James Crumbley Guilty: Convicted of involuntary manslaughter after monumental jury trial

James Crumbley trial verdict: Father found guilty of manslaughter after son kills 4 students

James Crumbley was found guilty on Thursday of manslaughter after his son, Ethan Crumbley, shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in 2021.

PONTIAC, Mich. (FOX 2) - James Crumbley was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter after a seven-day jury trial and the second of two monumental cases brought forth by the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office.

The jury deliberated for more than a day before convicting Crumbley in the deaths of four Oxford High School students who were murdered by his teenage son more than two years ago. It was the second guilty verdict secured by the prosecutor after she took the unprecedented step of charging both James and his wife Jennifer in connection to the mass shooting carried out by their son.

Judge Cheryl Mathews scheduled James Crumbley's sentence date for April 9 at 9 a.m. - the same day Jennifer Crumbley is expected to be sentenced.

At the heart of the case was Crumbley's responsibility as a parent and whether his decision to purchase a gun for his son and failing to secure it amounted to gross negligence and indirectly caused the deaths of Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, and Justin Shilling.

The high-profile trial followed years of evidence gathering, motion hearings, and anticipation after county prosecutor Karen McDonald chose to go forward with bringing charges just days after the mass shooting.

McDonald and her assistant prosecutor Marc Keast argued over five days of witness testimony that James was partly responsible for the deaths of the four kids.

They called more than a dozen witnesses, played security video from a gun store and inside the high school, showed revealing text messages and explosive journal entries written just days before the rampage was carried out.

During her rebuttal, McDonald physically locked the murder weapon with a cable lock, showing the jury that "ten seconds of the easiest, simplest thing" could have prevented the deaths of four teenagers.

But Mariell Lehman, the defense attorney for James Crumbley, argued there were any number of gaps in what the defendant knew about what his son was planning that he couldn't be found guilty.

"You would have seen evidence if James was guilty," she told the jury during her closing argument. "If James knew about what was in the journal, the prosecution would have told you that. If James knew his son had gained access to firearms, the prosecution would have told you that.

"The fact that you have not seen that evidence is your reasonable doubt," she added.