Mother Manslaughter

The Crumbley’s, Consequences + Crime

Jennifer Crumbley (in white)

This week a mom named Jennifer Crumbley was convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Each count represented a child that was killed by her then 15 year-old son, Ethan, in a school shooting in Michigan in 2021. Six others at the school were wounded and survived.

The shooting was terrible all around. A child struggling alone with something much bigger than he could handle, and all that rage and delusion pouring out onto innocent kids, who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ethan executed kids on their knees, and over and over again while they laid on the ground bleeding out.

He was sentenced as an adult. Ethan got life without parole in a plea.

But this begs the question….

If Ethan is being asked to accept responsibility as an adult, then what is the purpose of the juvenile justice system? And if he acted as an adult and received adult consequences, why should his parents be liable? Is he a kid and should be handled as one or an adult with all the intended consequences? Can we choose one?

The verdict and its media attention tell me a couple things:

1. People really do want fewer fire arms and more responsible storage of guns around young and vulnerable people. People want more stringent rules and regulations for gun ownership, more checks and balances, more regulations. No amount of second amendment blathering is going to sooth a parent who has lostt a child to this kind of stupidity. #PutYourFuckingFirearmAway should be our new viral hashtag and right after, law of the land.

2. And since our legislators don’t have the fortitude to create legislation to do these things for our citizens, we are watching the states, counties and local municipalities stepping in and doing it for themselves.

   Examples: After a shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, the father of the shooter plead guilty to a misdemeanor for reckless conduct after co-signing his son’s gun card. He did 60 days in jail. In Virginia, the mom of a six-year-old (Holy Hell) who shot his teacher, pleaded guilty to child neglect, felony use of a controlled substance while possessing a firearm and lying on an application to the get the firearm.

   I feel the rumblings of a quiet revolution by prosecutors happening on the state and local court levels.

3. But the last take-away is the one that sits in me the wrong way: “Ms. Crumbley should have noticed her son’s distress and stopped him from committing an act of unspeakable violence,” Marc Keast, one of the prosecutors said in The New York Times. Crumbley and her husband “didn’t do any number of tragically small and easy things that would have prevented all of this from happening.”

I bristled at this. But then I also bristled when I read accounts of Ethan telling his parents that “that he believed he was having a mental breakdown and asked his parents for medical help but that his father told him to “suck it up” and his mother laughed,” according to the judge’s opinion, profiled on CNN.

A child articulating his deepest darkest secrets and watching his parents shrug it off is devastating, and obviously played a role in their son devolving into a rampage killer. Or did it? In the months leading up to the shooting, Ethan had “told his parents about experiencing paranoia and hallucinations, including his belief that a demon was throwing objects around the house.” The judges opinion goes on: “When his mother didn’t reply, he sent her another message asking, “Can you at least text back.” His mother did not text back that day…”

WTF?

It’s rough to hear this and to also know that parenting is loaded, LOADED with these blindspots. Hit me on a bad day and I can be downright dismissive of whatever drama is unfolding. Throw in a stressful work deadline or a tense marital conversation and dismissing anything that isn’t 911-related is a coping strategy.

I would never be dismissive of my kids issues, I say. But I was the parent that missed that Edie was three and barely spoke words. (She was an excellent nonverbal communicator, an introvert and Lucy translated for her). A psychiatrist friend had to take me aside.

I wrote about Lucy going into a bipolar psychosis at 16, but I can tell you she was falling apart, and off the face of the earth, long before I was willing to see the signs for what they represented. In fact, she had to be in full blown delusional psychosis for me to really see the depths of her misery.

I did not know she was cutting. And cutting and cutting. And cutting. Wouldn’t a good parent know that? Shouldn’t I have been searching her body for signs?

