Trial resumes against mother of Oxford High School shooter
Editor’s note: Portions of the text below contain description of a violent event. Reader discretion is advised.
Pontiac — An attorney for the mother of the Oxford High School shooter refuted the suggestion that her client read text messsages from her son and ignored them, saying investigators don’t know the entire story and she may have had poor cellphone service in some cases.
Shannon Smith, Jennifer Crumbley’s attorney, said some text messages between Jennifer and her husband, James, show Jennifer was very concerned about the couple’s son. In one string from March 2021, Crumbley was very worried when the shooter wasn’t home from school yet, saying she was “freaking out,” until her husband pointed out the teen didn’t get home until 3:16 p.m.
“There are numerous conversation bertween Jennifer Crumbley and James Crumbley about their son,” said Smith.
Smith, during her cross examination of Edward Wagrowski, a former computer crimes detective for the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office who read all of the text messages, said if there were text messages that showed the shooter was sick, prosecutors would’ve shown them.
“What you have is the best evidence you can find from going through all of them,” said Smith, referring to the text messages.
To illustrate the amount of text messages prosecutors have in their case, Smith piled the folders and folders of printed out texts on her desk. There are texts between the Crumbleys, between the shooter and his friend and between the Crumbleys and others.
Oakland Circuit Judge Cheryl Matthews cautioned the jury to not think that prosecutors are hiding evidence from them, or that there is evidence they are not allowed to see.
Smith is able to admit or present any of the texts in that pile, said Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Marc Keast.
‘Ruined so many lives’
Hours after her son opened fire at Oxford High School, killing four classmates and injuring seven others, a distraught Jennifer Crumbley texted her friend that her son had “ruined so many lives.”
The text message between Crumbley and her friend, Kira Pennock, was revealed during testimony Friday in Oakland Circuit Court where she’s on trial for four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2021 shooting.
“I wish we had warnings,” Crumbley texted her friend. “He’s a good kid. They (sic) made a terrible decision.”
Wagrowski, the former detective with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office who testified most of the day Friday, responded: “The hallucinations back to back would’ve been a warning, or seeing demons,” said the former computer crimes detective, referring to texts the shooter sent to a friend that he was having hallucinations in the months before the shooting.
Shannon Smith, Crumbley’s attorney, disputed Wagrowski’s comment.
“You don’t know them,” she said. “You don’t know them, you don’t know the context… There’s gaps of time that you don’t definitively know what happened.”
Gun, bullets missing
The parents of the Oxford High School gunman put together that he was the shooter when they realized a gun was missing from their house.
Crumbley texted her boss after an email was sent to parents on Nov. 30, 2021 about an active shooter at the high school, “The gun is gone and so are the bullets. … Omg Andy he’s going to kill himself he must be the shooter.”
Audio also was played in the courtroom Friday of a frantic call the shooter’s father, James Crumbley, made to 911 at about 1:20 p.m. He said there was an active shooter situation at the high school and that he had a missing gun at his house.
James stumbles over his words during the call: “I don’t know if it was him, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m really freaking out.”
During her text with her boss, Jennifer also asks her boss “not to judge her.”
After an email was sent to parents about an active shooter at the high school, Jennifer also texted the shooter: “I love you too,” “You ok?” and “Ethan don’t do it.” All three texts were sent within a four minute period.
Jennifer started crying in court as the text between her and the shooter were shown.
Parents met with school counselor
A few hours before their son opened fire, his parents had met with his school counselor about violent drawings and words he made on a math worksheet. The meeting lasted 12 minutes.
The meeting at the counselor’s office happened after the shooter drew a bleeding person and a gun and wrote “the thoughts won’t stop” and “blood everywhere” on the worksheet. Crumbley got a phone call from the school at 9:24 a.m.
She messaged her husband, James Crumbley, after the school called: “Call NOW. Emergency.” Two minutes later, she again sent: “Emergency.” She also sent James images of the worksheet.
James replied, “My god. WTF.”
“He said he was distraught about last night,” Jennifer wrote, and called her husband.
Surveillance footage shown Friday in court showed Jennifer and James leaving the counselor’s office. After the meeting, Jennifer texted her friend about her son after the meeting: “He’s just having a hard time after losing tank, his friend going away to a treatment facility and who knows what else.” She said he would be coming with her to the barn later that day because he can’t be left alone.
