Taking Down a School Shooter's Enablers

 

by Pa Rock

Former Principal

There were a couple of significant court actions over the past week regarding America’s ongoing lack of success in stopping, or even slowing, incidents of school shootings.
 
The first involved the case of Ethan Crumbley, who was a fifteen-year-old when he brought an automatic pistol that his parents had purchased for him to his Michigan high school on November 30, 2021, and killed four teenage students while seriously wounding several others.  This past December a Michigan court found Ethan Crumbley guilty of murder and a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
 
There was a lot of neglect and bad parenting at play in that boy’s situation, and it is hard, for me at least, to feel good about the judicial result.  The father had purchased the 9mm automatic handgun and he and the boy’s mother gave it to their son as a gift for his fifteenth birthday.  The parents had ignored signs of mental health distress in their son and even his own pleadings for help with his emotional issues.  They had even met with school officials on the day of the shooting (before it happened) and had declined the school’s request that Ethan be taken home for the remainder of the day.  

At one point Ethan had told his parents that he was hearing voices, to which his father replied "Suck it up."   At another point the boy texted a friend and said that he felt like he was "mentally and physically dying."  Clearly he was seeking help, but none was forthcoming.
 
Guns were glorified in the home by both parents, and if they had any type of parenting plan, it was fatally flawed.   But, nevertheless, the kid is going to prison for the rest of his natural life with no chance of parole.
 
This past week James and Jennifer Crumbley, Ethan’s parents who immediately went into hiding after the shooting and have been incarcerated for most of the two years since the shooting, were each sentenced to ten-to-fifteen years in prison for manslaughter as a result of their actions in purchasing the murder weapon for their son, failing to supervise his access to the weapon, and failing to act on his mental distress and seek appropriate treatment.
 
I am uncomfortable with the sentence imposed on Ethan Crumbley because of the extenuating circumstances and sad way that he was raised, all of which helped to turn him into such a damaged adolescent – but I have no qualms at all about the sentences given to his parents, other than a strong feeling that they should have been sent down for an even longer period of time.  Perhaps there are other parents out there who will view the Crumbleys' situation as a wake-up call and suddenly start paying closer attention to the behaviors of their own children – particularly if those behaviors could lead to lethal results.
 
Let parents reap a portion of what they have sown.
 
The second case is more near and dear to my heart because it involves a school principal, and I served as a school principal for more than a dozen years.  It is a high-pressure and very hard job.  
 
An old joke that used to go around the principal community went something like this:
 

A mother goes into her son’s bedroom to wake him for school, but he pretends to be sick and says that he doesn’t want to go.  The mother, knowing that her son is not physically ill, questions him as to why he doesn’t want to go to school.  “Because,” the son replies, “everybody hates me.  The kids hate me, the teachers hate me, the cooks and the bus drivers hate me, the secretary hates me, and even the superintendent hates me.”
 
“But son,” his mother pleads, “you can’t stay home.  You must go to school.  You’re the principal!”

 
In January of 2023 a first-grade teacher was shot in the stomach and gravely wounded by a six-year-old in her classroom at an elementary school in Newport News, Virginia.   This week the Commonwealth of Virginia announced that it was bringing eight counts of felony child abuse against the young lady who was the assistant principal of the school at the time the teacher was shot.  The Commonwealth contends that the assistant principal ignored three warnings from individual teachers that the child might be carrying a gun, and that when a school counselor suggested that the administrator check his backpack for a gun, she declined to do so.  The negligent assistant principal resigned shortly after the shooting.  The teacher is suing the school for $40 million. 
 
(The mother in this case is also doing time.  Last summer she was sentenced to 21 months in prison on federal charges of using marijuana while owning a gun and of lying about her drug use on her application to purchase a weapon.)
 
Even as someone who knows firsthand how beat-down, unappreciated, and vulnerable principals can feel, I am still of a mind that teachers and administrators, like parents, also bear some responsibility regarding some actions of some students, and their culpability should not be automatically ignored in the wake of a school shooting.
 
Taking a serious look at the extenuating circumstances at play in a school shooting and then holding negligent party’s accountable sounds like a commonsense approach that could help to decrease the incidents of tragedy and bloodshed.  I’m glad to see this week’s court actions.