Let’s look at the facts. Ethan Crumbley, fifteen years old, has been arrested and charged as an adult with twenty-four criminal counts including four counts of first-degree murder, for shooting students on November 30, 2021, at Oxford High School, Oakland County, Michigan. The following are most of the salient facts known so far. The link to the video of Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald describing the facts of the case and announcing her intention to criminally charge Ethan’s parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley, is here. McDonald.
On Nov. 21, one of Ethan’s teachers observed him searching online for ammunition with his cellphone during class. The teacher reported this to school officials, who informed Jennifer Crumbley. No response was received from either parent. That day, Jennifer Crumbley exchanged text messages with her son about the incident. One text stated: "LOL I'm not mad at you, you have to learn not to get caught." Thanks, mom!
On November 26, with Ethan present at the gun shop, James Crumbly purchased a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun. On Instagram, Ethan posted a picture of a hand cradling a gun with the caption, “Just got my new beauty today.” The night before the slaughter, Ethan filmed himself talking about killing students but it is unclear whether the school staff knew of the film.
On the morning of the shooting, a teacher saw a note on Ethan's desk including a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun next to the words "The thoughts won't stop, help me," and a bullet below the words "Blood everywhere." The note also included drawings of figures with gunshot wounds, as well as the phrases "My life is useless" and "The world is dead."
The alarmed teacher took a photo of the note with her cellphone and shared it with the principal. Jennifer and James Crumbley were immediately summoned to the school, and a school counselor pulled Ethan from class to meet with his parents. Ethan removed the note from his backpack, but it had already been altered, with the images of the gun and disturbing phrases "scratched out," McDonald said.
McDonald said both parents "failed to ask their son if he had his gun with him" and did not inspect his backpack. The school staff did not ask if Ethan had a firearm and did not inspect the backpack. Prosecutors believe that the gun he allegedly used was in his backpack at the meeting. School officials told Jennifer and James Crumbley that they were required to find counseling for their son within 48 hours.
Jennifer and James Crumbley "resisted the idea of their son leaving the school at that time." They left the school, and Ethan returned to the classroom. The school counselors had determined Ethan was not a threat. Early afternoon, Ethan went to the bathroom and emerged carrying a handgun. As he walked the hallways, he began firing “methodically and deliberately” at his fellow students at close range, prosecutors said.
In a search of Ethan Crumbley’s cellphone, police found detailed descriptions of his wish to kill classmates. They say he also had a journal and in at least one social media post expressed elation that he had access to a handgun purchased by his father, but that information was likely known to the school staff.
In a video message published Thursday, Tim Throne, leader of Oxford Community Schools, addressed the suspect being called to the office prior to the shooting. Throne said no one saw evidence to lead to the conclusion that Ethan intended to cause harm to others or to himself. In a lethal state of anoesis, having rejected any cognitive content, Throne stated: “no discipline was warranted.” Ethan’s drawings and declarations of death were determined to have no significance. The parents’ aggressive non-compliance had no significance. Ethan’s cry for help had no resonance with these experienced counselors and administrators.
Throne’s conclusion is perplexing. According to an “Oxford Community Schools Code of Conduct” pdf released in June 2020, Ethan’s drawings and statements indicating violence should have risen to the level of harassment or intimidation. “Harassment or intimidation” means any gesture or written, verbal, or physical act that a reasonable person, under the circumstances, should know will have the effect of harming a student or damaging the student’s property, placing a student in reasonable fear of harm to the student’s person or damage to the student’s property, …..” However, the Code does not mandate expulsion, suspension or reporting to law enforcement. The Code encourages counseling and other therapeutic interventions, which can include a simple conference. As discussed below, the school’s response was based on ideology, not upon rational safety assessments or protocols.
Commentators pointed out the many signs were missed that should have alerted authorities and school staff to Ethan’s potential for savagery. For example, journalist G P Rodriguez wrote in Bungled Probe that the authorities bungled the probe and missed warning signs. Rodriguez does not offer insight into why warning signs were missed. Cal Thomas was more astute than most, asserting the signs weren’t missed at all; they were ignored. Big difference. Signs Not Missed Ignored
I assume—certainly hope—that Throne and his experienced counselors possessed brains more advanced than a Pet Rock, and, thus, the question is why would such highly compensated and presumably experienced school authorities ignore signs that could foretell infinite horror for those they are obligated and paid to protect? I think the answer is a belief in an ideology, a political bias, a world view, that places a fetid diseased value system above human life. True, the warning signs were ignored, but they were ignored for a reason.
For insight into and answers for the behavior of Throne and his staff, it is instructive to study the slaughter of seventeen students by Nikolas Cruz at the Parkland Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida, on February 15, 2018. I reference several articles and documents that describe the political and ideological foundations for cultivating a mindset and implementing actions, or inactions, based on that mindset.
The fundamental architecture of the destructive progressive ideology is illuminated by the “School to Prison Pipeline” narrative which demands that criminal activity in schools be under reported or not reported at all. The Parkland High School staff adopted this ideology with the intensity of a leopard leaping on a gemsbok. The phrase “School to Prison Pipeline” (STPP) is a masterpiece of rhetorical deceit. The imagery of a pipeline is a huge tube that transfers school students to prisons as if these precious youngsters were treated like barrels of crude oil. No judgment, no free will, no intermediate stops are considered as possible in this metaphor.
