Today there is a deep read story in the Washington Post: Guilty: Inside the high-risk, historic prosecution of a school shooter’s parents; A Post reporter embedded Michigan prosecutors as they pursued homicide charges against Jennifer and James Crumbley, whose son killed four students at Oxford High.
If you have a subscription you will get the full impact of the piece, including the graphics. You should also check out the comments, mostly extremely positive about both the reporting and the prosecution. Here’s an example, a comment that has been “liked” 469 times as of earlier this evening:
Excellent reporting.
I am taking a moment to think about this prosecution team. They are public servants in the truest sense of the words. They deserve our deepest respect and thanks. Maureen Siwik,13 hours ago thumb_up 469
WAPO, online edition, July 8, 2024
This is how the story was reported:
For the past two years, Post reporter John Woodrow Cox has had behind-the-scenes access to an unprecedented effort by a Michigan prosecutor to charge the parents of a 15-year-old school shooter with involuntary manslaughter. As a condition of his access, The Post agreed to wait until the cases against Jennifer and James Crumbley were resolved to publish what he witnessed. The Post assigned another reporter to cover the trials in real time. Cox was not involved in the news coverage.
Cox spent months with prosecutors and investigators while they gathered hundreds of pieces of evidence against the Crumbleys, whose son killed four schoolmates at Oxford High. He watched them meet with some witnesses and make crucial decisions about how to prosecute the couple. He attended more than two dozen strategy meetings, read through hundreds of pages of documents and text messages and later embedded with the prosecution team for the entirety of both parents’ trials. He was occasionally excluded from sensitive legal discussions and witness preparation sessions.
Id.
As I wrote earlier this year, I respected Oakland County, Michigan Prosecutor Karen McDonald for charging and trying the parents of school shooter Ethan Crumbley.
I watched some of the Jennifer Crumbley trial online, as much as I could stomach, and I was relieved when a jury found her guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
The shooter’s father, James Crumbley was convicted by a jury a little over a month later. The Crumbleys were each sentenced to 10-15 years in prison. https://abcnews.go.com/US/jennifer-james-crumbley-parents-michigan-school-shooter-sentenced/story?id=108900929 . Given the facts of this case, the sentences were entirely warranted.
The victim impact statements for all three of the Crumbley trials were deeply moving. Hana St. Juliana’s dad bluntly told the court and all present that he was not the same person any more. Hana’s sister pulled defense attorney Shannon Smith up short when she told Smith not to roll her eyes as she spoke about her sister. What a disgusting spectacle, Ms. Smith.
I thought many times earlier this winter–what if Karen McDonald had been prosecutor when the OCCK crimes devastated an entire county? What if there had been arrests, or even answers of any kind? What if there had been honest statements to the press instead of complete bullshit? What if there had been a national reporter who dug into this case back in the day, in spite of that evil SOS, Oakland County prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson? What if Patterson was more concerned about the numerous unsolved murders (most of them children) in Oakland County and the pedophile rings just under the surface of his kingdom, instead of his run for senate (or any higher office his exploratory committee could wrangle)?
Almost 50 years have passed since those unsolved murders Brooks Patterson simply stepped over and had buried in his quest for greater power. He knew the Michigan State Police would provide the black hole treatment this case has in fact received for almost five decades. There would never be any arrests; no trial, no victim impact statements, no deep dive read in a national newspaper–not so much as an honest comment in response to legitimate questions. Not a single effort made by his office to seek truth on behalf of murdered children in a county where the murder rate at that time could probably be counted on two hands (three at most).
The question has long since become not who was involved in these grisly crimes, but why they have not been solved/closed. Thus, the victim impact statements in this case should have been made to: L. Brooks Patterson, Richard Thompson, Gary Hawkins, Robert Robertson, Larry Wasser, Chet Romatowski, Ralph Cabot, Jane Burgess, Jerry Tobin, Don Studt, Jessica Cooper, Paul Walton, Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard and members of his staff, Dave Robertson, Garry Gray and probably a few others on the staff at the OCP offices of Patterson and Cooper, and others who knew or suspected what happened here and kept their mouths shut.
When I think of my poor parents, trusting the police and the legal system, thinking that they had done the right thing moving to Oakland County for the school system–it takes my breath away. It would later become full-on gaslighting after my dad started asking difficult questions in 2005. It is a really rotten place.
It is malfeasance, not just misfeasance, that kept the OCCK case from ever being litigated. This deep dive reporting in today’s WAPO never happened in the Detroit area about the OCCK case or Frank Shelden and N. Fox Island. The heavy hand of the old prosecutor-turned eternal county executive took care of that. General Motors and perhaps a three-lettered agency or two may have tipped the scale as well. The stories got a little traction in metro-Detroit; more like a little scratch than a deep dive.
In other news, the OCCK case has been handed off to yet another detective at the Michigan State Police. Another detective who is too busy to ever get any simple sense of what could actually be done in this case in good conscience and good practice, before he passes it off to yet another detective. Garry Gray-Dave Robertson-Sean Street-Eric Young, and now James Plumber. When Gray and Robertson had this cold case for over a decade–one of them working it full time and the other running defense for the MSP–nothing of substance was accomplished. We know they concealed information about 2009 polygraph of suspect John Hastings’ polygraph in Georgia. Michiganders’ tax dollars paid for them to “audit” this case while they racked up retirement credit. Now the MSP wants to cry about lack of resources. We didn’t get our money’s worth–not from the gigantic grant back in the day that no one accounted for, nor from yet another decade of paper-pushing before the case went back into the deep freeze.
Just like ole Brooksie envisioned it. Imagine if he had worked like Karen McDonald has.
I know. I can’t imagine it either.