She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”

The images were pivotal to an unprecedented conviction this week that legal scholars predict could create a new tool for prosecutors as the nation looks for ways to stem a record-setting uptick in mass shootings.

“This is the last picture we have of that gun until we see it murder four kids on Nov. 30, and the person holding it is Jennifer Crumbley,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said before a jury convicted the mother on four counts of involuntary manslaughter — one for each of the students her son gunned down at Oxford High School. 

“She’s the last person we see with that gun,” McDonald said. 

Crumbley is the first parent to be held directly responsible for a school shooting carried out by their child, turning on its head a bedrock legal principle: People cannot be held responsible for the actions of others.

“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told The 74.

And if other parents are charged in connection with shootings acted out by their children, Yankah said, the Crumbley conviction may make them more likely to accept a plea deal behind closed doors.

“Prosecutors will be tempted to use this power in ways that we don’t see,” he said. “A prosecutor is going to sit across from a parent when people are crying out for somebody to be held accountable and the prosecutor is going to be able to say, ‘I’m offering you three years to five years in prison, but if you don’t take this deal, I will prosecute for 15 years.’ ” 

For gun control advocates and the parents of children killed in their classrooms, the landmark trial’s outcome was welcomed. Craig Shilling, the father of Oxford shooting victim Justin Shilling, told a local TV station the conviction is “definitely a step towards accountability.” About three-quarters of school shooters obtain their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to a . In about half of cases, the guns had been readily accessible. 

The conviction is in many ways a watershed moment that hinged heavily on portrayals of Crumbley as a neglectful mom who paid more attention to her horses and an affair than to the son she’d gifted a gun to as he struggled with his mental health and exhibited violent behaviors. 

In this case, the gunman was charged as an adult while his mother was found guilty of crimes that stemmed from her role as an egregiously aloof and reckless parent. The gunman pleaded guilty in October 2022 to 24 charges, including first-degree murder and terrorism causing death, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in December. 

The shooter’s father, James Crumbley, is scheduled to face a similar trial next month. 

Yankah, the UMichigan law professor, told The 74 he wasn’t aware of any other cases where a parent was held liable for the crimes of a child who was simultaneously considered “a legal agent” and therefore responsible for his own actions. 

It’s not the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Still, experts said the Crumbley case does present a significant escalation in a generations-long push to hold parents accountable for the misdeed of their kids.

One , published in the Utah Law Review in 2008, noted that such efforts appeared cyclical, noting that “every couple of decades or so” lawmakers claimed to “discover” the idea of holding parents to account for teenage crimes. 

Punishing parents

which impose civil or criminal liability on adults under the premise that their failures to take control as parents led to their kids’ bad acts. There is research that ties youth delinquency to poor parenting. 

One recent parental responsibility law, , specifically addressed guns. It imposed civil liability on parents for negligence or willful misconduct if they allow their minor children to use or possess guns if the child has been adjudicated delinquent, was convicted of a crime, has the propensity to commit violence or intends to use the weapon unlawfully. 

Efforts to hold parents accountable for their children’s behaviors are rooted in the very origins of the nation’s juvenile justice system in the early 1900s, which authorized the state to intervene when parents failed in their duties, and their constitutional implications. By the 1970s, the report notes, lawmakers began to place a greater emphasis on parents as a factor in juvenile crime and turned to

Little is known, however, about whether such efforts have been effective in reducing juvenile crime. Eve Brank, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told The 74 that she is unaware, after decades of researching the emergence of parental responsibility laws, of “any empirical research that shows that imposing punishments on parents because of the actions of the children will decrease juvenile crime.”

She is also unaware of any data indicating how frequently those laws are used. In 2015, she , who reported infrequent enforcement. Through her research, Brank has identified three types of such laws: civil liability, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and parental involvement. 

Under the statutes, parents can be held responsible for helping or encouraging their child to commit a crime and financially liable for damages. They can also be required to pay fines or attend parenting classes due to their children’s criminal acts. 

Among them are truancy laws, which require students to attend school. In New Jersey, for example, parents who don’t compel their children to attend school can face disorderly conduct charges and fines. Such efforts, however, have been heavily criticized — including during the 2016 presidential election when Vice President Kamala Harris was that imposed jail time and fines on parents in truancy cases while she served as state attorney general. 

In 2017, Pennsylvania lawmakers reformed state truancy rules and made them less punitive after a Reading County woman was found dead in 2014 while serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy because she was unable to pay a $2,000 fine. 

“Many of those statutes came under a lot of strain in the last say 15 years,” including ones around truancy, Yankah said, adding that people were skeptical about whether they addressed the root causes underlying the social problems they sought to address and could uphold long standing racial disparities in the judicial system. “Frankly, communities of color really learned that — as is so often the case — when we pass more criminal statutes the people who are in the crosshairs are politically vulnerable. It was a lot of Black mothers, and so those statutes kind of faded out of popularity.” 

