Recap Day 3: Audio of 911 call James Crumbley made after Oxford shooting: 'I'm really freaking out'
Editor's Note: Some of the testimony below is graphic. Discretion is advised.
Pontiac — A timeline of when and how James Crumbley, the father of the Oxford High School shooter, discovered that the family's gun was missing during the 2021 shooting played out in court Thursday, including his frantic 911 call when he realized it was missing.
James Crumbley, 47, is being tried in Oakland County Circuit Court on four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of four students his son shot in 2021 — Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17.
Missing gun, 911 call
After meeting with school officials the morning of Nov. 30, 2021 to discuss a math worksheet on which his son had drawn disturbing pictures and words, including a gun and the words, "Help Me," James Crumbley immediately went back to work, delivering four DoorDash orders.
At 1:09 p.m., James received an email about the shooting at Oxford High School. He called the shooter four minutes later, then again at 1:17 p.m., said Edward Wagrowski, a former Oakland County Sheriff's detective, who testified in detail about phone records and text messages between the Crumbleys. He spoke to his wife, Jennifer, for 10 minutes as he drove back to their home from the Meijer parking lot, where students were reuniting with parents. There, he checked for the 9mm.
Around 1:30 p.m., he called 911, his voice frantic.
“I have a missing gun at my house,” James said. “I have a missing gun and my son is at the school. … I don’t know if it was him, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m really freaking out.”
The day of the shooting
The day of the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting, James dropped off the shooter at Oxford High School at 7:46 a.m. Surveillance video shown in court showed him dropping the teen, then 15, off at school.
Crumbley went home afterward and then to a barn to attend to the family's horses around 9 a.m. He was at the barn when Jennifer sent him photos of a disturbing math worksheet on which their son had drawn a picture of a handgun and the words, "The thoughts won't stop. Help me."
“My god. WTF,” Crumbley wrote in response to his wife's texts.
They both arrived at the high school to meet with school officials around 10:30 a.m., after they had an about seven minute phone call with each other.
Buying the gun
Four days before the shooting, the Crumbleys purchased the 9mm SIG Sauer handgun the shooter later used to kill his classmates and injure seven others.
Social media posts shared during testimony Thursday showed posts made by both the shooter and his mom, Jennifer Crumbley, before the shooting about the 9mm.
"Just got my new beauty. 9mm SIG Sauer. Ask any questions I will answer," read a post by the shooter.
'Why not'
The shooter sent two videos of himself holding a gun to his friend in August 2021, captioned with “my dad left it out so I thought ‘Why not’ lol.”
The teen didn’t talk to this friend — or hardly anyone — in November after the friend was sent to an out-of-state treatment center, testified Wagrowski, who pulled text messages sent by the shooter and his parents. The shooter sent 48 texts in November: to his parents and to an application that appeared to be for homework help.
20,000 text messages
The shooter, Ethan Crumbley, exchanged as many 20,000 text messages with a friend before the shooting, in which he described some of his challenges.
Wagrowski read some of the messages Thursday. In one exchange, the shooter told his friend about his insomnia and paranoia. In another, he told his friend that he needed help, but when he told his dad, he was given some pills and told to "suck it up."
"It’s at the point that I’m asking to go to the doctor," read one text from the shooter to his friend. "My mom laughed."
A 'proud chest'
Wagrowski, who analyzed surveillance footage of the 2021 shooting, tearfully narrated the events of the 2021 shooting, its details worn into grooves in his memory from watching them countless times. He said the shooter came out of the bathroom with a "proud chest," his shoulders back.
He shot Phoebe Arthur and her boyfriend Elijah Mueller, then Hana St. Juliana, Kylie Ossege and Riley Franz. The shooter then fired point-blank with the gun against Madisyn Baldwin's head, and shot Tate Myre twice as Tate turned a corner in a hallway, wearing headphones, dropping before he knew what happened, then walked forward and shot teacher Molly Darnell.
The shooter entered a bathroom and killed Justin Shilling out of any surveillance camera's view. Around the same time as Phoebe and Elijah were shot, so were John Asciutto and Aiden Watson.
James Crumbley began to cry around the time Wagrowski described Madisyn's death.
'They looked like zombies'
Wagrowski told the jury about rushing to a nearby Meijer the day of the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting, the school's planned meeting spot. He ran red lights to get to the scene, a caravan of at least 16 police cars, ambulances and SWAT vehicles screaming past him when he stopped in an intersection so they could pass safely.
Kids coming out of Oxford on foot after the shooting, too skimpily dressed for the freezing weather that November day and one boy missing a shoe, reminded Wagrowski of his teenage daughter.
“They looked like zombies. They had no facial expression. Nothing," he said.
Teacher testifies about day of shooting
Molly Darnell, a teacher at Oxford High School shooting the day of the Nov. 30, 2021 rampage who was shot in the shoulder, was the first person to testify Thursday.
Darnell said she saw a group of students rushing down the hallway outside her classroom and thought there might have been a fight. They moved with an urgency she'd never seen before, she testified — yet the hall was otherwise oddly silent.