She texted her son, asking if he was OK. He said yes, that he had just gotten back from lunch. She said he could always talk to them. The shooter said: “(I know). Thank you. I’m sorry for that. I love you.” This was at 12:42 p.m., just 10 minutes before he opened fire at the school.
Shooter searched for bullets online day before shooting
The day before the shooting, his mother searched for clinical depression treatment options online.
Jennifer Crumbley, now on trial for four counts of involuntary manslaughter in Oakland County Circuit Court for the 2021 shooting, searched at 3:05 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2021, the day before the shooting.
Later that same morning on Nov. 29, an Oxford High School official left a voicemail for Jennifer Crumbley about concerns raised by a teacher about her son searching for bullets online. The shooter said he had gone to a shooting range the weekend before, according to the voicemail left by Pam Fine, Oxford’s bullying prevention and restorative practices coordinator.
The school officials told him “guns are a hobby for a lot of people” and interest in them is “perfectly normal,” but searching for them online isn’t acceptable to do in school.
Jennifer Crumbley texted her son that day: “Seriously? Looking up bullets in school??”
Her son responded with a string of messsages that included “Oh yeah. I already went to the office for that” and “It was on my phone. Completely harmless.”
Jennifer texted at another point: “did you at least show them a pic of your new gun?” Ethan responded: “No, I didn’t show them the pic, my God.”
Jennifer later texted “LOL. I’m not mad. You have to learn not to get caught.”
Hallucations, being told to ‘suck it up’
Months before the Oxford High School shooting, text messages appeared to paint a conflicting picture of the mindset of Jennifer Crumbley about her son’s mental health.
In April 2021, the shooter texted his lone friend that his mom laughed at him when he told his parents he heard people talking to him, worried he was seeing things and asked them to see a doctor.
The teen told his friend he was having hallucinations and said he asked his dad to go to the doctor, but was told to take some pills and to “suck it up.”
But also around that time in April 2021, Jennifer Crumbley texted the friend’s mother in April 2021 that her son had been acting “kind of depressed,” according to text messages read Friday in court.
“I’m not sure if there’s something bothering at school. He really doesn’t feel good. I can’t get anything out of him,” Jennifer Crumbley wrote. “I’m not used to Ethan being moody. He’s usually pretty happy and will talk about anything.”
Jennifer Crumbley offered to have the friend come over to hang out and said they had set up a little gun range in the backyard for their son to shoot his BB gun.
These details emerged in testimony from Edward Wagrowski, a former detective with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office who specialized in computer crimes. He read some of the text messages while testifying in court Friday.
In one text, the shooter told his friend: “I need help. I was thinking about calling 911 just so I could go to the hospital. But then my parents would be really pissed.”
Wagrowski, the former detective with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office who specialized in computer crimes, testified that the friend appeared to be Ethan Crumbley’s only one and the two shared 20,000 text messages. The friend abruptly left Michigan a month before the Nov. 2021 shooting.
Texts unanswered to parents
Text messages between the Oxford High School shooter and his mother in the months before the November 2021 shooting show the teen worried at times about a demon being in the family’s house, asking his mother for a text response, though one wouldn’t come until hours or days later.
In March 2021, the shooter texted his mother, Jennifer Crumbley, about “paranoia” he experienced while home alone, hearing the toilet flush and a door slam. He texted Crumbley at 8 p.m. asking when she would be home.
“Maybe it’s just my paranoia,” he wrote.
Jennifer Crumbley didn’t respond until 10 a.m. the next day, when she asked where his dad was, Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Marc Keast said in court Friday.
The day before that exchange, on March 8, Jennifer Crumbley sent her husband a message at 3:12 p.m. because she was “freaking out” that their son wasn’t home yet. James Crumbley told her not to worry because their son wouldn’t get home until 3:16. “I told you to pick him up because he’s upset and I don’t want him to do anything stupid,” Jennifer Crumbley wrote, according to Keast.
But Shannon Smith, Crumbley’s attorney, questioned when or if texts arrived. She said her client may not have been able to see texts because of a poor cellphone signal.
“There’s gaps of time where you don’t know definitively what happened,” Smith said. “…Text messages about someone being in the house, someone walking into the bathroom, you don’t know any of the responses, or even the thoughts Jennifer Crumbley had, when she did in fact read those messages.”