In some cases, parental responsibility laws have failed under court scrutiny. Among them is an ordinance in Maple Heights, Ohio, that for “failing to supervise a minor” if their child committed what would be considered a misdemeanor or a felony if it had been carried out by an adult. The in 2008 after a parent faced charges after her 17-year-old son was accused in juvenile court of carrying a concealed weapon, resisting arrest and failing to comply with a police officer. 

Meanwhile, officials have also sought to hold parents responsible when their children bully other kids. In 2016, the city council in Shawano, Wisconsin, passed an ordinance that on parents who failed to address their child’s harassment directed at other kids. 

In a high-profile cyberbullying case from 2013, a Florida sheriff bemoaned his of a girl who was charged criminally for harassing a 12-year-old classmate so relentlessly online that it led the girl to die by suicide. Among the harassment was an online message encouraging the 12-year-old to “drink bleach and die,” yet the parents continued to give the bully access to social media. 

“I’m aggravated that the parents aren’t doing what parents should do,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters at the time. “Responsible parents take disciplinary action.” 

A new category of parental responsibility

Crumbley’s conviction, Brank said, “doesn’t fit into any of these categories” of traditional parental responsibility laws and is instead a first-of-its-kind extension of the manslaughter statute. 

As officials seek to crack down on mass shootings, the Crumbley case is one of several recent examples where prosecutors sought to hold parents accountable when their children carried out what once were unthinkable acts of violence.

In December, a Virginia mother was for felony child neglect after her 6-year-old son brought a gun to his Newport News elementary school and shot his first-grade teacher. In a separate prosecution, the mother pleaded guilty to using marijuana while owning a firearm and for making false statements about her drug use. 

In a separate prosecution that may have laid the groundwork for the Crumbley case, to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges that stemmed from a shooting carried out by his son at a 2022 Highland Park Independence Day parade, which left seven people dead. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license. 

At the time of the massacre, the gunman was too young to apply for a firearm license so his father sponsored his application despite knowing his son had a history of behaving violently. Several months before the attack, a relative reported to police that the teenager had a large collection of knives and had threatened to “kill everyone.” 

In the Highland Park case, was explicit: The father’s guilty plea, he said, should be a “beacon” to others that parents can be held accountable for the actions of their children. 

“We’ve laid down a marker to other prosecutors, to other police in this country, to other parents, that they must be held accountable,” Lake County State Attorney Eric Rinehart said. “The risk of potentially losing this innovative prosecution — and not putting down any marker — was too great for our trial team.” 

Yankah said it’s important to look at new parental accountability efforts through their historical contexts. 

“Looking back at history,” he said, “shows us that our historical experiments with this kind of liability for parents has rarely solved the underlying problem,” he said. “Maybe this kind of case will have an effect, maybe parents will be more attentive. But to speak honestly, I think what a case like this shows is how many different things we as a society have to work on if we really want to be free of this violence.”

A Michigan jury found Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford High School shooter, guilty of involuntary manslaughter Tuesday.

In a , the jury found that Crumbley bore enough responsibility for the deaths caused by her son’s actions that she should be held criminally liable.

At age 15, Crumbley’s son shot and killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021, days after his father bought him a gun. Crumbley’s son was sentenced to life without parole in December.

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Crumbley’s husband, James Crumbley, has a separate trial scheduled for March.

After two days of deliberations, a jury in Oakland County Circuit Court in metro Detroit delivered the guilty verdict for Jennifer Crumbley on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the students killed: Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Hana St. Julianna and Justin Shilling.

The jury had been tasked by the court to determine whether Crumbley’s actions warranted involuntary manslaughter charges, which marks new legal ground for determining responsibility for a mass shooting.

Crumbley now faces up to 15 years in prison ahead of her sentencing scheduled for April 9.

Her defense argued during the trial that began on Jan. 25 that Crumbley couldn’t have known what her son was going to do. She was portrayed as an attentive parent who was aware that her son was going through a hard time, but nothing indicated he would become a school shooter.

“It was unforeseeable; no one expected this,” Shannon Smith, a lawyer for Crumbley, said in her closing arguments. “No one could have expected this, including Mrs. Crumbley.”

But the prosecution argued that Crumbley failed as a parent to perform her legal duty to exercise reasonable oversight to her son to prevent him from harming others and was negligent to the point that it harmed human life.

The prosecution proved Crumbley’s role in the shooting and how she could have intervened at several points beforehand to get her son help or secured the firearms in the home, but she didn’t, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in her closing arguments.

“We have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she is guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. It’s a rare case. It takes some really egregious facts. It takes the unthinkable and she has done the unthinkable and because of that four kids have died,” McDonald said.

