because she did. She does and also has very exacting standards, I think, under someone else who maybe wasn’t willing to work as hard or. Who couldn’t maybe muster that sort of devotion. It might not have gone that way, but she very much leads by consensus, even though this really didn’t start with consensus. She does like to build consensus. She likes to go around the room regardless of people’s stature. She wants to know their opinions. I mean, I saw her many times turn to the legal aides, you know, people who are not attorneys and want them to express their opinion.
Krys Boyd People may recall that these trials made national headlines, in part because of the charges brought against the parents were so unusual. The fact that they made national headlines meant they were the national subject of debate for a time. How much didn’t MacDonald pay attention to the criticism lobbed? Not maybe specifically at her, but at the idea of ever holding parents accountable for an action that their child took.
John Woodrow Cox She was very aware of that, especially as it led up to trial. And when the trial started, it wasn’t so much that she was taking that personally. But she thought that that criticism or those those differing opinions might give them insight into what the jurors were thinking, or worse, that the jurors would even be maybe reading some of that material. There was one particular case, a moment the night before closing argument, when the New York Times published a an op ed. It was an opinion piece that really questioned the entire premise of the prosecution. It was titled, if I remember right, you know, what is this mother really guilty of? And it was, you know, it was pretty critical of the case that they were prosecuting. And she she read the whole thing and actually altered. She asked Mark Keast, who was going to cross-examine Jennifer Crumbly the next morning. He said, you know, you need to soften your approach. We sort of can’t murder this woman because maybe the these jurors are looking at her in a sympathetic light as well. So she she made use of that. I mean, she really thought that it was important to pay attention to those things just to gauge what it was that other people were thinking, because they were so inside this, they obviously viewed it in a very, very specific way.
Krys Boyd What do you know, John, about how jury deliberations played out in Jennifer Crumbley trial? The two parents were tried separately, will remind people.
John Woodrow Cox They were right. So Jennifer Crumbly was tried first. That was that really made it the more historic case, because if she was convicted, she was going to be the first the first parent of a school shooter ever convicted of homicide. And so I, I ended up talking to three of the jurors on that case. And, I mean, it was for me, it was enthralling. I mean, I was I was totally fascinated to hear about their process. You know, they took an early vote. So, you know, the case ends and they take kind of a poll of where everyone stands and eight were guilty, two were not guilty, and two were undecided. And the two not guilty, had very different reasons. You know, one of them was a woman who saw elements maybe of herself and Jennifer Crumbly, her husband, own guns. She worried that what if something like that happened to her or someone like her, could she also be, convicted of a crime like this? And the other juror sort of talked to her through maybe. Why? Why she was different than Jennifer Crumbly, the person, though, who really was the holdout. There was one man who, you know, he had no kids, no guns. He was, college educated, professional. And he viewed the evidence in a completely different light than than anyone else did. And and one way was that he was very dismissive of sort of the mental health aspects that the prosecution had argued. He was dismissive of the relevance of the meeting at the school. He did not think that that was relevant to the case. All he really cared about was the gun. And who was responsible for locking up the gun, how he got access to the gun. And, you know, at a point on the first day of, deliberations, it got so heated, he was, you know, cursing by his own account. He was cursing that the other jurors and at one point blurted out, I guess we’re just going to have a hung jury. And the prosecution was was feeling that anxiety because he had he had asked a couple of questions of the judge, which juries do all the time. They sent questions to the judge for clarification. And one of the questions that he asked is whether or not they could infer anything from the fact that the prosecution did not call the shooter. And that signaled to the prosecution that they were in trouble, that this jury was maybe going the wrong direction or would hang or would maybe even be an acquittal. And there was a, there was a local reporter who, you know, sitting back there and overheard this person say that, well, that sounds that sounds like it, you know, could be an acquittal. So, yeah, it was it was very intense. And it went into, it went into the second day.
Krys Boyd So Jennifer Crumbly was found guilty about a month later. James Crumbly is trial commenced. Did the strategy differ significantly in that case than in the case against James Crumbly, his wife?
John Woodrow Cox It did differ. It did they? They focused more narrowly. On the gun, the storage of the gun. It was a simpler case. His case was simpler than hers. I mean, there were these really complicated elements in hers. One was that they. One of their witnesses was a, this firefighter with whom she had been having an ongoing affair. They called him as a witness because he alleged that she had shared some things, with him that were incriminating, sort of those dramatic elements did not play a role in James’s case. The focus, really, in his case, was very much centered on the gun is, you know, he was the one who bought the gun. He was primarily responsible for the storage of the weapon, even though it was his wife who was last seen with it in public. She took her son to a gun range on the Saturday before the shooting, which was on a Tuesday, so that was very much the focus is that he bought his son the gun. He didn’t secure it. And, you know, there was this really dramatic moment in the in the closing arguments when Karen McDonald puts on these gloves and illustrates for the jury live how to apply a cable lock to a gun. And she did it in something like 10s to sort of make this argument how simple this would have been to avoid.
