Recap Day 8: Jennifer Crumbley testifies she wishes son would've killed her, husband instead
Editor's Note: Some of the text below is graphic. Discretion is advised.
Pontiac — Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford High School shooter, testified Thursday that she doesn't want to describe herself as a victim but her family lost everything in the aftermath of the 2021 shooting and she wishes her son would've acted differently.
"I wish he would've killed us instead," said Crumbley, testifying on her own behalf Thursday during her trial at Oakland County Circuit Court.
Crumbley, who is being tried on four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of four students at the hands of her son, said parents spend their entire lives trying to protect their children from others. She said she never imagined she'd have to protect others from her son.
"That's what blew my mind," said Crumbley. "That's the hardest thing I had to stomach."
Delay in turning themselves in
Staying at a friend's art studio in Detroit in early December, Crumbley said she and her husband feared for their safety as they wait to turn themselves in on criminal charges.
Crumbley withdrew thousands of dollars from the family's bank accounts to hire an attorney and because she heard any civil lawsuits might cause their assets to be frozen. She and James Crumbley stayed for a few days at a hotel in Auburn Hills before going to the friend's art studio in Detroit. Once plans to charge them were announced, they made plans with their attorney to turn themselves in, Crumbley said.
On Dec. 3, Jennifer and James planned to turn themselves in the next morning. They each took four Xanax pills to cope with their anxiety and help them sleep, Crumbley testified. Smith showed a screenshot of alarms the couple set for early in the morning of Dec. 4.
A video showed in court Wednesday showed law enforcement barging into the art studio with guns.
'Numb'
Just hours after her son opened fire on his classmates at Oxford High School in 2021, Jennifer Crumbley said she still couldn't imagine that it was her son who'd opened fire.
Before police arrived at her house on Nov. 30 to execute a search warrant, Crumbley said her thinking was "hazy" and she felt "numb."
"I didn't really believe everything was happening the way it was," said Crumbley, testifying in her own defense Thursday in Oakland Circuit Court. "It was surreal. My mind was in all different places."
When Crumbley heard about injuries, she said her mind shifted into planning mode: Her son would get arrested, but they could still figure out how to deal with the situation. She didn't hear victims had died until she sat alone in a deputy sheriff's patrol car later that afternoon as a search warrant was executed on her house.
Husband in charge of gun
Crumbley testified that it was her husband, James, who was in charge of storing the guns and that they kept the gun they bought their son locked up with a cable lock, with the key hidden in a decorative beer stein and the bullets separate.
Crumbley said “guns aren’t really my thing” and said her husband James was in charge of storing the guns. She didn't feel comfortable doing it herself, she said, and she said she had never taken the cable lock off herself and did not even know which beer stein the key was stored in.
She said the 9mm handgun was bought for her son to use only at a shooting range, and he was not allowed to access it without his father around
Crumbley took the stand early Thursday afternoon to testify in her own defense after prosecutors rested their case in Oakland County Circuit Court.
Defense attorney Shannon Smith addressed text messages introduced by prosecutors that Crumbley got from her son in the spring of 2021, telling her he thought he saw a demon in the house. She thought her son was “messing around,” as he had made jokes for years about the family's house having a ghost. The family had even given the "house ghost" nicknames, like "Victoria" and "Boris Johnson."
The shooter texts Crumbley about the house being haunted, saying he has a photo and videos of the demon. He sends half a dozen unanswered texts, then says: “Can you at least text back?” There was no response from Crumbley until two days later, when she asked where her husband was.
These texts didn't stand out to Crumbley, she said — not even now looking back with the benefit of hindsight — because she assumed "it was just him messing around." She said he has been convinced the house was haunted since 2015, and became even more convinced when he and his friend played with an Ouija board in the basement after he got one for Christmas in 2020.
Crumbley said there was never a time when her son asked for help and she laughed at him or refused to get him mental health treatment, as the teen said in texts to his friend.
School meeting
Crumbley said seeing the drawings and phrases her son made on his math worksheet Nov. 30, 2021, which included phrases like "Blood everywhere" and "the thoughts won't stop," "concerned" her. But she initially thought he had drawn all over the empty worksheet to get back at his parents for an argument the had the night before about his low grades and missing assignments.