One of the most comprehensive statements I have discovered on Parkland High School and the School to Prison Pipeline is A. P. Dillon’s article, The School to Prison Pipeline and the Parkland Shooting Parkland STPP. Dillon details the political and social forces that coalesced to undermine law enforcement and that inoculated violent and or troubled students from repercussions and law enforcement engagement. One of those students who avoided criminal repercussions was Nikolas Cruz, the killer at Parkland High School. He had been on the radar of the Sheriff’s department and the FBI. There were at least 45 interactions with the Sheriff’s department and two tips to the FBI.
With excruciating precision, Dillon illustrates the incentives created, indeed mandated, to ignore, students’ crimes and threatening behavior. Addressing student violence and threats were scene as racist; as one race was disproportionately represented in school crimes, suspensions, and expulsions. Concepts such as "restorative justice" came into vogue, and then mandated, to contour discipline programs. These trends became the Obama administration's signatures for its efforts to focus on what Obama termed “equity in discipline,” which meant calibrating the racial outcomes of student treatment for violence and threats by ignoring, under reporting or contextualizing bad behavior. The express goal was to lower suspension and arrest rates, particularly among certain minorities. Student safety was irrelevant.
Self-proclaimed civil rights groups such as the NAACP and The Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, lobbied legislatures and school boards to adopt STPP guidelines and to eliminate school resource officers, SROs, who were actually law enforcement officers. The premise of the effort was that racial biases existed in enforcing laws, by which they meant differences in outcomes for different races were occurring. That the SROs were protecting their favored students was of no consequence.
Photos are available of students screeching about racism and their desire to prevent violent students from being reported to the police. The photos and descriptions evoked the lines from "The Second Coming," a poem by Irish poet W. B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”
President Obama’s Justice Department, under Eric Holder, got involved, and in 2014, entered into a partnership with the U.S. Department of Education, led by Arne Duncan, to advance these STPP and “equity in discipline” policies. Florida’s Broward County, home to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, was among the leaders in this nationwide policy shift. See Did an Obama-Era School Discipline Policy Contribute to the Parkland Shooting? Obama Era Discipline and The Parkland Shooting and LCPS Stone Bridge HS Rape: “Restorative Practices” and the “School to Prison Pipeline (STPP)” Parkland LCPS and How Did Parkland Shooter Slip Through The Cracks? Cracks. Also see the soul-churning account of the Parkland shooting and the school’s policies by Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was murdered by Cruz, here. Pollack Lax Discipline. I encourage the reader to read these articles, but I suggest the reader does so on an empty stomach.
Referring to the shooting as the “most avoidable school shooting,” Pollack points out that the confessed shooter allegedly threatened to kill other students and threatened to rape. He threatened to shoot up the school, according to the sheriff's office. Classmates said he brought knives and bullets to school. He wrote hideous racial slurs on his backpack. He carved swastikas in the lunchroom tables. But the assistant principals at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School didn’t have him arrested. Rather, they simply banned him from bringing a backpack to school and frisked him every day, according to the sworn testimony of the security guard who searched him, for fear he’d bring a deadly weapon and kill.
How should we interpret efficacy of these anti-law enforcement race-oriented policies and their influence on student safety? The golden nugget that offers the most lucid insight into this sewage-like collection of policies, their overarching ideology and the people implementing them, is this statement made by Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel: “The police can’t be faulted here because “there’s no malfeasance or misfeasance if you don’t know about something.” Let us fully understand the meaning of the sheriff’s viperous statement: the incentive is to know nothing because then law enforcement cannot be held accountable for doing nothing. Deaths of students is the acceptable collateral damage of implementing this mindset.
Returning to Oxford High School and Ethan Crumbly, an article titled Oxford High School Appears To Have Used Controversial ‘Restorative’ Discipline Practices Prior To School Shooting by Tim Meads for The Daily Wire see Oxford Restorative Principles states:
But, rather than disciplining the child, the school simply gave the parents the option of pulling him out of class or leaving him in school following a meeting with school officials. The description of events seems to be in line with the school’s ‘restorative’ policy which uses principles based on a controversial disciplinarian approach called “restorative justice” that has been blamed for allowing other school shootings to happen.
As Oakland County District Attorney McDonald stated, “this could have been avoided.
One doesn’t need to be a survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau to see the truth of Elie Wiesel’s statement that tolerance always aids the aggressor, never the victim. Then tolerance leads to indifference, and indifference leads to aiding and abetting.
Thus, at Oxford High School, we have another shooting, unarguably preventable. Classmates, friends, families, will, yet again, pile teddy bears, flowers, cards with saccharine messages and other amulets around the school grounds. They will wail, “How could this happen here?” “Why did this happen?” And the answers come down with the dispassion of a guillotine: stupidity, incompetence, cowardice, the comfort of bureaucratic insularity and ideology. This is how the shootings happen, perhaps not every shooting, but most. No excuse now exists for not knowing how or why these shootings happen. However, knowledge is not enough. Knowledge without action is morally worthless. The challenge is to act on what we know.
And I, for winking at your discords, too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.
The Prince, Act 5 of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
Michael Sabbeth is the author of The Good, The Bad & The Difference: How to Talk with Children About Values http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Michael%20Sabbeth
