Joette Katz Authors Law.com Article Entitled "Crumbley Tragedy Draws Similarities to Connecticut Case From 25+ Years Ago"

The recent case of Jennifer Crumbley, the mother held criminally liable for the deaths and injuries caused by her son during a Michigan high school shooting in 2021, brought back memories from State v. Wilchinski, 242 Conn. 211 (1997), wherein, writing for the Connecticut Supreme Court, I examined C.G.S. §29-37, defining a standard of care for the storage of loaded firearms, and §53a-217a, punishing the criminally negligent violation of that standard of care.

Joseph Wilchinski’s 14-year-old son had removed the dad’s loaded Ruger .357 Security Six revolver from underneath the dad’s bedroom dresser and while fooling around with the weapon, killed his visiting 15-year old-friend. Following his conviction of one count of §53a-217a, Wilchinski raised several constitutional challenges, asserting that §53a-217a is unconstitutionally vague, both on its face and as applied to his conduct. He further claimed that §53a-217a is defective because it impermissibly criminalizes mere negligence, fails to require that a defendant proximately caused the underlying injury or death, and fails to incorporate the accessory liability standard of §53a-8.

In answering these questions, the court concluded, inter alia, that no penalty attached under §53a-217a unless a minor injured or killed himself or another with an improperly stored gun; that the acts of the third party did not relieve the defendant of criminal liability because the crime for which the defendant was being punished is “failing to take the proper safeguards with [a] loaded gun;” and that by enacting §53a-217a, “the legislature intended to hold an individual criminally liable when that individual’s criminally negligent storage of a loaded firearm created an opportunity for a minor to obtain and use the firearm, thereby causing a foreseeable injury. Although the death or injury required by the statute results from the act of a third party, that act is the foreseeable result of the risk created by the defendant’s failure to store his gun properly.”

We concluded that “because the act of the defendant’s son was precisely the harm the legislature sought to prevent when it enacted §53a-217a, that foreseeable act cannot be invoked by the defendant as an efficient intervening cause of [the victim’s] death.”

Fast forward 25 plus years, to last week’s verdict in Michigan raising similar questions of proximate cause, foreseeability, and intervening acts. The prosecution presented two theories in its case against Jennifer Crumbley: that she was “grossly negligent” by failing to properly store the gun her son obtained, and that she failed her legal duty to prevent her child from harming others.

James Crumbley had bought a gun for his son at a Black Friday sale four days before the shooting, and Jennifer Crumbley had taken her son to a shooting range the following day. There was testimony from witnesses, including the shooter’s counselor and the school’s assistant principal, about how the Crumbley parents had been called to school the morning of the shooting to discuss violent drawings and messages from a math assignment that showed signs of suicidal ideation (“The thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” “my life is useless,” “blood everywhere” and “the world is dead” along with drawings of a gun, a bullet and a bleeding body).

There were also texts in which the youth had told his mother he believed the house was haunted and that he was seeing demons and objects flying around the room. She understood he was struggling with the deaths of his grandmother and the family’s dog, followed by his only friend moving away. She interpreted the texts about seeing demons and hallucinating people in the house as her son playing on the family’s running joke that their 1920s home had a ghost. She had not read his private journal or text messages with his friend, where he shared more violent, troubling thoughts. She knew that her son had struggled through the pandemic and was anxious about his future, including college; nevertheless, she did not consider him troubled “to a level where I felt he needed to go see a psychiatrist” despite his personal request for medical assistance.

At the counselor’s meeting the morning of the shooting, Crumbley explained that she was concerned and understood that they were dealing with a mental health issue, not a disciplinary one. Crumbley’s son asked to go back to class, and she and her husband said they had to return to work. The Crumbley parents, who maintained that the gun was locked and hidden separate from the bullets in their bedroom, did not mention the new gun purchase during that meeting, or that their son had recently visited a shooting range. Neither the parents nor school staff searched the shooter’s backpack before he was sent back to class. Two hours later, the teen opened fire in school, killing four and wounding seven.

The government’s case, distilled to its essence, was that, but for defendants’ decision to purchase their mentally disturbed son a handgun, their failure to properly secure the gun, and most importantly, their refusal to remove him from school when he made overt threats to hurt other people, the murders would not have occurred that day. In an earlier ruling on the issue of whether Crumbley could be held responsible for her son’s conduct, the Court of Appeals of Michigan examined the question of whether her son’s conduct was an intervening cause that superseded her conduct, thereby breaking the causal link between Crumbley’s conduct and the horrific injuries that occurred such that proximate cause would be lacking and criminal liability could not be imposed.

Although intentional misconduct by a third party will generally be considered a superseding cause, “t]he linchpin in the superseding cause analysis [ ] is whether the intervening cause was foreseeable based on an objective standard of reasonableness.” People v. Crumbley, 2023 WL 2617524. If it was reasonably foreseeable, then the defendant’s conduct would be considered a proximate cause. If not, the court held that generally the causal link would be severed, and the defendant’s conduct would not be regarded as a proximate cause of the fatalities and injuries.

The jury heard evidence that, despite their knowledge of all of these circumstances, when given the option to help her son and take him out of school, Crumbley did nothing. Contrary to the recommendations of the school, she did not take him home and get him immediate medical help. Nor, when she decided to leave him at school, did she tell school officials about his history of mental health issues nor explain to them that he had access to a gun similar to the one he drew on the math worksheet. She neither asked him if he had the gun with him or looked in his backpack. Finally, when she left the school, she did not go home and ensure that her son had not taken the gun and the ammunition. Given all those facts, the jury reasonably could conclude that a foreseeable outcome of Crumbley’s gross negligence was her son committing a shooting that day.

At the very least, one probable outcome of failing to secure the firearm that was gifted to her son was that it would be accessible to him and that, in his mentally deteriorated condition, he might use it in unlawful ways. In light of those foreseeable events, when presented with what he had just drawn, written, and viewed that morning, along with her decision not to remove him from the school, a reasonable factfinder could conclude that it was foreseeable that Crumbley’s son would use his recent gift that day, and accordingly that his intervening acts were not a superseding cause of the murders.

Lest anyone worry that odd or subpar parenting creates criminal liability, that was not this case. And while I can speculate about the legal arguments that could be made by Crumbley’s attorney and differentiate them from those advanced by Wilchinski’s lawyers, a review of the record does not evoke the sympathies for the parents that some headlines about the case might have generated.

So, what’s my take-away? In writing editorials, when I invoke an earlier case that I argued or helped decide, I like to conclude with a lesson, a musing, a moral, something that leaves the reader with a sense of my views. When we decided Wilchinski nearly 25 years ago, the case seemed like an outlier, and I for one never imagined that the same legal issues would still be so relevant and certainly not in the context of mass shootings. There is plenty of blame to go around here, but sadly none of it will bring back the dead children.

Copyright 2024. ALM Global, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Originally published by Connecticut Law Tribune and Law.com [https://www.law.com/ctlawtribune/2024/02/14/crumbley-tragedy-draws-similarities-to-connecticut-case-from-25-years-ago/], reprinted by permission.