Despite audibly crying at several points throughout the trial, Crumbley didn’t have a substantial reaction to the verdict being read. McDonald and other members of the prosecution hugged family members of the slain children.

In addition to the four students who were killed, the shooter injured six other students and a teacher. Molly Darnell, the teacher who was shot in the arm, was the first witness to testify at the start of the trial in January. A total of 22 witnesses spoke during the trial, including Crumbley, members of law enforcement and people who had interactions with Crumbley.

A major element of the prosecution’s justification for the involuntary manslaughter charges was Crumbley’s actions the day of the shooting after she and her husband were called to the school because the shooter had done a drawing of his gun on his math assignment.

Four days prior, the shooter and his father went to a gun shop and the father purchased the gun used in the killings on Black Friday as an early Christmas present.

After the meeting at the school where Crumbley and her husband were advised to seek out professional help for their son, the prosecution brought in witnesses from the school and law enforcement to show that neither parent took the shooter out of school for the day. Neither parent checked their son’s backpack where he had the gun. And neither parent asked their son where his gun was or checked to see if it was still at home.

There had been other meetings with the shooter’s parents, Shawn Hopkins, the school counselor at the meeting the day of the shooting, said during the trial. He said he was hoping one of the parents would take the shooter home. Although Hopkins didn’t tell them they had to, he thought it was strange they didn’t.

“She sat down in the chair; [I] felt she was a little bit distant. … It felt like it was a little bit of an inconvenience to be there,” Hopkins said of Crumbley during the meeting.

Hopkins said the shooter showed signs of possible suicidal thoughts and he didn’t want him to be alone. Hopkins added that he did not know that the shooter’s father had bought him a gun.

In addition to the drawing of a gun, the shooter’s assignment had the words, “my life is useless” and “the thoughts won’t stop help me,” written in addition to other statements and drawings.

When school officials asked Crumbley and her husband to go to the school, Crumbley testified she thought the shooter had sketched the gun in defiance of a recent conversation they had about his falling math grade, during which he had his phone taken away and was told he couldn’t go to the shooting range until his grade improved.

This was the first time she and her husband had been called to the school on an “immediate” time frame, Crumbley testified and she had told her boss she would be back at work an hour later.

Crumbley said she expected her son to get in trouble and get suspended, but the meeting was “nonchalant” and “brief.”

“There is never a time where I would refuse to take him home,” Crumbley testified, adding that she told her husband to start calling mental health professionals suggested by Hopkins.

Crumbley said she and her husband lost everything, adding she doesn’t feel like she failed as a parent and she had no reason to think her son was a danger to anyone else. She said she doesn’t look back and think she would have done anything differently.

“You spend your whole life trying to protect your child from other dangers. You never would think you have to protect your child from harming somebody else,” Crumbley testified, adding that she wished he would have killed her and her husband instead of the other kids at the school.

The shooter’s father was responsible for gun storage as firearms were not really her thing, Crumbley said. The gun that was bought for her son’s use was secured using a cable lock and the key to unlock it was hidden in one of the many decorative beer steins throughout the house.

The prosecution “cherry-picked” evidence to make Crumbley look like a negligent mother and conflate the magnitude of the tragedy with Crumbley’s parenting, Smith said as part of Crumbley’s defense. Hours of the trial were dedicated to members of law enforcement going over the gruesome details of the shooting. But Smith said the case came down to the prosecution improperly asking the jury to come to the assumption that Crumbley could have conceived what no parent would think their child would be capable of.

“When you look back in hindsight, with 20-20 vision … it is easy to say this could have been different, that could have been different, this would have changed,” Smith said.

Due to the community impact of the shooting and the future legal implications for parents of mass shooters in the future, the case has garnered national attention.

The jury’s verdict stands as a reminder to parents and gun owners that they are responsible for ensuring children can’t access their firearms unsupervised, Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement after the verdict was read.

“Plain and simple, the deadly shooting at Oxford High School in 2021 should have — and could have — been prevented had the Crumbley’s not acquired a gun for their 15-year-old son,” Suplina said. “This decision is an important step forward in ensuring accountability and, hopefully, preventing future tragedies.”

The decision marks Michigan setting a standard for the legal response to “when our kids are killed in their sanctuaries,” U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly) said in a statement Tuesday. She applauded .

“Today is a historic day in Michigan, and really for the whole country. Having watched the Oxford community go through this school shooting firsthand, and seeing the lifelong hole it ripped in the lives of everyone involved, this verdict feels like a small moment of relief,” Slotkin said. “It is my hope that it brings a bit of peace to the survivors and to the entire community, as I know everyone in Oxford has worked to heal together over the past two years.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told The 74. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”