Her son's counselor had talked to him for about an hour and a half before Jennifer and James got to the school, she testified, and she learned they had talked about the family dog passing away and his sadness over his friend leaving the state.
Crumbley said she thought her son was going to get in trouble and she was expecting a disciplinary meeting Nov. 30. But the school was nonchalant during the brief meeting, she said.
Her son's counselor said he didn't think her son posed a risk, and gave him the option to stay at school. Crumbley insisted she never would have refused to take him out, as prosecutors have characterized.
“I thought the advice they were giving us was good advice," Crumbley said.
Crumbley said the school never told her about a teacher’s concerns that her son was sleeping all the time in class and was failing, nor did they tell her about an assignment where he had written that he felt terrible and his family was a mistake. She said she “definitely” would have been concerned, had she known about this.
Crumbley said she had told her husband to start making calls to find mental health treatment for their son once he was done working for the day.
But he would never have the chance, as the shooting took place two hours later.
No requests for help
During her more than two hours of testimony, Crumbley denied her son asked for mental health treatment and said she never noticed any issues that might have suggested he needed it, despite prosecutors' assertions that she ignored her son's requests for help.
Smith confronted Crumbley with text messages her son sent to his friend in April 2021 saying he wanted to ask his parents for mental health treatment, but that they laughed at him when the topic came up a few times. Crumbley denied remembering her son ever asking for mental health treatment, let alone her and her husband laughing it off.
She could tell her son was sad after his friend — which Crumbley said was the only friend he spent time with outside school — left for a treatment facility shortly before Halloween in 2021. Crumbley asked her son if he had anyone else he could spend time with. But she maintained she didn't see any reason to get him professional help.
“It hit us really hard, because we didn’t really expect it coming," she said of her son's friend leaving.
She said her son struggled with getting a grasp on his future because of his grades, despite aspirations of designing video games or owning a car shop. Crumbley testified he at times expressed anxiety over school things such as tests, but never to a level that made her think he needed professional treatment. She said he never asked for mental health treatment.
"He expressed those concerns (about his future) to me but not to the level that I thought he needed to see a psychiatrist," she said.
Crumbley said seeing the drawings and phrases her son made on his math worksheet concerned her. But she initially thought he had done it to get back at his parents for an argument the had the night before about his struggling grades. Her son's counselor had talked to him for about an hour and a half before Jennifer and James got to the school, she testified, and she learned they had talked about the family dog passing away and his sadness over his friend leaving the state.
Crumbley said her son was an average student and their biggest issue with him was missing assignments. It was something they battled all the time, she said. She would go on the school’s application to monitor his grades and assignments multiple times a day, she said.
She said she and her husband talked about their son daily; he had a part-time job and bowling practice and they had to work out transportation for that. Overall, she said she felt like they were pretty close. She didn’t go through his texts – she didn’t feel like she needed to – but would go through his room when she was cleaning, she said.
“We would talk, I mean, we did a lot of things together,” Crumbley said. “I trusted him. I felt like I had an open door, he can come to me about anything. I felt as a family the three of us were really close."
Family life
Shannon Smith, Crumbley's attorney, took her through, dozens, if not hundreds, of photos she had posted on Facebook: images of camping trips; vacations; holidays; playing games; and pets, including her son's cat, Dexter. Just hours after the shooting, one of the only things he said to Crumbley in Oxford substation was “please take care of Dexter.”
Many of the photos came from trips the family took in 2021, which Crumbley said her son's friend often accompanied them on. The pictures Smith flashed on the screen spanned about two years, from early 2019 into the fall of 2021.
Crumbley choked up as Smith showed some of the photos posted on her Facebook page: Her son with his pet chinchilla, a close-up of his smiling face right after he had braces put on, her son and his friend on a beach.
Son's interests before shooting
Crumbley appeared nervous as she testified, her voice trembling. She said having a lot of emotions for her is difficult, and she tends to “keep things in and I let it out when I’m alone.”
She said when things get emotional, she goes into planning mode.
