While the lawyer for Ethan Crumbley’s parents tried vainly to argue that they ‘had just left town temporarily’ police found the two in Detroit, with $4,000 they had withdrawn from an ATM.
Now the Crumbley’s are in custody on a $500,000 bail. Each.
They were charged earlier with four counts each of homicide involuntary manslaughter following the deadly school shooting. If convicted, they could face up to 15 years in prison.
While it’s rare to charge parents in shootings, authorities argued that the suspect’s father legally bought the handgun four days before his son used it and made the gun ‘freely available,’ making them culpable.
‘The parents were the only individuals in the position to know the access to weapons,’ the judge said Thursday. The gun, which Ethan’s father, James Crumbley, had just purchased four days before the rampage, ‘seems to have been just freely available to that individual.’