In some ways, I am more prepared for my youngest kids potential issues. They have diagnoses and their disabilities are recognized, and in process of treatment. I am surveying their prognoses all the time. What does it mean when she says this? Could this be a larger issue? Was he joking or did he mean it? David and I are constantly sending research back and forth and following people on Reels who have the same diagnoses as our kids. This time around we are on it.

But unless you have a kid with a life and family-altering diagnosis, why would you be looking for something deeply off when your teen is hiding in their hoodie, or openly hating you at the dinner table?

Antisocial behaviors = moody teen behaviors after all.

Should we be reading their diaries? Searching their messages?

Maybe. I broke my own rule about family privacy and read Lucy’s journal after she was released from the psych ward. Her therapist said she could still kill herself and recommended it. But believe me, I felt like an interloper searching through her most personal thoughts looking for the initials KMS. I confessed to her a year later. I felt gross even as I was sure I was doing the needed and right thing.

But should I have done that earlier? See how it gets tricky….

Sue Klebold, Dylan Klebold's mother, one of the Columbine shooters, always thought she would’ve known what her teen was going through.

“Before Columbine happened, I would have been one of those parents,” Klebold told Diane Sawyer for the TV show "20/20." “I think we like to believe that our love and our understanding is protective, and that ‘if anything were wrong with my kids, I would know,’ but I didn’t know, and I wasn’t able to stop him from hurting other people. I wasn’t able to stop his hurting himself and it’s very hard to live with that.”

Ethan Crumbsley

Also, parenting looks different in different households and circumstances. For instance: Our parenting style for our youngest kids is no consequences. Can you imagine having to tell a jury that the treatment for kids with autism with a PDA profile is creating calm situations where they have no demands placed on them? LOL We would be an internet meme!

Or that when Raffi charged $400 on our credit card, knowing perfectly well he wasn’t allowed, why didn’t we remove his whole computer system and sell it off as a consequence? Or ground him for the summer? Oh, we wanted to A LOT. LOL. But it doesn’t work with kids who are disabled this way. The behaviors are brain-based and the job is healing and helping them come up with new strategies to cope. In this light, punishment feels nearly medieval, a cruel performance that never begets a solution. I mean, If consequences worked there would be no or low jail recidivism, right? The simple threat of confinement would be enough to change behaviors. But can you imagine the prosecutor? You did nothing after he committed this crime? LOL. Again, we would be a tragic courtroom joke.

Here in Nevada, the first murder of the year happened to a 14 year old boy. Shot at the hands of his 12 year old brother. Now, one kid is dead. The other is in custody. The loss here is unfathomable, even as we know few details.

Of course, this could’ve been mitigated by simply not having a gun lying around. For me, this is the solution that makes the most sense. It’s so simple as to be genius. But are the parents responsible and if so, how much? What kind of punishment should we meter out for having a hand in killing your own child? What consequence will keep people from making that mistake again? Do consequences keep people from killing their children? Will consequences make people lock up their guns?

I want people to have justice for their losses. But more and more, I’m not sure what justice means. Why does justice so often feel like revenge? And why must justice be so wrapped up in prison? Can we be accountable without confinement when the person isn’t a threat? Why does revenge feel good? What if the families of the victims need this to feel whole again? Will they ever feel whole? What do we owe the dead? Aren’t there other paths to accountability and penance? Are we safer for having Jennifer Crumbley locked up? What about Ethan? Is he better off in jail or a mental institution (or are they just the same thing)? What is the right consequence for a boy who shoots his brother? The parents lost one kid, should they lose the second? Or is that their punishment for leaving the gun around?

Is that enough?

Who decides if they suffered enough?

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END NOTES:

If you live near the Center for the Arts in Kayenta, Utah, I will be there Friday night for Coyote Tales where I will be walking the lit high wire, not reading or using notes and telling a story the Moth-way. It will be video recorded by Outside Magazine. I’m excited to meet the organizer, Victoria and Tanya at Bungalow Books.

I will wear my lucky leather pants.

As always, thank you for reading. Xo Kim