PONTIAC, Mich. — The photos on Jennifer Crumbley’s phone showed a typical-seeming family, one that went on vacation to the beach, carved pumpkins at Halloween, played board games with grandparents and gardened in the backyard. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Crumbley, 45, narrated the images Thursday as she testified in her involuntary manslaughter trial, in which she is charged in the deaths of four students her son killed in the 2021 shooting at Oxford High School, roughly 40 miles north of Detroit.
Crumbley and her husband, James, who faces identical charges in a separate trial in March, have both pleaded not guilty. The couple is still married, but Crumbley said she has not spoken to him in two years; they were unable to post their combined $1 million bond and both remain in custody.
From the witness stand, Crumbley described a close family, whose teenage son experienced anxiety and sadness over things like grades, friends and the future. Crumbley denied having prior knowledge of her son’s school shooting plans or the extent of his mental health struggles until it was far too late. Asked on the stand whether Crumbley wished the shooting had never happened, Crumbley was unequivocal.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I wish he would have killed us instead.”
Most of the evidence presented by prosecutors, who rested their case Thursday, has been seen before in sentencing hearings for the shooter: Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty in 2022, moving from an instant trial straight to sentencing last December, where he was given life without parole.
Prosecutors showed text messages the shooter sent his mother while he was home alone, pleading with her to respond because he was seeing demons and felt their house was haunted. Oxford School staffers testified that days before the shooting, they left Crumbley a voice mail alerting her that her son was web searching ammunition during class; Crumbley never called back, and instead chided her son in a text message saying he had to learn to not get caught. Jurors also saw footage of James Crumbley in a local gun shop just four days before the shooting, buying a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol for his son as an early Christmas gift, and footage of Jennifer Crumbley trying out the same gun with her son at a shooting range.
The Crumbleys are the first parents of a school shooter to be tried for involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors allege that the parents acted with gross negligence, and that instead of addressing their son’s obvious mental health problems, they bought him a gun.
Thursday’s testimony marked the first time the Crumbley family’s dynamic had been described from one of the parents’ perspectives.
Wearing a white sweater and with her hair pulled back, Crumbley was red-faced on the witness stand as she told jurors she gets nervous speaking in public. Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Matthews ordered a sheriff’s deputy to stand guard near the witness stand.
Jennifer Crumbley faces trial in a high-profile case that marks the first time parents of a school shooter have faced involuntary manslaughter charges. (Video: WXYZ, Photo: Mandi Wright/Detroit Free Press via AP/WXYZ)
Defense attorney Shannon Smith in her opening argument accused prosecutors of giving jurors evidence without the full context. In calling Crumbley to the stand, Smith moved to neutralize some of the more inflammatory evidence from the prosecution and offer jurors the first alternative narrative of Crumbley as an engaged, caring but occasionally quirky mother.
Crumbley said her text to her son about learning to not get caught was a running family joke about her own troublemaking childhood.
Prosecutors made much of how much time Crumbley spent riding horses, often ignoring desperate-sounding messages from her son. She took his texts about seeing demons and flying pots and pans as his offbeat sense of humor at play on another running family joke that the Crumbleys had a “house ghost” in their 1920s home.
Crumbley noticed her son seemed sad in the fall of 2021, but didn’t think it was a mental health crisis. She said she let her son know they could talk to him.
“He’s a quiet kid. He was being quieter than normal,” Crumbley said. She testified she could tell her son was “a little sad” but felt he was more stressed out because of his grades, which slipped after the family went to Florida for several weeks after the death of her son’s paternal grandmother.
When it came to guns, Crumbley said she left storage and handling responsibility to her husband, who already owned two. After James Crumbley bought the pistol at a Black Friday sale, Jennifer Crumbley said she took her son to the shooting range because he asked her to — something he usually asked his father.
She testified that her husband kept the gun stored with a cable lock in a case hidden somewhere in her bedroom. Ammunition was hidden elsewhere — “because that’s what you do,” Crumbley said — and said a key to the lock was hidden in the kitchen.
Crumbley rebutted several claims from the prosecution’s case, saying she never refused to take her son home after she and her husband were summoned to school the morning of the shooting to discuss violent images their son had drawn on a math assignment.
“I was pretty concerned,” she said of the picture her son’s counselor emailed her in requesting the meeting. Crumbley expected the meeting to be about discipline and thought her son might be suspended for his drawings, which included a gun, a bullet and a bleeding, bullet-ridden body near the words “blood everywhere” and “the thoughts won’t stop.”
The meeting was “nonchalant,” with counselor Shawn Hopkins telling them he didn’t think their son was a risk, she testified.
“I thought the advice they were giving us was good advice. They talked about being sad,” Crumbley said. Her son asked to stay in school, and she and her husband obliged, thinking the alternative would be worse. “My son gets very stressed out doing virtual school. There was never a time I would refuse to take him home.”