Smith also objected to any reference of alcohol in text messages, including a text Jennifer Crumbley sent about wanting to “get drunk and ride my horse.” Keast said the text messages are relevant because it shows what she was doing at a period when the shooter was texting her, looking for help because he believed he was hallucinating.
“If the shooter is feeling some trauma and is reaching out to his parents and they’re ignoring him, that evidence to me is obviously relevant,” Judge Cheryl Matthews said.
Detective describes harrowing details of shooting
Wagrowski, the former Oakland County Sheriff’s Office detective who was one of the first people to review surveillance footage of the Oxford High School shooting described how the shooter took aim at his classmates on Nov. 30, 2021, appearing almost with a “proud chest.”
Wagrowski described how the shooter, then-15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, exited the bathroom on Nov. 30 and “looked excited,” said Wagrowski, who choked up throughout his testimony.
He described in detail how the shooter fired shots at classmates one by one, firing rounds down the hallway “with no regard for anything,” Wagrowski said.
He immediately fired shots at two classmates, a girl in her neck and another classmate in his mouth. Both survived.
Madisyn Baldwin, one of the students who died that day, was curled in the fetal position in the hallway, trying to hide, when the shooter “runs up to her and just puts the gun right to her head,” Wagrowski said.
He rounded the corner in the hallway, Wagrowski said, where he encountered Tate Myre, another victim. The shooter leveled the gun and fired, causing Tate to fall instantly. He walked past Tate’s body and fired again.
“You see his feet stop at what I later learned to be a classroom,” Wagrowski said. There, he shot teacher Molly Darnell, who testified Thursday.
Jennifer Crumbley wiped tears with a tissue as Wagrowski described her son’s warpath through the school. Jurors and Smith also cried during his testimony.
Wagrowski said the shooter turned his head away from Assistant Principal Kristy Gibson-Marshall as he walked past her before stopping abruptly and going into the bathroom, where he killed another student, Justin Shilling.
Wagrowski said the footage is “burned in my brain.” He said he’s seen the footage countless times.
The court took a break Firday after Wagrowski spoke about the shooter entering the bathroom. Smith hugged Jennifer Crumbley and whispered in her ear before members of the sheriff’s department led her away.
Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford High School shooter, is being tried on four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of four students at the hands of her son. The trial marks the first time a parent has been tried in connection with a mass shooting. See updates below:
A tussle over conflicting evidence of shooter’s mental health
Before jurors entered the courtroom Friday morning, Shannon Smith, Crumbley’s attorney, objected to evidence prosecutors plan to introduce, specifically texts that the shooter sent to a friend about asking his parents for mental health treatment.
Smith said it is unfair for prosecutors to be able to introduce this evidence when she will likely not be able to call the shooter’s doctors to testify about apparent consistencies in this evidence.
She also said statements the shooter made to his doctors refutes the evidence in the text messages between him and his friend.
Judge Cheryl Matthews said this issue has already been decided and the shooter’s attorney, Paulette Loftin, asserted privilege for her client in 2022. It is not new information that the shooter will likely assert his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, Matthews said.
Smith asked Matthews to not allow the text evidence to come in because she will have no way to cross-examine it. Assistant Prosecutor Marc Keast said the evidence is not testimonial and that doesn’t apply.
Matthews said she will prohibit putting the shooter on the stand when she knows he will assert his Fifth Amendment rights.
“I understand your problem. I understand the difficulties. I do,” Matthews told Smith.
Attorney directs blame at James Crumbley; Jennifer Crumbley to testify
In her opening statement and cross-examination of witnesses Thursday, Smith suggested Jennifer Crumbley’s husband, James, was responsible for buying the family’s guns and keeping them stored. Jennifer Crumbley had little experience with guns, Smith argued. She made a post on Instagram about using a 9mm handgun for the first time at a shooting range with her son after James Crumbley and the shooter bought the gun.
Jennifer Crumbley will testify in her own defense, Smith said in her opening statement.
More:Recap Day 3: Mother of Oxford High School shooter will take the stand during trial
More:Recap Day 2: Jury selected in Jennifer Crumbley trial
More:Recap Day 1: Judge asks potential jurors for opinions on guns in Jennifer Crumbley trial
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