"There was a hyper-ness to the voices, and it was almost like they were pushing forward, trying to move as fast as possible," said Darnell, who also testified during Jennifer Crumbley's trial.
She eventually saw a person she didn't recognize through her classroom door's window and the two locked eyes, the only part of his face she could see because of the mask and dark hoodie the person wore. She saw the person raise his arm in her peripheral vision.
"I see some movement coming from the side of him and I realize that he’s raising a gun to me," she testified, her voice trembling. "I remember thinking in my head, ‘There’s no orange tip.’ I’d heard somewhere in my past that BB guns had an orange tip. My body reacted."
She jumped to the side, a bullet hitting her upper left arm. She took off her jacket and motioned to her scars.
But she didn't feel any pain beyond a sting that felt like hot water, and remained in denial at first that she'd been shot, Darnell testified. Popping sounds she had heard could have been lockers slamming, she thought, not registering them as gunshots.
She used her cardigan as a tourniquet when she felt blood dripping down her arm. All she could think about was barricading the classroom door.
“The only thing I have to go on right now is what’s happening in my space, and what are my senses telling me.”
When an assistant principal pounded on the door, Darnell said, she was almost too scared to open the door. She had known him since she started at the school but didn't immediately trust it was him.
The shooter shot several times through her office door, and Darnell knows if she hadn't jumped to the side, he would have shot her in her chest.
"He was aiming to kill me," she testified. "Those shots were intended."
During her testimony, Crumbley began to cry, wiping his eyes with a tissue.
Defense attorney's opening statement
In her brief opening statement, Mariell Lehman, James Crumbley's attorney, outlined what jurors would not hear during the trial: that Crumbley was aware of his son's plans to open fire on his high school.
Lehman said prosecutors have cherry-picked evidence to make him look negligent. But in reality, he had no idea his son had access to the gun, nor about his plans for the shooting, Lehman argued.
"You will hear testimony that access was not allowed, in James' mind,” Lehman said, possibly hinting that Crumbley might testify later in the trial. “He did not purchase that gun with the knowledge that his son may use it against other people.”
Lehman said Crumbley went back to work as a DoorDash driver the day of the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting after a meeting with school officials because it was his job. She said "when you’re not aware of an immediate, imminent danger, why would you do anything different than what you normally do?"
"You wouldn’t, because you don’t have any reason to think you need to," she said.
Prosecutors' opening statement
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Marc Keast said in his opening statement that Crumbley's guilt comes from what he didn't do as much as what he did: He didn't secure the gun he bought for the shooter four days before the shooting. An image shown during opening statement showed the cable lock that came with the gun unopened.
Crumbley frequently took his son on trips to shooting ranges in the months before the shooting, Keast said, even after his son's only friend abruptly moved out of Michigan and the shooter went into a “downward spiral of stress.” When the shooter asked his father for help, he texted his friend, Crumbley told him to "suck it up."
“What happened inside that school was truly a nightmare come to life. But it didn’t have to be,” Keast said. “That nightmare was preventable and it was foreseeable.”
Keast said Crumbley was "the adult in the best position to prevent" the 2021 shooting. Crumbley and his wife met with school employees the morning of the shooting to discuss drawings on a worksheet the shooter had made of a person with a gunshot wound, a firearm that looked like the handgun the Crumbleys purchased a few days earlier, and phrases like “the thoughts won’t stop” and “help me.”
But the Crumbley parents left their son at school, and did not tell school officials they had guns in their home.
"What happened was foreseeable," Keast said.
Keast emphasized the case isn't about bad parenting or opinions on gun control.
"We’re here to talk about a preventable mass murder," said Keast.
Jury instructions
Oakland County Circuit Judge Cheryl Matthews went over a series of instructions with the jury, advising them not to discuss the case with anyone, even each other before deliberations begin, or read about the case online or in newspapers.
"It's your duty as a jury to only decide this case based on the evidence presented in this courtroom," she said.
Matthews also warned the jury to be aware of personal biases.
"It's important for you to maintain an open-mind... until you go the jury room," she said.
Judge excludes certain text messages
Before the jury came in Thursday morning, Matthews ruled prosecutors cannot show texts between the shooter and his mom, Jennifer Crumbley, several months before the massacre, in which he told her he saw a demon in the house while he was home alone.—
James and Jennifer were at the barn together where their horses lived, but Matthews said because there is no evidence James knew about the texts, they cannot be shown to the jury.
She also excluded a text from the shooter to his friend the day of the shooting, hinting at what he was about to do.
Other texts from Jennifer Crumbley ruled out by Matthews includes one she sent to her son when he got in trouble at school the day before the shooting for researching bullets online, and one after the shooting happened: "Ethan don't do it."
Matthews also won't allow some messages between Jennifer and her boss before the shooting, but will allow some sent after, when she told her boss she'd discovered the gun and bullets were missing from the family's home, and she suspected her son must be the shooter.
Family members in courtroom
Relatives of two of the students who died in the shooting were in the courtroom Thursday — Craig Shilling and Steve St. Juliana. Shilling was in the courtroom throughout Jennifer Crumbley's trial, as was St. Juliana.
Come back to The Detroit News for more on this developing story.
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