School attacker’s parents sentenced to 10 years in prison for failing to stop ‘runaway train’

Pontiac, Michigan: The first parents convicted in a mass US school shooting were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison as a judge lamented missed opportunities that could have prevented their teenage son from possessing a gun and killing four students in 2021. .

“These convictions are not about poor parenting,” Oakland County Judge Cheryl Matthews said. “These convictions confirm repeated acts, or lack of acts, that could have stopped an oncoming runaway train.”

The hearing in a packed, tense courtroom was the climax of an extraordinary effort to hold others besides the 15-year-old attacker criminally responsible for a school shooting.

Jennifer and James Crumbley didn’t know that Ethan Crumbley had a gun (he called it his “beauty”) in a backpack when they dropped him off at Oxford High School. But prosecutors convinced jurors that parents still played a disastrous role in the violence.