Statement from Nicole Beausoleil, about her daughter, at the Crumbley sentencing.

“While you were purchasing a gun for your son and leaving it unlocked, I was helping her finish her college essays. When you knew the gun was missing, you called the police, knowing it was your son that took it. I was having family call every hospital describing what she looked like. While you were hiding [from the police], I was planning her funeral.

The negligent parents of a high school mass shooter get 10 – 15 year sentences.

‘“This case is a very dangerous one for parents out there,” [warned Jennifer Crumbley’s defense lawyer.]’

Let’s hope so. Let’s hope the current high-profile involuntary manslaughter trial scares the bejaysus out of America’s most cretinous heatpackers.

Hey hon says dad as he watches the Crumbleys carted off to jail, maybe we shouldn’t give our violent, schizophrenic kid an AK47 for Christmas…

The Way the Cookie Crumbleys.

The bumbly scumbly Crumbleys are off to court for four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Good on ya, Michigan Court of Appeals.

‘Family members have described a home life defined by abuse, neglect, drug use, and deadly access to a cache of weapons. At least two of Colt’s family members were aware of the boy’s allegedly abusive living situation and troubled home life.’

‘[Another family member] said that Colt “was begging for help from everybody around him.”’

Nancy Lanza, Deja Taylor, the Crumbleys, Colin Gray – the crazed, gun-obsessed parents of America’s littlest mass killers/mass killers in waiting — what are we to say about them? Is there anything we can do?

There are so many of them by now. The list of four highlights only the most depraved/pitiable progenitors of the sickest of the shooters; but it’s easy to recall plenty more child/preteen/teen predators with a smaller body count, or with a higher age of slaughter-onset. These are America’s version of Africa’s child soldiers, automata we glance at in court and quickly look away from because we are totally not interested in taking on board just how grotesque a gun culture we have now achieved, how the AR-15 revolution is actively eating its children, how generational gun insanity is upon us. Crazy people with guns produce crazy children with guns; and families and neighbors watch it happen and think none of my business or hey maybe weaponizing this troubled kid will help him.

Gun laws in this country will only become more lax. No point looking there. The only thing that might make a difference is vigilance — people in the orbit of graphically fucked up and highly armed families finding the guts to call the authorities. It take guts cuz duh these are nutty violent people with twenty guns.

And then the authorities must do whatever they can do — remove the guns, take the killer-to-be out of the classroom, detain the parents for other shit they have going on (drugs, illegal weapons, child abuse, disturbing the peace, whatever) — to begin neutralizing America’s emergent children’s army.

Read all the NYT updates, if you can stomach it.

They keep updating as reams of evidence that this madman should never have been in a public school come in. At 13, he’d already threatened to shoot up a school; at 14, he did it. His father kept multiple huge guns in the home, and UD is pretty confident that one of his ARs – easily accessible to his mentally ill son? – did the deed.

So… we’ve already corralled three probable enablers – negligent parent, indifferent school administrators, and inept law enforcement. Mes petites – you’d think in a country with 450 million or so guns, and routine mass killings, some effort would be made to identify likely mass killers. But guns are considered beautiful here; a 14 year old handling an AR is a beautiful thing. His classmates report he never spoke – completely alienated, it seems. Completely out of it. Rarely attended. Pity the teachers compelled by idiot administrators to harbor a student who probably frightened them.

The local county is Trumpian. God forbid you’d vote for anyone who talks about any form of gun legislation. The county got what it wished for: virtually no control of weapons. Check it out. Scroll and keep scrolling until you get to Georgia.

Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, Adam Gopnik writes.

UPDATE: Oh – and get ready for the lawsuits. Abigail Zwerner’s forty million dollar suit against the Newport News Public Schools is humming along.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As with so many other school shooters, blatant mental health problems, fucked up parent, fucked up school administrators, fucked up law enforcement, guns all over the place. Dad let this child – at age 13, and probably before – handle all the weapons.

