The parents of an American teenager sentenced to life in prison for killing four students at his school in 2021 with a weapon they had given him were sentenced Tuesday to 10 to 15 years in prison, a first in the United States .
• Read also: Father of teenager responsible for school shooting found guilty of manslaughter
• Read also: Mother of teenager responsible for mass shooting at high school found guilty of manslaughter
The mother, Jennifer Crumbley, 46, and the father, James Crumbley, 47, were convicted of manslaughter in two separate trials, in February and March, unprecedented convictions in the country for parents.
“Parents are not expected to be soothsayers, but these verdicts do not punish bad parents. These verdicts confirm repeated actions, or lack of actions, that could have stopped an impending catastrophe,” Pontiac, Michigan District Court Judge Cheryl Matthews said.
Getty Images via AFP
She sentenced them to the same sentence of “10 to 15 years in prison”, less the two and a half years of preventive detention already served. They faced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
The prosecutor had asked him to pronounce the harshest possible sentences against the accused, “taking into account the impact of their blatant negligence”.
Before the sentencing, both Jennifer Crumbley and James Crumbley made it clear, contrary to the impression they had given during their respective trials, that they would have acted differently if they had been aware of the signs before -runners of tragedy.
Their son, Ethan Crumbley, aged 15 at the time of the events, killed two girls and two boys aged 14 to 17 and injured six other students and a teacher on November 30, 2021.
One gun, 50 bullets
At her trial, Jennifer Crumbley testified that her husband had brought back a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol as an early Christmas present a few days earlier. She said she took her son to a shooting range the next day.
Despite summoning the parents to the school on the day of the tragedy, the teachers advising them to have their son psychologically monitored after discovering an “alarming” drawing made by the teenager, they left without bringing him home.
Ethan Crumbley was tried as an adult and sentenced in December to life without parole in an Oakland County court.
The teenager pleaded guilty in October 2022 to bringing the gun with 50 bullets in his backpack to his high school and shooting the students.
In December, the mother of a six-year-old student who seriously injured his school teacher was sentenced to two years in prison for parental neglect by the Virginia state courts.
The previous month, the father of a man accused of opening fire in 2022 during US National Day celebrations near Chicago, killing seven, pleaded guilty to reckless behavior for helping him buy the weapon used in the killing.
