Ethan Crumbley killed four classmates with a gun. His parents were convicted

The students at Oxford High School were trudging between rooms during passing time, the short recess between classes. It was late November 2021, a mid-day like any other. Oxford is located just outside Detroit, Michigan, so it was cold, about minus 1C, and snow covered the ground. At 12.46pm, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley ambled to the south end of one of the school’s hallways.

Ethan, wearing a grey hoodie, jeans and a backpack, moved easily among the other students. He was lanky, with hunched shoulders. Squinting through his glasses, dark hair falling messily in front of his eyes, he looked somewhat like a ruffled hatchling. He was a quiet boy, an average student and, according to some of the staff at Oxford High School, no trouble at all.

Ethan entered a bathroom around 12.50pm, walked into one of the stalls and put down his pack. He took out a black notebook, pens, a juice bottle and his laptop. At the bottom of the bag, a jet-black Sig Sauer 9mm handgun jostled among rounds of ammunition. As Ethan fed the gun chamber with bullets, several other kids heard the rhythmic sound of metal on metal, like the tick of a grandfather clock. Then, click-clack, the sound of the gun cocking.

He had been planning this for months. He had Googled police response times. He’d looked up the difference between .22 and 9mm-calibre ammunition, the latter being more destructive, searched if Michigan had the death sentence, and he’d thought about who he wanted to kill. “The first victim,” he wrote in his journal, “has to be a pretty girl with a future so she can suffer just like me.”

Ethan slipped out of the stall, leaving his backpack and notebook behind. His hand was clenched around the butt of the pistol inside the front pocket of his hoodie, but his demeanour was calm as he emerged into the hallway crowded with students. Then he yanked his right hand from his pocket, raised his arm 90 degrees, held it there, straight and rigid, and began to fire into the crowd.

In seven seconds, he shot seven students, fatally wounding Hana St Juliana, 14, and Madisyn Baldwin, 17. The hallway erupted in screams, the frantic squeaking of rubber soles on linoleum, the sounds of backpacks and textbooks slapping to the floor. Ethan moved towards a classroom, where students hid behind desks, some recording the attack on their phones, some leaping out of the ground-floor windows. “Please don’t let this be real, please don’t let this be real,” one teenage girl pleaded into her cellphone’s camera, over the crack of gunshots.

Oxford’s assistant principal, Kristy Gibson-Marshall, saw the kids running down the hallway towards her. She was in her fifties, with longish, wavy dark hair. At first, she thought the students were laughing but as more of them passed by, she realised they were panicking. Then Gibson-Marshall heard her boss’s voice over the PA: “We’re on lockdown. This is not a drill.”

Gibson-Marshall knew remaining in the corridor would break protocol, but something drove her down the hallway anyway. The smell of burnt gunpowder grew stronger. So did the sound of screaming and gunfire. Outside classroom 225, she saw Tate Myre, 16, slumped in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice. Then she saw Ethan. Gibson-Marshall wondered why he was there alone and not running away. She asked the boy if he was OK. “I didn’t believe it could be him,” she later testified. But Ethan didn’t respond. He stared straight ahead and walked back down the hallway.

A few minutes later, Ethan reached another bathroom. Keegan Gregory, 15, and Justin Shilling, 17, were inside. The two boys did not know one another but, hearing gunshots, Shilling told Gregory to come into the stall to hide with him. Gregory squatted on the toilet seat so that the shooter wouldn’t see his feet and texted his family, “Help! Gunshots, I’m hiding in the bathroom.” Shilling tried to hide behind the cubicle door.

Ethan, possibly alerted by Gregory’s tapping, kicked the stall door open. He hesitated, then shouted at Shilling to come out but told Gregory to stay put. Both boys complied. As Gregory resumed texting his parents, Ethan shot Shilling. “He killed him,” Gregory wrote. “OMG.” Ethan turned back to Gregory and asked him to lean against the wall. Instead, Gregory ran past him. Ethan hurried out of the bathroom around 1pm.

Further down the hall, he saw police officers who had arrived at the scene. At first, they ran straight past. But when one noticed he was carrying a pistol, they began shouting at him to get on his knees. Ethan did as he was instructed, raising his hands up in the air.

He had always planned to comply. He wasn’t going to kill himself. He was too curious for that. “I know that rarely shootings have happened in Michigan,” he’d written in his journal. “Which means I will be the cause of the largest school shooting ever in the state.” Ethan wanted America to hear what he’d done, and he wanted to be incarcerated for life.

