Were the Oxford school shooter's parents guilty of material support to terrorism?
It's rare for parents to be criminally charged for their child's actions and for a 15-year-old to be sentenced to life without parole.
Most school shootings follow the same predictably tragic pattern of missed red flags and a preventable crisis escalating into violence. While the attack was the same, the aftermath in Oxford, Michigan is different and important.
Yesterday, James Crumbley—the father of the Oxford High school shooter—was found guilty of four counts of manslaughter. In the closing arguments, the prosecutor described “gross negligence” as he left a gun accessible inside his home and ignored the deteriorating mental health of his son. This verdict comes a month after his wife was also found guilty of manslaughter.
This landmark case holding parents criminally responsible for the actions of their teenage child is an opportunity to look back at how a 15-year-old school shooter was criminally charged and sentenced. Ethan Crumbley was the first minor to face life without the possibility of parole following a 2012 US Supreme Court ruling which found life without parole is excessive for all but the rarest juvenile offender.
What makes a 15-year-old school shooter and his parents different from other offenders?
Michigan prosecutors charged Ethan Crumbley with terrorism, a novel approach made possible by a law enacted after the 9/11 attacks.
“If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is. There is no playbook about how to prosecute a school shooting.” - Karen McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor
“What about all the children who ran, screaming, hiding under desks? What about all the children at home right now, who can’t eat and can’t sleep and can’t imagine a world where they could ever step foot back in that school? Those are victims, too, and so are their families and so is the community. The charge of terrorism reflects that” said Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald.
However, terrorism is typically reserved for violence with “discernable political, ideological, or religious motivation,” like the September 11 attacks. In 22-pages of handwritten journal entries, the Oxford shooter made a single convoluted claims about his attack leading to President Biden’s impeachment.
Instead of being driven to violence by political motivation, court records show the shooter was depressed and suicidal. He told his parents about hallucinations, videotaped himself torturing animals, and drew sketches of school shootings. He searched online to learn about prior school shootings, weapons, and ammunition, and even fashioned his own Molotov cocktails. He was crying for help at school, yet his spiral into untreated mental illness and unchecked violent ideation culminated with his parents purchasing him a handgun days before the shooting.
What is terrorism?
Just like the term “school shooting”, there is a surprising lack of consensus on what “terrorism” means.
The FBI defines terrorism as the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives.
In the United Kingdom, terrorism is use or threat of violence designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public.
The United Nations sees terrorism as: (i) the perpetration of a criminal act (such as murder, kidnapping, hostage-taking, arson, and so on), or threatening such an act; (ii) the intent to spread fear among the population (which would generally entail the creation of public danger) or directly or indirectly coerce a national or international authority to take some action, or to refrain from taking it.
In all three of these definitions, the common components are violence directed at the public with the intent to influence the actions of the government.
Michigan’s state anti-terrorism law, passed in 2002, uses a broader definition of terrorism beyond pressuring or retaliating against only the government with violence. It defines a terroristic act as being intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to affect the conduct of a government through intimidation or coercion.
“This (Oxford High attack) is why we have this law. It’s for this type of case. This is not just a murder case. It’s going to terrorize a generation of these kids who were in the school. The impact is on thousands of people.” — Matthew Schneider, a former federal prosecutor
Are a teen’s delusional aspirations of political impact enough to constitute terrorism? The reason so many people are hung up on the definition of these words is that terrorism compels people to action. We fought wars overseas and stood up an entire Department of Homeland Security with a $52 billion annual budget to stop terrorists.
US intelligence agencies maintain databases of suspected terrorists and the FBI has great latitude in surveilling what suspected terrorists do before they act. There is no question that if we invested as much time, money, and effort into school safety as we do into counterterrorism, that most school shooting plots would be averted. The problem is that the more we learn about teenage school shooters, the less they sound like “terrorists”.
Columbine and Domestic Terrorism
The attack at Columbine High 25 years ago became the most infamous school shooting, but it was never intended to be a shooting. The two attackers planned to copycat the Oklahoma City Bombing on the 4th anniversary with a more spectacular and deadly explosion that would level the entire school building.
Unlike McVeigh who was trained in the operation of explosives from his military service and had the resources to assemble a giant truck bomb, the Columbine attackers placed a crude assortment of improvised explosives around the school. When their bombs didn’t go off, plan B was to wander around the school firing at random students until they killed themselves.
