Jennifer Crumbley trial: Mother of Michigan school shooter takes stand

Jennifer Crumbley said Thursday that her son never shared anything to raise concerns about his mental health before he opened fire in 2021 at Oxford High School in Michigan, killing four students and injuring several others.

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Crumbley, 45, took the stand in her manslaughter trial on Thursday. Authorities charged her and her husband, James Crumbley, with four counts each of involuntary manslaughter after their son, then 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, opened fire at his school. The elder Crumbleys are being tried separately, with James Crumbley’s trial scheduled to start in March.

Jennifer Crumbley described her son as a “history buff” who liked video games, metal detecting, bowling and coin collecting. She said he struggled with his grades, which was often a point of contention in the house. However, she said he never said anything to make her think he needed mental health help.

“There was a couple of times where Ethan had expressed anxiety over taking tests, anxiety about what he was going to do after high school whether it was college, military — so he expressed those concerns to me, but not to a level where I felt he needed to go see a psychiatrist or a mental health professional,” Jennifer Crumbley said on the stand.

She addressed text messages that her son sent in March 2021 in which he appeared to exhibit paranoid behavior, complaining of a demon in the family’s home and claiming that it was haunted. Jennifer Crumbley said the texts weren’t “anything that was anything serious.”

“It was Ethan just messing around,” she said. “He’s been convinced our house has been haunted since 2015, because it was built in 1920. Around that timeframe, him and his friend would go down to the basement and play Ouija board, so they thought we had a house ghost. So it was around that time when he would mess with us that things were going on in the house, silverware was flying across the room, doors were slamming.

“He actually took a video of the door and showed me when I got home, and you can clearly see where he’s standing back with his phone looking at the door that’s open. You can see him walk up the door and you can kind of see him slam it, and of him trying to say, ‘See our house is haunted.’ So, it was that kind of stuff that he did.”

Addressing text messages between her son and one of his friends, Jennifer Crumbley said Ethan Crumbley never asked his parents for mental health help before the shooting. He told a friend that he had asked them to take him to a doctor and his mother laughed, while his dad gave him pills and told him to “suck it up,” according to the messages.

Jennifer Crumbley added that her son never told her or James Crumbley that he was hearing voices, an admission he made to his friend.

Jennifer Crumbley confirmed that around the time of the shooting, she was having an affair with her longtime friend, Brian Meloche, who testified in court on Wednesday. Meloche said Jennifer Crumbley was worried that her son was “going to do something dumb” on the day of the shooting after her son’s teacher found a violent drawing on one of his math assignments, The Associated Press reported.

Ethan Crumbley’s state of mind around the time of the shooting is a key point in the trial. Prosecutors said the Crumbleys ignored their son’s mental instability despite his attempts to get help and that they bought the gun he used in the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting as a Christmas present.

The case is the first in which parents have been charged for a mass shooting carried out by their child.

Ethan Crumbley, now 17, pleaded guilty in 2022 to two dozen charges, including terrorism and multiple counts of first-degree murder. Last month, a judge sentenced him to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors said that social media posts showed that Ethan Crumbley planned the mass shooting at Oxford High School in advance. He shot and killed Hana St. Juliana, 14; Tate Myre, 16; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; and Justin Shilling, 17. Seven other people were injured.

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