Over two years later, in an austere courtroom some 17 miles south of Oxford, prosecutors recounted the day of the shooting in minute detail. Reporters from all over the country were crammed on narrow, churchlike pews in a cordoned press section. But Ethan Crumbley wasn’t on trial. He’d pleaded guilty in 2022 to the murder of four people and injuring seven more and was later sentenced to life in prison. Today, it was his mother, Jennifer, who stood accused of involuntary manslaughter. His father, James, was scheduled to be tried on the same charge separately.

The Crumbley case was an unprecedented moment in the grim saga of mass shootings in America. In a famously litigious country, victims of gun violence have had little recourse to courts. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, signed by president George W Bush in 2005, shields firearm manufacturers and dealers from civil lawsuits. The number of parents of school shooters who have been put on trial in the US is vanishingly small. In 1999, the parents of the Columbine shooters faced civil lawsuits but were not criminally charged. Last year, the father of the Highland Park Fourth of July shooter pleaded guilty to reckless conduct, and the mother of a six-year-old who shot his teacher in Virginia was sentenced to 21 months for child neglect.

But Oakland County’s District Attorney, Karen McDonald, had decided to go further. Depending on its outcome, the trial was being heralded as a milestone. McDonald, a Democrat and mother of five, charged Ethan’s parents with involuntary manslaughter. She’d told a press conference that Jennifer and James knew their son had access to an unsecured firearm at home, that Ethan had been searching for ammunition online and that a teacher had discovered a disturbing drawing he had made, depicting his planned actions.

In the courtroom, McDonald sat at a wooden table to the judge’s left, dressed in a checked blazer, her bright blonde hair falling to her shoulders. She looked on as the Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor told the jury that Jennifer and James’s trials weren’t about lousy parenting but preventable mass murder. “The state [isn’t] trying to prove that the parents knew what was going to happen that day,” he said. “If that were the case, the charges would be murder.” Instead, the state aimed to prove that the Crumbleys had been grossly negligent parents and that they showed a wilful disregard for the danger their son’s behaviour had presented. (McDonald declined an interview request.)

Involuntary manslaughter involves less culpability than murder, but it can still be difficult to prove. Nobody had ever been tried for it in a mass shooting case before. For the prosecution to win a guilty verdict, it would have to prove that the Crumbley parents’ “wilful disregard” directly contributed to the events of November 30 2021.

There was another complication. When Ethan pleaded guilty in 2022, McDonald insisted he be sentenced as an adult. Now, prosecutors seemed to be arguing that Ethan was a child who might never have killed four people had his parents been paying closer attention. The prosecution had no legal obligation to be coherent with their accusations. From a legal point of view, these were two separate cases, on two separate tracks. The effect, though, was to suggest some sort of quantum morality, in which the prosecution claimed that Ethan was a victim of circumstance and an evil mastermind at the same time.

Behind a line of sheriff’s deputies, Jennifer Crumbley sat huddled at a desk next to her lawyer. She wore a grey turtleneck, her hair swept back in a greasy ponytail. She kept removing her thick black glasses to dab tears from her eyes, occasionally letting out a hoarse sob. Her attorney, Shannon Smith, rose to make her opening statement.

Smith, tall, red-headed, wearing purple high-heeled shoes and a matching jacket, told the jury she had been nervous on the way to the courthouse that morning. To calm her nerves, she had put on Taylor Swift. As she drove, she said, one line in the song stood out: Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes. This case, Smith told the court, was just a show to make the public feel better. It was a distraction from pain. Jennifer, she insisted, was a good mother who had suffered. She’d lost her son, too.

I spotted Steve St Juliana sitting in the courtroom one row ahead. His daughter Hana, a pretty girl with a future, had been shot and killed in the first few seconds of the attack. Steve and I had communicated by text and phone in the weeks leading up to the trial, but hadn’t met in person until that day. As I watched him slump deeper into his pew, I didn’t dare wonder what he was thinking or feeling, or what hearing all this was doing to him. Steve would later tell me that these trials were parts of a broader struggle for justice. On that cold January morning, though, he was in the courtroom for the same reason as everyone else. He wanted to know if Ethan’s parents could have prevented the death of his daughter and three other kids.

Jennifer Crumbley grew up in Clarkston, a Detroit suburb, where she skied with the junior varsity team. According to friends, she had a brash, sarcastic streak. She could also be self-indulgent and “talk for hours”, one former neighbour told me. Her young adulthood was marked by several misdemeanours, including a DUI. As she grew up, she traded her love of skiing for horses. She bought two and showered them with attention.