Krys Boyd Do we know both? The Crumbley parents were ultimately sentenced to serve 10 to 15 years in prison, which is like the maximum? Do we know what sort of contact they maintain with their son, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole?
John Woodrow Cox So, if I remember correctly, existed come up at their sentencing. I don’t think they’re allowed to have any contact with him, or each other for, for the time being. And I don’t know if that would change, you know, if their appeals were lost and exhausted, that they could have some sort of contact. But I don’t believe they’re allowed to have continued contact with him.
Krys Boyd I mean, Karen McDonald and her co-counsel, Mark Keast, were candid with you about the toll these cases took on their lives. Do they believe that their choices might somehow prevent future violence?
John Woodrow Cox Yeah, I think they would like to believe that, certainly, if only because of the coverage of this. I mean, you know, the day of Jennifer Crumbly conviction, it led all three nightly news, broadcast. This was the lead story. And that was a day when there had been major political news. So you know that alone. It’s obviously it’s impossible to quantify these things, but there was some local reporting that there had been an increase in cable lock sales, that suddenly people were showing up to local gun shops and buying more cable locks. So, you know, I think, having reported on this issue for a long time and, and responses I’ve seen to other events, I can say with confidence that certainly there were people who saw these proceedings and decided to go out and purchase something that, you know, whether it was a safer cable or something like that to better secure their weapon or they already had, they just started using it. There was a level of awareness. Absolutely. I think that was brought to this issue. And having reported on this specific issue for so long, you know, my experiences that gun owners want to behave responsibly with their firearms and that they certainly don’t want their children to take those guns and commit a heinous act. There was never any allegation that James and Jennifer Crumbley wanted their son to do something like this. And I think that’s true. I mean, especially in cases of suicide and accidental shootings, there’s enormous regret. And I think a lot of it is based in an ignorance, is that not everyone knows the risks that they’re running by having an unsecured weapon in their home. And this just raised a level of awareness that didn’t previously exist. So I think they everyone involved would would sacrifice what they did again. And and it’s not just because I think of this prosecution and what that meant to the victims. I think I think too it it also extends to what it how it might benefit society writ large.
Krys Boyd I completely understand that people who would like to prevent all gun violence would like to see guns better secured, and people taking every possible step to ensure that they don’t fall into the hands of people who might do the wrong thing. What’s so hard about these preventive measures, though, of course, is that you’ll never prove a negative, right? We may never hear about potential shootings of any kind that didn’t happen because, say, parents took preventive action even if they saved lives by that action.
John Woodrow Cox Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I mean, it is, and it’s a frustrating part of and I think being involved on this issue, I mean, I’ve written about it because it’s since 2017. I mean, one of maybe the most satisfying moment of my career. So I wrote I wrote a book two years ago, and, after it published in 2021, we the post ran an excerpt of it, and that excerpt was about, a gun unsecured. It was actually in a safe. But his son, his 11 year old son, knew where the key to the safe was and was not. A kid who really showed any interest in guns, certainly never showed any interest in violence or depression or anything like that. He had lots of friends, incredible student, just a great kid in every way. And one night, you know, they had Taco Bell, and then he goes to his room. He goes to his parents room, they’re out in the living room watching TV, and they hear this pop, and his father rushes in and finds that his son is has shot himself. And it just, you know, destroyed them. And, you know, we ran that story as an excerpt from one chapter in my book. And so the post ran it and I got, you know, I got emails afterwards from people showing me the gun safes that they had bought as a result of that excerpt. And, you know, that that’s sort of a rare moment in something like that. And again, in those cases, I don’t know that it actually prevented anything. You know, we can never know if one of those father’s kids would have ever picked up one of their guns. But it was certainly gratifying to know that at least a few people were going to secure their firearms in a way that they hadn’t before. And, I think ultimately, even if there was not a larger effect, the prosecutors would have said it was worth it because they were very, very, very narrowly focused on the injustice that they thought had occurred here, and that the role that these parents played in the deaths of of those four kids at Oxford High School.
Krys Boyd John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter. His long form article for The Washington Post is titled Guilty Inside the high Risk Historic Prosecution of a School Shooter’s Parents. John, thank you for making time to talk today.
John Woodrow Cox Thanks so much for the thoughtful questions. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Krys Boyd You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. The podcast is available wherever you get your podcast. You just need to search for KERA. Think or listen at our website think.kera.Org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