What remains unclear about Columbine is exactly what motivated the shooters in their attempt to upstage McVeigh because they did not express specific grievances against the government. McVeigh’s attack was a direct response to standoffs between the government and anti-government white nationalist groups at Ruby Ridge and Waco. The failed Columbine bombing was a copycat of the spectacle without a clear ideological foundation.
The prevailing belief about most school shootings is the perpetrators are mentally ill, dark, and disturbed social outcasts who decide indiscriminate violence is their perverse way to gain notoriety. The circumstances surrounding school shootings like Columbine are actually far more complicated than that and the connections to terrorism should not be overlooked.
Are Other School Shootings Terrorism?
Rather than gaining individual notoriety, terrorism is about advancing a group’s ideology. Jihad translates to “the struggle” of a group’s ideological identity being defended from the enemies of Islam. Because terror attacks are intended to advance the agenda and status of a group, the goal of these attacks is to strike fear in citizens and debase the government.
Unlike terrorist groups, school shooters’ motivations are rooted in their individual personal trauma and crisis. They rarely have gripes with the broader principles of our institutions. For example, forty-three different perpetrators who fired shots at teachers and school administrators over the past 50 years were angry about their grades or recent discipline—they weren’t trying to change the world.
The Oxford shooter is not the only teen with terrorism charges in relation to school violence. In December 2021, a 19-year-old male student at Embry-Riddle University in Daytona Beach, Florida was charged with terrorism for coming to campus armed with a collapsible rifle and six loaded magazines in his backpack. He was in a state of crisis from failing his courses and sold his car to buy the weapon.
The adult man who opened fire at Michigan State University murder documentaries, school shooting videos, arsons, and searched terms including “people that shot up colleges”, “mass killings in college”, “the bomber”, and, “the nail bomber.”
In Johnstown, PA in 2021, two boys, 16 and 17, were similarly charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism for an averted plot after a search warrant found five semi-automatic rifles and ammunition in the 16-year-old’s bedroom. The boys were plotting an attack, did a walkthrough of the campus to identify security cameras, and posted threats online. The 17-year-old was already expelled for prior school shooting threats.
Terrorism charges aren’t isolated to the United States. In the United Kingdom, a 13-year-old became one of the country’s youngest convicted terrorists for a Columbine copycat plot targeting an orphanage.
Terrorism Means Access to Resources
The Department of Homeland Security provides more than $1 billion in grants every year to state and local governments, but the money must be spent exclusively on counter terrorism. Unlike schools, regional airports are not left alone to fund and staff security screenings because they fall under the umbrella of TSA. If a small town police department suspects there is a terrorist plot, these officers have access to a regional Fusion Center funded by DHS and the Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI.
At the same time, conflating school shootings with terrorism sets a dangerous precedent. It opens up the possibility of Orwellian surveillance in the lives of teenagers and FBI profilers in the hallways of K-12 schools. Felony charges and terrorist watchlists would disqualify troubled teens from full social acceptance or building a strong, participatory civic life.
But schools and communities do desperately need resources and coordinated systems on a Homeland Security-scale to address rising school violence. At Susquehanna Valley High and Oxford High, life and death decisions were placed in the hands of one school counselor. These single points of failure can have tragic results.
Across the country schools need:
Crisis response teams that can investigate and respond to warning signs appropriately.
Systematic trauma-screening and easily accessible school-based mental health for struggling students who are talking and thinking about violence.
Education to parents and teachers about warning signs or red flags—as they say in counterterrorism, “if you see something, say something”.
Laws requiring safe and secure firearms storage at home to keep teenagers from accessing guns they can bring to school.
As a society, we must decide what terrorism is, or isn’t, and understand the consequences of both over-using the term, or avoiding it. Charges in these cases lay the legal groundwork for treating kids as terrorists and this is a problematic precedence to set. Inversely, avoiding terrorism charges brushes aside the presence of dangerous ideology that extend beyond the actions of any individual perpetrator.
In either case, making meaningful investments in prevention and intervention can stop an attack from ever happening and help a 15-year-old in crisis before he commits murderous actions that deserve a sentence of life without parole.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.