Facing charges, parents of Michigan shooting suspect are now fugitives

The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semi-automatic 9 mm Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” Ethan Crumbley, 15, called it.

The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed.

A day later, authorities say the teenager fatally shot four classmates in the halls of Oxford High School in suburban Detroit.

On Friday, Karen D. McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor, laid out those and other chilling details as she took the rare step of filing involuntary manslaughter charges against the suspect's parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley.

McDonald said the Crumbleys were culpable in the year’s deadliest school shooting because they had allowed their son access to a handgun while ignoring glaring warnings that he was on the brink of violence.

Law enforcement officials said that the parents had gone missing Friday afternoon and that the county’s fugitive-apprehension team, FBI agents and U.S. marshals were looking for the couple.

But lawyers for the parents said the Crumbleys had not fled, but had left town for their own safety and were returning to be arraigned.

In an extraordinary news conference, McDonald recounted a nearly minute-by-minute litany of missed opportunities to intervene — including how the suspect’s parents had been alerted to a disturbing drawing he made containing violent images and a plea for help just hours before the shooting.

Law enforcement officials say the gunman fired more than 30 rounds before he was apprehended. He has been charged with terrorism and first-degree murder in the deaths of Tate Myre, 16; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. Seven other people were wounded.

A lawyer for Ethan Crumbley pleaded not guilty on his behalf this week. Gun control experts said McDonald’s move to charge the parents of a mass shooting suspect was almost unheard-of.