“I internalize things and my reaction is to take care of other things that may have to be taken care of, like financials or things that keep the house running,” Crumbley said.
Crumbley described her son before the shooting and his interests, which included bowling, using metal detectors to find old coins or cans and playing video games. She said he also enjoyed shooting BB guns and doing target practice. She said he played soccer up until ninth grade and enjoyed skiing. He loved history, she said.
"He could play me in Trivial Pursuit, and he would get me every single time," she said with a small smile.
Smith, Crumbley's attorney, also asked her if she'd gotten her son medical treatment in the past. She said she'd taken him to the doctor for a mole that change colors, headaches that lasted awhile and if he got sick.
After her husband, James, lost his job in the fall of 2021, Crumbley said insurance was an issue and she was going to enroll her husband on her insurance plan.
Emptying their son's bank account
The day of the Oxford High School shooting, James and Jennifer Crumbley emptied their son's bank account, taking $3,000 out and leaving only 99 cents inside.
In the following days, they withdrew another $6,000 in cash from two other accounts, Oakland County Sheriff's Office Lt. Timothy Willis testified Thursday during Jennifer Crumbley's trial on four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
They stayed at several different hotels and bought new phones, as their own phones had been seized by police in the aftermath of the shooting, Willis said.
Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Marc Keast also introduced footage from the parking lot of the industrial building where the Crumbleys stayed for much of the day on Dec. 3 and into the night, until their arrests early the next morning. Footage shows them arriving shortly before 11 a.m., and James Crumbley moving the couple's car right before 4 p.m. — about four hours after arrest warrants for the couple were issued.
Willis confirmed that there were no calls in Crumbley’s phone logs to doctors offices or mental health treatment facilities after the meeting with the school Nov. 30.
On cross-examination, Willis said had not discovered any evidence the shooter's parents ever saw his journal with drawings of guns and plans for the shooting.
Willis said he believes the Crumbleys would be facing murder charges, instead of manslaughter, if they had seen the journal.
"If I had evidence of that, I believe the charges would be different," he said.
Lt. cries as he details where each child was shot
Willis broke down in tears on the witness stand as he Assistant Prosecutor Marc Keast showed photos of each of the children who were killed in the Oxford High School shooting — Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Hana St. Juliana, 14; and Justin Shilling, 17 — and asked him about where each were shot.
Hana was shot in the upper torso and abdomen, and Tate, Madisyn and Justin were shot in the head.
Willis, who was the first witness to testify Thursday, said he initially thought the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting might be a false alarm, similar to what they have had at other schools, but he remembers someone telling him, “it’s real.”
As Keast showed photos of the victims and Willis testified about their causes of death, Crumbley bowed her head and cried. She began sobbing as Keast played silent surveillance video of the shooting.
Attorney Shannon Smith looked away from the screen as the video played, wiping her eyes as Crumbley sobbed and bowed her head next to her.
Willis struggled to speak when Keast asked him why police had to run past the victims lying on the ground instead of stopping to help them.
“Because the situation was active and the killing hadn’t stopped, you can't stop to render aid,” Willis said, choking up. He took a deep breath to compose himself before he continued. “I know those officers. And that is the hardest thing they've ever had to do in their life.”
Willis said “every single” page of the shooter’s journal referenced a school shooting, and more than half of the 90 pieces of paper in his backpack had drawings of firearms on them.
Willis read aloud some of the journal entries where the shooter talked about his desire to shoot up the school and how his parents don’t listen to him.
“I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the f-----g school,” the shooter wrote. “I want help but my parents don’t listen to me and I can’t get any help. … My parents won’t listen to me about help or therapists.”
Keast also showed footage from a deputy sheriff's car camera of Jennifer and James Crumbley sitting in his patrol car. Jennifer is handcuffed, and they ask each other in agitated voices why. But James tells her at one point not to "freak out" so the situation doesn't get worse.
"I didn't do anything," Jennifer said.
Prosecutors contend Crumbley was grossly negligent for ignoring her son's spiral mental health and then buying him a gun.
Her attorney has argued she was a caring mother but there was no way the shooting was foreseeable.