In the Michigan School Shooting, the Prosecutor Asks, What About the Parents?
The New York Times
After seeing the evidence, Karen McDonald made an instinctual, and unusual, decision to charge Ethan Crumbley’s mother and father. Can she succeed?
PONTIAC, Mich. — It was a gut judgment, one made quickly, the prosecutor Karen D. McDonald said of her decision to charge Ethan Crumbley’s parents with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting deaths of four students at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit.
“I just instinctually knew there was just absolutely no way I was not going to prosecute them when I heard all the evidence,” Ms. McDonald said in an interview.
Ms. McDonald pointed to what she said is the chilling lead-up to the Nov. 30 massacre: how James and Jennifer Crumbley bought their son a 9-millimeter handgun as an early Christmas present, then failed to tell school officials about it, even after they called the parents to a meeting because a teacher saw their son’s drawing of a gun, a victim and the plea, “The thoughts won’t stop. Please help me.”