A perfect storm here, and a perfect idiot could have seen this before it broke. It’s very easy to see the father in court, and it’s even easier to see the school district sued for tens of millions of dollars. The monster the father made (it’s not clear the mother is at all involved – the parents are divorced, and it looks as though the shooter lived with his gun-totin’ pa) will never get out of prison. Might even get the death penalty.

AGAIN AN UPDATE: Mother a career criminal. Howdy.

La Dee Dah.

Wotta shocker. Daddy’s been arrested. Let’s see…

[F]our counts of involuntary manslaughter, two of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.

The Crumbleys also got involuntary manslaughter. They’re both serving ten year sentences.

FREE AND ARMED DESPITE FELONY CONVICTION

Chase Garvey faced a felony charge two years ago that could have put him behind bars for years and barred him from carrying a gun.

But early Saturday morning, police say, Garvey was free and armed when he walked into a home in Florence and opened fire on a crowd of people gathered for a birthday party, killing four.

Garvey, 21, was on probation after pleading guilty to the felony charge in 2022 that accused him of having sex with a 13-year-old in the parking lot of a Fort Mitchell apartment complex.

The plea was to a lesser charge than the rape charge Garvey initially faced, but it carried a possible sentence of up to five years in prison. Though he was sentenced to probation instead, he still could not legally possess a gun because he was a felon.

Good ol Kentucky.

Update: Free and armed to slaughter everyone he knows. “We haven’t heard yet how he got a gun but it’s not like it’s hard to do around here.” Rumor has it his father bought him one illegally. If true, this should be another Crumbley trial.

The ArmaLite doesn’t fall far from…

the tree.

‘Now, two separate juries have taken the unusual step of holding a parent criminally responsible for a child’s horrific crimes.’

Yep, when the little bugger grabs one of the guns lying around the house and maims/slaughters all over his school, you get to go to jail too.

The Butcher’s Bill

Ms. Crumbley, 45, was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the four students who were shot to death by her son at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021. The son, Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, used a pistol to kill Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. Seven other people were injured. The gun was a gift from his parents.

She could – and should – get fifteen years. As I said in an earlier post, she’ll do the world some good by scaring the shit out of other fucked up gunnies who reproduced.

One of America’s more grotesque shootings…

… involved a six-year-old obviously disturbed kid who almost killed but only badly wounded his teacher (she’s suing the school board for forty million dollars, but details of the virtually criminal neglect on the part of administrators suggest she should sue for sixty million) … Wounded, she still managed to save all the children in the room from the shooter.

Do you remember this case? I know all them massacres in Nashville and Louisville are crowding out your memory of this one and hundreds of others. But you probably remember this one because six-year-old gun-bearing would-be murderers are – even in this country, where the blood comes sweepin’ down the plain, pretty fucking amazing.

So, the latest is that, following in the footsteps of the bone-chilling Crumbleys, the woman who birthed this severely mentally ill little boy and left her gun lying around for him to take to school, has been indicted by a Newport News grand jury.

That’s very good news; but in both cases – and the tons of others on their way – we must send these people, once found guilty, to prison.

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From the wonderful family that brought you Alex Murdaugh on down, oodles of American assholes are currently leaving loaded guns all over the place. When their one year olds find them and kill their two year olds it barely makes the news, cuz it happens all the time. The babes need to shoot up a school to get our attention.

But they still don’t have our attention. Not sose you’d notice.

From prison, the Crumbleys and Deja Taylor need to be incentivized to star in a joint public service announcement, in which, sadder but wiser, they encourage other Americans to lock their guns and put them away.

“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of massacre, and to face in the smithy of my soul the yet-uncreated school shooters of my race…”

As Stephen Dedalus might have put it if he lived in the United States of America in the twenty-first century.

In virtually every case of our prolific young demented mass killers, neighbors, friends, and family members eventually emerge to testify to their obvious mental illness, their obvious violent tendencies, the guns their fucked up parents left lying around the house. They encountered it, they faced it — they did everything but tell anyone about it.

