Did The Crumbleys Get Punished As A Message To White Parents?
If you’re not caught up on this news, the Crumbleys are a couple from Michigan. Their son, Ethan, shot up his high school in 2021. He killed four people. Ethan got punished, as he was a rare school shooter who survived, but then something unprecedented happened, and the parents also got punished. They both were convicted of their role in everything (at a second-degree level), and got 10–15 years earlier this week.
That was the first time in American history that parents of a mass violence event perpetrator got jail time themselves.
Interesting little arc and case study with a lot to unpack.
One thing that’s immediately interesting is that it creates what we’d call a “slippery slope,” because a lot of parents aren’t that good at being parents, and like, OK, if their kid goes off the rails and does something horrible … now they need to go to jail? As self-involved but uninvolved-with-their-kids parents scramble to…
