How a school shooter’s parents were convicted of homicide
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When parents list school shootings among their greatest fears, they're, of course, terrified of their own child being targeted. |
| 0:17.0 | But surely some tiny subset of parents has an even more unsettling fear, one they might hesitate to even talk about, the fear that their child could be the one pulling the trigger. |
| 0:28.7 | From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. |
| 0:32.9 | We want to believe parents with even the slightest sense that their child could be violent would seek |
| 0:37.7 | intense and immediate help, therapy, medication, whatever. We want to believe those parents |
| 0:42.8 | would fully cooperate with school authorities who had concerns. And of course, we would expect |
| 0:47.5 | those parents to block their child's access to deadly weapons. That is not what happened in |
| 0:52.7 | Michigan in 2021. On a 15-year-old student shot 11 people |
| 0:57.1 | at his high school, including four classmates who died from their injuries, Ethan Crumbly was |
| 1:02.3 | charged as an adult, pleaded guilty and eventually sentenced to life in prison. But the county |
| 1:07.3 | prosecutor overseeing the case became convinced the teenager's parents deserved a share of the blame. |
| 1:12.7 | And as well here, she was willing to risk her safety and her reputation to hold them accountable. |
| 1:18.2 | John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter who embedded with prosecutors in Pontiac, Michigan as they pursued those charges against an entire family. |
| 1:27.1 | His long form article for the Washington Post is titled Guilty, Inside the High Risk Historic Prosecution of a school shooter's parents. |
| 1:35.4 | John, welcome to think. |
| 1:37.3 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:38.5 | So you really spent extensive time on this story. |
| 1:42.7 | What made you decide to devote the better part of two years of your |
| 1:46.6 | life to this? You know, I have been written writing about the impact of gun violence on children |
| 1:53.8 | 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 |
| 2:04.5 | was undercovered was just access to firearms, children's access to firearms. And, you know, |
| 2:12.2 | we created a database of school shootings going all the way back to Columbine. And in analyzing all those events, |
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