James Crumbley, two years her senior, was from Jacksonville, Florida. Some people who knew him said he was charming and happy-go-lucky; others told me he was standoffish and shy. Like Jennifer’s, his record wasn’t spotless. There was a DUI conviction in 2005, the year he and Jennifer got married on a Florida beach. Ethan, their only child, was born in 2006. The couple moved to Michigan when he was in elementary school, eventually settling in a modest three-bedroom house with a menagerie of pets: dogs, cats, a chinchilla. There were early indications Ethan was being neglected. One neighbour, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said they’d had a big argument with Jennifer for leaving Ethan home without a phone while she and James went barhopping when their son was around six years old. “When I confronted her, Jenn just raged, there was a whole list of expletives,” the neighbour told me. The person said Ethan was always timid and struggled to interact with other children and adults.

By early 2021, Ethan was a teenager exhibiting signs of mental illness. Text messages revealed during the trial suggested he might have suffered from hallucinations. One text to his mother in March of that year read, “Can you get home now? I think someone is in the house and I thought it was you, but when will you get home?” In another, the boy texted a picture of what he described as a demon, claiming the house was haunted. When his mother did not respond, Ethan pleaded, “CAN YOU AT LEAST TEXT BACK?” Jennifer, who was at a horse farm with her husband, phoned him back an hour later. The call lasted 19 seconds.

By April, Ethan’s isolation and anxiety seemed to worsen. In a message to a friend, he wrote, “Like I hear people talking to me, and I see someone in the distance. I actually asked my dad to take me to the doctor. He gave me some pills and told me to suck it up. My mom laughed when I told her.”

Equally worrying was Ethan’s interest in violence. In mid-April, he told the same friend about his wish “to take an axe and chop a baby bird in half”. Several weeks later, he fulfilled his desire. In two short videos, described by investigators at Ethan’s sentencing hearing, he burnt a hatchling with a butane lighter while speaking to it like a child. “Hey, little buddy,” he kept saying, before impaling it with a drywall screw. About a month later, he texted his friend: “I’m getting that feeling I need to kill again.”

Ethan liked guns too, videotaping himself with a .22-calibre KelTec pistol his parents had left around the house. “Now it’s time to shoot up the school,” he wrote to his friend, “joke joke joke joke.”

In late October 2021, Ethan’s friend, with whom he had exchanged over 20,000 messages, was taken out of state for mental health treatment. This seemed to affect Ethan deeply. In the weeks that followed, he spent hours online, looking up mass shootings and googling questions like, “What is the worst prison sentence in Michigan?”

“Loss, or impending loss, is often a key precipitant in such cases,” Dr Greg Saathoff, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and an FBI contractor who helps co-ordinate threat-assessment programmes in schools across the US, told me. In the preceding months, Ethan had lost his dog and his grandmother. Now his best friend, his only friend, had disappeared too. “When we identify a child as vulnerable to destructive behaviour,” Saathoff said, “we look to establish a support network in this child’s environment.” In other words, parents, relatives, friends.

But, according to Ethan, he had no such support. “One call and that can save a lot of lives,” reads one of his journal entries from that time. “My evil has fully taken over in me, and I used to like it, but now I don’t want to be evil. I want help, but my parents don’t listen to me, so I can’t get any help. I feel like I’m in a tiny loop of sadness.”

Ethan’s parents denied they saw these texts and videos or knew what he was searching for online. Dr Karie Gibson, chief of behavioural analysis unit-1 with the FBI, told me that people close to a potential mass attacker often show “an inability to recognise the significance of what is happening to a person”. There can be many reasons. People are preoccupied with everyday life and don’t have the bandwidth to notice or deal with worrying behaviours. Even if they notice, they can’t necessarily predict what it could lead to. (Saathoff and Gibson declined to comment on the Crumbley case specifically.)

The prosecution emphasised at trial that the Crumbleys knew their son was unhappy and still did nothing. In a text presented in court, Jennifer wrote to another parent: “Ethan isn’t bowling tonight. Recently, he’s been depressed.”

The state argued they always put their needs before their son’s. Whether it was their financial struggles (James was between permanent jobs) or marital problems (Jennifer was having an affair), these issues overshadowed their son’s welfare.

