PONTIAC, Mich. — Prosecutors in the criminal trial of James Crumbley, the father of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley, opened their case Thursday by showing jurors an image of the gun’s unused cable lock still in its original packaging — teasing out evidence meant to suggest he failed to prevent the looming rampage.
“That nightmare was preventable and it was foreseeable,” Oakland County prosecutor Marc Keast said of the shooting spree at Oxford High School in November 2021 that left four dead and several wounded.
“There is no claim that James Crumbley gave his son that firearm knowing he would murder four students,” Keast added. “The question becomes how is it a father can be held responsible for the intentional acts of his teenage son?”
“It takes gross negligence, it takes causation of death and it takes the other person’s actions reasonably foreseeable — those are the three elements that must be proven,” he told the jury of a trial that could last about two weeks.
But in her opening statement, James Crumbley’s lawyer defended his actions in the months leading up to and on the day of the shooting, telling jurors that he was simply unaware of his son’s planned attack.
“What the prosecution wants you to believe, the part that’s not true, is that James Crumbley knew what his son was going to do and knew he had a duty to protect other people from his son,” Mariell Lehman said. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s not true. He didn’t know.”
Crumbley, 47, faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter, each representing one of the victims in the massacre at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit days after Thanksgiving.
His wife, Jennifer Crumbley, 45, was found guilty on the same charges last month and will be sentenced in April.
The prosecution and defense’s opening statements on Thursday walked jurors through similar presentations to those in Jennifer Crumbley’s landmark trial — the first time in the U.S. that a parent was held partially responsible for their child’s school shooting rampage.
James Crumbley, dressed in a suit and glasses, mostly stared straight ahead, using an over-the-ear device to help with his hearing.
His wife’s trial was marked by emotional testimony, with video and photos of the shooting shown to jurors, and Jennifer Crumbley at times audibly sobbing in her seat.
Opening statements in Crumbley’s trial came after two days of jury selection in which 15 people were seated, 12 of whom will be randomly chosen to deliberate the verdict.
Similar to Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, the jury in James Crumbley’s trial is not being sequestered, but they are being asked to avoid watching or reading any news about the trial. In addition, the majority of jurors in his trial are also parents and are either gun owners, grew up around guns or have family or friends who have them — highlighting how firearm exposure is a familiar facet of this region of Michigan, where hunting is a popular activity.
Themes of parental responsibility and safe gun storage will hang over James Crumbley’s trial as well.
But there are some differences. At least two new witnesses are set to testify: the original owner of the 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, who sold the weapon and a cable lock to a gun store where James Crumbley bought it, and a student who was injured in the shooting.
Some evidence will also be new or withheld compared with the first trial. For instance, text messages between Jennifer Crumbley and her son that were shared while she and her husband were riding horses won’t be heard this time; the texts bolstered the prosecution’s case to show that Jennifer Crumbley was a negligent mother while her son was in distress and complained that there were demons in the family’s home. Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Matthews on Thursday ruled the texts were inadmissible because there’s no evidence that James Crumbley was aware of them.
Matthews had emphasized during jury selection that James Crumbley’s case is separate from his wife’s, with different evidence, and asked if anyone’s judgement was so clouded from the media coverage that they could not be impartial.
“Are you able to set aside any sympathy that you feel and decide this case based on the evidence and the facts?” Matthews asked.
As with Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, son Ethan won’t be testifying in his father’s case.
Ethan, now 17, pleaded guilty in 2022 as an adult to murder, terrorism and other crimes and was sentenced in December to life in prison without parole.
Loved ones of some of the four shooting victims — Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Hana St. Juliana, 14; and Justin Shilling, 17 — attended Thursday’s opening statements.
It’s unclear if James Crumbley will take the stand. If found guilty, he faces up to 15 years in prison per count.
Selina Guevara reported from Pontiac and Erik Ortiz from New York.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