[Ethan Crumbley’s mass killing] weighs heavily on [one of his neighbors] now because she wonders what she could have done differently to help her young neighbor-turned-school-shooter.

“This haunts me, big time,” she said. “I will always wonder, ‘What else could we have done?'”

This woman recognized Crumbley was nuts and his parents gunned and ginned up degenerates, but she didn’t contact family services or the police. She tried talking to the Crumbleys and got screamed at for her trouble, and then she shrank away. She’s probably lucky the family didn’t shoot her.

So I understand. Going to the authorities would make drunk, violent people even angrier at her. Yes. I understand.

‘He was never, ever OK … They would go out and drink and leave him home alone. … He was scared. He would come over to my house and say, ‘I can’t be here because I’m going to get into trouble.’

She never spoke to Jennifer Crumbley again after that argument. …

‘Ethan didn’t have a prayer …’

His school, just as aware of the threat he posed, tried feebly to get his parents to take him away, but in the event administrators failed to stand their ground against the scary Crumbleys.

Nihilistic Parenting

In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.

Hey Mom and Dad PULEEZE tell Junior not to bring loaded handguns to school!

Especially when the school’s a mere five miles from UD‘s house.

I mean of course UD knows that this is just one loaded gun that this one school happened to find; schools all over her neighborhood (elementary, junior high, high school) are she assumes bristling with weaponized babies who will eventually not only get through security but kill everybody and then kill themselves blahblahblah, and indeed UD rather doubts the measured, well-intentioned letter that the latest shocked principal sent out to parents asking them not to send weaponized babies to school will have much impact.

I mean dear mom and dad you might not know this but you shouldn’t send your troubled twelve year old to school with a loaded Glock… What I mean is did you know this? Did you know you’re supposed to secure your guns, especially when your kid has fucked up badly enough to be removed from the regular school system and placed (as in this latest case) in a special school? Just how did your troubled fourteen year old get a loaded handgun?

********************

And why oh why are the innocent children of America supposed to sit around while the vile parents of vile offspring fail to notice that their tyke is locked and loaded and ready to blow everyone’s head off?

Just sit there at your desk, little one, and wait, while some maggot bursts in and kills you with his daddy’s gun.

********************

UD feels absolutely certain that when details of this latest baby shooter come out he will be notoriously frightening, notoriously violent, at his school, well known to the well-meaning principal who remains in denial about the homicidal nature of some of his weaponized charges. Just a tyke! Our job at our compassionate and enlightened school, after all, is to turn such people around.

Actually, these days your primary function is to fucking notice which of your students is likely to be a killer, and to remove those students for the safety of all. (There’s the possibility of legislation that might help you, but we’ll see.) Letters to parents asking them to put their guns away will do two things:

  1. Scare the shit out of most of the parents, since they’re unlikely to own any guns at all.
  2. Have no impact at all on the people raising a kid with loaded guns lying all over the house. Your job isn’t to persuade crazy motherfuckers to act responsibly. Your job is to get the future mass killer unlucky enough to call these people his parents the hell out of your school.
For an outcome as bad as this, it takes a village.

Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction [to abundant evidence of the shooter’s clear and present danger] “truly astounding.”

It was well within the school’s rights to require Mr. Crumbley, who has since pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges, to leave campus, Professor Ross said.

If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

*****************

Some public school administrators harbor a sort of mulish assumption that public means everyone gets to go there. And stay there.

Or is this about incompetence? Indifference? As charges and lawsuits are brought forward, we will find out.

Call out the NRA!

A Michigan prosecutor on Friday filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of the 15-year-old suspect in the Oxford High School shooting.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were each charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son, Ethan, was accused of fatally shooting four students at the suburban Detroit school on Tuesday.

******************

When ordinary Americans can’t send their psychotic fifteen year old to school with a Sig Sauer 9 mm, things have taken a truly ominous turn.

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