The one thing Ethan’s parents did indulge was their son’s love of guns, regularly taking him to a shooting range. On November 26, James took Ethan to a gun shop in Oxford to buy him an early Christmas present. In CCTV footage, father and son walk to a counter and examine an array of pistols. The shop clerk testified that the pair didn’t browse for long. They knew exactly what they wanted, the Sig Sauer. James paid $519.35, using his credit card. Before he left, he signed a form acknowledging it was illegal to buy a minor a gun.

One Saturday morning, midway through Jennifer’s trial, I drove to Oxford from the nearby town where I was staying. The central street is lined with chocolate-brown houses, with front windows shaded by striped awnings. It is a quiet, middle-class town that, like much of Michigan, swings Republican and Democrat. Like much of Michigan, it is also gun country. Hunting and sport shooting are traditions in this state with some 10 million acres of land open to the public.

That led to conflicted feelings among locals about the prospect of a guilty verdict for Jennifer and James. “Holding parents accountable for their inaction to provide ordinary care is necessary for the safety of all children,” Meghan Gregory wrote to me. Her son, Keegan, was the boy who ran away from Ethan in the bathroom.

But some academics and lawyers worried a guilty verdict might have unintended consequences. “Hard cases don’t make for good law,” Evan Bernick, a lecturer at Northern Illinois University, told me. The legal system is built on precedent. Once a precedent is established, regardless of how specific it is to a particular case, prosecutors can freely use it in other ostensibly similar cases. Bernick’s primary point was that a guilty verdict might be used as leverage in lower-profile cases that were not so unique or egregious. He was specifically worried about law enforcement pressuring suspects into taking plea bargains. “There are innate racial prejudices in our legal system and this type of precedent might help execute such a prejudice in law more easily,” he said.

On East Street, just off the main drag, I stopped by the green, box-shaped house where the Crumbleys had lived. A silver pick-up was parked outside, and a lurching pine tree invaded the front lawn. The prosecution had shown pictures from inside taken on the day of the shooting. Beds were unmade, clothes and cushions were strewn about the floor, an empty Canada House whiskey bottle was in Ethan’s room, and cardboard boxes were piled up in the living room. But the mess wasn’t the point, the prosecution argued. The chaos of the Crumbley family home was.

Sitting across the road, occasionally looking down to reread bits of trial transcript, I tried to recreate what had happened there in the days and hours before the shooting. By late November 2021, two disparate worlds were crammed under that roof. In one, two parents were wrapped up in their own problems and, in the other, a young man was descending into madness. I pictured the moment Ethan started taking videos of himself loading and unloading his pistol at the kitchen table. I saw James and Jennifer swigging from the bottles of Canada House whiskey, squabbling over money, her affair, their son.

Then, I imagined the night of November 29, when Ethan fought with them about his poor academic performance. As a punishment, they locked him in the freezing backyard for several hours. The final thing I read in the court files was that Ethan, presumably in his room, scribbled in his spidery handwriting the following sentence: “First off, I got my gun. It’s a 2022 Sig Sauer 9mm. Second, the shooting is tomorrow. I’m fully committed to this now. So yeah . . . I’m going to prison for life, and many people have about one day left.”

At around 9.25am on November 30, Jennifer was on the phone with Oxford High School’s front desk. In class, Ethan had been caught drawing guns on a worksheet, as well as pictures of a man bleeding. He’d written, “The thoughts won’t stop,” “Blood everywhere,” and “My life is useless.” School administrators told Jennifer they were deeply concerned, especially since Ethan had been caught looking up bullets on his phone the day before. Jennifer texted her husband a picture of the maths worksheet as she spoke to the school staff. James responded “WTF”, and she told him he needed to come in for an urgent meeting.

Around 10.37am, Jennifer and James got to the school. School counsellor Shawn Hopkins was waiting for them with Ethan and Nick Ejak, the dean of students. “Something had to be done,” Hopkins told them, after reviewing the disturbing findings. This wasn’t the first time Ethan had come to the attention of Hopkins, one of four counsellors for a student body of roughly 1,600. In May 2021, he received an email in which a teacher told him that Ethan frequently fell asleep and was failing her class. In September of that year, another teacher wrote to him that “Ethan [felt] terrible and that his family was a mistake.”

In addition to the protocols, metal detectors and police officers that have become a feature of American schools in the past two decades, the burden of shooting prevention has fallen on guidance counsellors and teachers, who are usually not qualified as mental-health professionals.

Saathoff, the threat-assessment expert, said that for shooters to be successfully identified, there must be good communication between staff members to ensure that students get the help they need. “Staff must know what is a threat and what is not before they report it.” He said that one has to imagine a potential shooter as being on the highway to violence: “There are exit ramps that can get [them] off such a path, then our job is to provide billboards that encourage the person to take these exits.”

