(Washington) The parents of the teenager who killed four students at a school in the northern United States, charged with manslaughter for letting their son use a weapon given as a gift, remained nowhere to be found on Friday even though their lawyers assured that they would surrender to the authorities.
Updated 3 Dec. 2021
James and Jennifer Crumbley were actively wanted by the police and the FBI, said in a press release Michael Bouchard, sheriff of Oakland County, Michigan.
“We intend to place them in detention quickly,” he added.
The couple’s lawyers assured that, contrary to what was reported, Ethan Crumbley’s parents were not on the run.
“The Crumbleys left on the evening of this tragic shooting for their own safety,” they said in a message to AFP on Friday evening.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE OAKLAND COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, VIA REUTERS Forensic identification photo of 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley taken at the Oxford County Jail in Pontiac, Michigan 
“They are coming back to the area to be brought before a judge. They are not running from the authorities, despite what the media reports,” they said.
The couple, however, remained untraceable several hours after their indictment. According to a police official quoted by CNN, the Crumbleys withdrew $4,000 from an ATM in the town of Rochester Hills, Michigan.
“I just hope they do the right thing and get to the police as quickly as possible,” Oakland County District Attorney Karen McDonald told CNN.
Their 15-year-old son Ethan killed four students in cold blood and injured six others, as well as a teacher, on Tuesday at the school in Oxford, a small town north of Detroit.
He ‘entered the school and pulled the trigger’, but ‘other people contributed to this event and I intend to hold them accountable’, says Karen McDonald announcing lawsuits against parents.
Ethan Crumbley has been charged with “terrorist act” and “murder”, and risks life in prison, because he is being prosecuted as an adult. He pleaded not guilty, but chose to remain silent. He is being held in solitary confinement in the county jail in Pontiac.
Shootings remain a recurring scourge in the United States, where the right to own guns is guaranteed by the Constitution. But prosecutions against the relatives of their perpetrators are extremely rare.
Christmas gift
James Crumbley had bought the previous Friday, the day of the big Black Friday discounts, a SIG Sauer semi-automatic pistol as an early Christmas present for his son.
After the purchase, the teenager posted images of the gun on social media, calling it a “beauty”.
According to the police, he had recorded a video the day before the shooting on his mobile phone where he announced his intention to use his weapon at school, without posting it on the internet.
The next morning, Ethan Crumbley had been summoned with his parents by the school administration for drawings of a weapon and a bloody body accompanied by a smiling emoji as well as for messages evoking death: “Help me, my life is useless, the world is dead, blood everywhere, ”said the prosecutor.
“To think that a parent can read these words knowing that their son has access to a deadly weapon that he gave to him is incomprehensible, and I think it is a crime,” she said.
She also criticizes the parents for not asking their son where his gun was, which was in his backpack.
Two hours after the meeting, he came out of the toilets, gun in hand, methodically progressing through the corridors of the school, shooting at students and at the doors of the classrooms where students had barricaded themselves. He fired at least 30 bullets.
According to the police, he had aimed at random, without having previously chosen victims.
When news of a school shooting broke out, Jennifer Crumbley texted her son, saying, “Ethan, don’t do this. His father had reported to the police that the gun had disappeared from the drawer where it was stored.
These lawsuits are also a “message to gun owners that they have a responsibility”, underlined Mr.me McDonald, denouncing an “inadequate” Michigan law that does not require you to keep a gun locked up.
The tragedy has created an atmosphere of psychosis in Michigan, where authorities are “inundated” with messages reporting threats against schools.