A jury found James Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter on Thursday after about 11 hours of deliberation, holding him partially responsible for failing to prevent his son from carrying out Michigan’s deadliest school shooting.

Crumbley’s wife, Jennifer, was convicted of identical charges last month in the same Pontiac, Michigan, courtroom after a jury deliberated for roughly the same amount of time. The trials became a lightning rod for issues of parental responsibility at a time of high-profile gun violence by minors.

The parenting skills of each defendant came under intense scrutiny, as did the shooter’s access to a handgun that his father had purchased. Now, two separate juries have taken the unusual step of holding a parent criminally responsible for a child’s crimes.

The repeated result “cements the concept that the prosecution here found a successful playbook, and they used it again”, said Mark D. Chutkow, a lawyer.

Oakland County prosecutors charged the Crumbleys three days after the November 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, where their son, Ethan who was 15 at the time, killed Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14, and injured seven others.

“James Crumbley was presented with the easiest, most glaring opportunities to prevent the deaths of these four students,” Karen McDonald, the Oakland prosecutor, said in closing arguments. “And he did nothing.”

Mariell Lehman, Crumbley’s defence lawyer, urged the jury to take into account how much Crumbley could not have known until it was too late. “You heard no testimony, and you saw no evidence, that James had any knowledge that his son was a danger to anyone,” she said.

Crumbley has been jailed since December 2021. He and his wife requested separate trials. Each will be sentenced later and faces a maximum of 15 years in prison.

The witness lists in the two Crumbley trials were similar, but there were a few key differences in the evidence that was presented. At Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, lawyers pored over her communications with her son, including months of text messages, as prosecutors tried to paint her as a negligent mother. But in the case of James Crumbley, the testimony focused less on his parenting and more on the Sig Sauer pistol that prosecutors say he bought his son four days before the shooting.

New York Times News Service