An independent investigation commissioned by the district found that these billboards did not exist at Oxford High School. The report stated that staff didn’t recognise the shooter as a threat even though he showed clear signs of dangerous behaviour. This was because they hadn’t followed the district’s guidelines for identifying potential threats, guidelines that hadn’t been properly implemented by school administrators. In other words, school staff had no idea what to report as suspicious to a higher authority. (Oxford High School did not respond to interview requests.)

Staff didn’t recognise the shooter as a threat even though he showed clear signs of dangerous behaviour. They had no idea what to report as suspicious

Instead, Ethan’s behaviour was only reported to Hopkins, who failed to meet with the teenager on the first two occasions. (In court, he testified that he was overloaded with casework.) When Hopkins was informed a third time about Ethan’s conduct, he finally approached him. They met briefly in a school hallway, and Hopkins told Ethan he was available if he needed to talk.

Now, on the morning of November 30, Hopkins was explaining to the Crumbleys that their son needed urgent psychiatric attention. He handed the parents a list of therapy options. According to his testimony, Hopkins hoped the Crumbleys would take their son home and get him help.

Instead, Hopkins said the parents seemed annoyed at having been called to the school. According to Ejak, Jennifer said taking Ethan out of school that day wouldn’t be possible because the couple had to return to work. Hopkins told the court that he had no choice but to write Ethan a pass to return to class. “I can’t keep a student from class if there isn’t a valid reason,” he testified.

When Ethan got up to leave the meeting around 10.52am, Ejak handed him his backpack.

“That’s heavy,” he said, as the boy headed towards the door. “What have you got in there?”

Ethan demurred, but a psychiatrist testified that the teenager later told him that, at that moment, he had desperately wanted the dean of students to open his pack. He’d wanted Ejak to find the gun. He’d wanted someone to stop him because he could no longer stop himself. Ejak, though, told the court he had no “reasonable suspicion to search the bag”. Ethan’s behaviour conveyed no signs of nervousness. “He didn’t appear even to care that I was holding his backpack,” he said.

Several minutes after the meeting ended, Jennifer texted a friend to complain about having to meet with her son’s counsellor and then asked about her horses. She wrote to the same friend, “He’ll be coming with me tonight,” referring to bringing Ethan to the horse stables. “He can’t be left alone.”

At 12.21pm, Jennifer texted Ethan: “You OK? You know you can talk to us, we won’t judge.”

Twenty-two minutes later, Ethan replied: “Thank you, I’m sorry for that. I love you.”

At 1.09pm, Oxford High School sent all parents an active emergency email. Ten minutes later, James, heading home and realising what was unfolding, made a frantic call to his wife.

By 1.20pm, he was back on East 57th. He hung up and called 911, reporting, “I have a missing gun at my house. And my son is at school. We had to meet with his counsellor. I think my son took the gun.”

Two minutes later, gripped by dread, Jennifer texted Ethan: “I love you, too.”

There was no response, so she tried again: “You OK?” And finally, “Ethan don’t do it.”

When detectives searched the Crumbleys’ house later, they discovered that the Sig Sauer had not been stored securely. The safe in which it was supposed to be kept still had the default code of 000. A cable lock intended to stop it from firing, which James bought at the same time as the gun, was still in its packaging.

During his sentencing hearing, Ethan told the court that he was a really bad person and had done “things that no one should ever do”. He said that no one would have been able to stop him. That he’d hidden his plans from everyone, especially his parents. Several months later, his mother seemed to agree.

As I watched Jennifer take the stand, I noticed she showed little remorse or contrition. She seemed strangely confident as she said she didn’t believe Ethan had mental health issues, merely anxiety about taking tests. She seemed to want to cast the blame more on her husband, who she claimed was responsible for storing the gun. She also said, emphatically, that she didn’t see herself as a failure of a parent. And though she couldn’t quite believe that her child had killed other people, she said she did not have any regrets.

“I’ve asked myself what I would have done differently and, well, I wouldn’t have done anything differently,” she said.

Jennifer wouldn’t have done anything differently because, her attorney argued during closing arguments, she was a “vigilant mother” who could not have foreseen her son’s actions. She claimed the prosecution charged her to create a media spectacle and that Jennifer’s actions, such as going to the shooting range, were attempts to bond with her son. Ethan, she said, had deceived his parents. He was a master manipulator, and Smith urged the jury to consider reasonable doubt.

