“Killing Through Their Kids”

The title of this post is the title of this new piece authored by Dyllan Taxman now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

In early 2024, James and Jennifer Crumbley were sentenced to over a decade in prison after their son, Ethan, shot and killed four classmates at Oxford High School in Michigan.  The Crumbley parents incurred manslaughter liability by ignoring Ethan’s deteriorating mental state, gifting him the murder weapon, and failing to act on concerns about Ethan’s behavior on the day of the shooting.  In this Article, I suggest they will be far from the last. Indeed, less than one year after the Crumbley convictions, Colin Gray — whose son committed the shooting at Apalachee High School — was charged with manslaughter and second-degree murder.

Current coverage of the Crumbley parents’ conviction has cabined their case as an outlier, unlikely to repeat due to uniquely egregious facts.  I argue that charging and convicting the parents of a school shooter will recur because similar conduct has produced parental homicide liability for over a century of widespread American jurisprudence via homicide by medical neglect and passive abuse.  By analyzing the Crumbley parents’ conviction in this context, I draw out a test to determine when parental homicide liability might attach following a school shooting.  This duty to prevent test asks if parents: (1) ignored clear warning signs about the child’s deteriorating mental health; (2) facilitated the child’s access to a weapon; and finally (3) ignored additional warnings about the child’s violent ideations.  Where each prong is met, parental homicide liability following a school shooting tracks not only the theory of liability upon which the Crumbleys were convicted, but also the traditional and well-established components of homicide liability for medical neglect and passive abuse.  Finally, I suggest that school officials who meet each prong of the test may incur similar liability under certain circumstances.