I looked over at Hana’s dad, Steve, who was sitting next to Justin Shilling’s father, gazing down at his feet. Several days before, I’d met him at a local coffee shop. He looked tired and jaded. He told me that his life now moves in fits and starts. “Spurts” was the word he used. Sometimes, he had no energy and time was hazy. Other times, he felt so enraged that he had to speak to the press.

This isn’t uncommon. Over the years, many American parents of school shooting victims have channelled grief into advocacy. The Sandy Hook Promise, founded by parents from a 2012 primary school massacre, pushed for more rigorous gun storage and background check regulations. Fred Guttenberg, who lost his daughter in the 2018 Parkland shooting, campaigned for increasing the gun purchase age and instituting waiting periods between the sale and delivery of guns. Likewise, the Everytown for Gun Safety campaign, supported by parents from multiple shootings, lobbied successfully for red flag laws and closing sales loopholes.

James Crumbley called 911, reporting, ‘I have a missing gun at my house. And my son is at school. We had to meet with his counsellor. I think my son took the gun’

Steve was also focused on instituting this kind of systemic change. But he found the media’s fixation on the Crumbley trials somewhat worrying. Journalists knew a historic conviction would make a good story. But Steve said that wouldn’t necessarily be the most important thing in advancing the objective of making the school safer for children. Even if they were convicted, “It’s likely that it will be appealed from here to eternity.”

More problematic than any of that, he added, was the lack of state investigation into the shooting. In this, his views coincided with most of the other parents I spoke to. “It’s what the government wants us to focus on. The real story is our state is hiding behind unconstitutional legislation called governmental immunity,” another parent, Buck Meyer, wrote to me, referring to the immunity school employees have from prosecution. Justin Shilling’s mother, Jill Soave, reiterated this when we met at the offices of her lawyer in Detroit.

Ethan’s parents were one thing, an important thing, the parents seemed to agree, but many others were guilty, too. The school’s employees, for example, were not being disciplined or thoroughly investigated. Ejak and Hopkins were both moved to other schools in the district.

Even during the shooting, things were mishandled. According to the independent investigation, the surveillance camera system was unmonitored, so nobody was tracking Ethan’s whereabouts. The PA wasn’t working correctly either, hindering communication between staff and students. “No one is calling that out, and no one is doing anything about it,” Steve said angrily. To him, there had been too many missed opportunities to stop what happened and, even now, he said, the authorities were missing opportunities to prevent future tragedies. As he spoke, sirens wailed loudly. They screamed down the road as they would have done that day in 2021. Steve opened his mouth and then closed it without saying a word.

By the time the jury was due to deliver its verdict, I was back home in Madrid, sitting in my kitchen late at night, watching a live stream. I had been following a lot of social media. YouTubers and Tik-Tokers were commenting on live feeds from the courtroom, dissecting testimony and going back over Ethan’s sentencing hearing. Every piece of available evidence was being studied. This is, in part, just what high-profile trials have become: content. But there was something else in the coverage, a yearning, a hope for a verdict that might change something about a seemingly unchangeable condition.

I wondered if this hope might instruct the jury. The trial had been gruelling. The 12 jurors had screened CCTV footage from the day of the shooting, watched various witnesses break down on the stand and seen the parents of the four dead children stare into blank space in court. They hadn’t been sequestered and had to return home each night. Although they were prohibited from watching or reading news about the case, I wondered how faithfully they’d adhered.

At 7.23pm Madrid time on February 6, my phone vibrated. “The jury has come to a decision,” Meghan Gregory texted me. I returned to my computer. The live-stream camera was focused on Jennifer and her attorney. The cacophony of murmurs and squeaky wooden pews in the courtroom was interrupted by the voice of the lead juror speaking into a microphone: “We find the defendant guilty of involuntary manslaughter.”

The court hushed. Jennifer’s lawyer’s face sank into a frown. Her client bowed slightly and kept her eyes firmly shut. Several weeks later, James was also found guilty. In April this year, Ethan’s parents were each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.

In the days after the sentencing, the story made national and international news. Some coverage reported that the verdict and sentencing were a significant step in accountability for gun safety. Others argued the broader implications of criminally charging parents for their children’s crimes weren’t properly understood yet. Any hope that the novelty of the case might offer a signal in the noise of American mass violence quickly dissipated.

Hana’s dad, Steve, probably put it best. “I’m content with the conviction, I am,” he told me over the phone from his home outside Oxford. His voice was quiet, deflated. “But we’re still a long way from the justice and change we need.”

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