Annie Kuo Becker (AKB): Welcome to Discovery, a podcast where we explore the hottest legal topics with UW Law faculty and visitors to the law school. I'm your host, Annie Kuo Becker. On this episode, we're exploring parental criminal liability in this era of adolescent gun violence and other youth-related harm. We see a lot of headlines and their ensuing social media comments crying out for prosecution of parents whose children cause death by e-bike, whose stepchildren kill one another when rooming as a trio on a family cruise. Are parents liable of gross negligence when their kids commit serious crimes?
Well, Professor Shirin Bakhshay from UCLA Law School says, not so fast, parents should not be held responsible by the criminal justice system. And her perspective is valuable because the topic spans both areas of her scholarship. She teaches criminal law at UCLA and has a Ph.D. in social psychology. She was recently at UW Law for our faculty colloquium to discuss her upcoming paper, “The Dilemma of Parental Care and Control in the Era of Mass School Shootings,” which will be published around December 2026 in the UCLA Law Review.
Welcome, Professor Bakhshay, to the podcast.
Shirin Bakhshay (SB): Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
AKB: Your arguments center around the case The People v. Crumbley where the parents of a school shooter are convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the intentional murders committed by their minor son, Ethan Crumbley, at Oxford High School in Michigan. Tell us about the case.
SB: So, Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, opened fire with a firearm that his parents had purchased and that they knew about. At his school, he ended up killing four of his classmates and injuring, I think, seven other people. He was tried as an adult. He was convicted — actually, he pled guilty. He was sentenced as an adult to life without the possibility of parole, which is the harshest sentence that a person his age in Michigan can receive.
Separate and apart from that, the parents were also charged, and they were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. So, that's where you kill somebody, but you don't necessarily mean to do it. It's typically based on a theory of negligence or recklessness. You can imagine situations where someone loses control of a car and they hit somebody. That's a typical involuntary manslaughter case.
Here, the theory was the parents were negligent because they knew that their son was mentally ill. They knew that their son had a preoccupation with violence, and they did nothing to prevent him from committing this atrocious crime. That is a very novel way of approaching this question because you've got the son who is bearing full criminal responsibility and being punished as though he acted completely independently and alone, and then you separately have the parents who are being — they were sentenced to 10 to 15 years for these crimes. They're appealing those decisions, but this is a very harsh sentence for people who, you know, I agree that they didn't do a great job sort of dealing with their son and all the issues that he was facing, but for them to bear that kind of criminal responsibility is really, really novel.
So, I put it to my students, and I said, what do you all think about this? And I got a lot of really intense reactions, and it made me really want to, kind of, pursue understanding the case, understanding the legal doctrine behind it, and the ultimate outcome. The case puts the parents of a school shooter in a position of bearing criminal legal responsibility for the children that that school shooter killed. And when I learned that this was being pursued, I thought it was fundamentally wrong on many different levels.
AKB: James and Jennifer Crumbley got the maximum sentence for involuntary manslaughter in Michigan, which you believe is very harsh. Tell us about some of the considerations that the court got so wrong.
SB: One important reason is because it goes against traditional legal doctrine, right? Normally, parent s —or anybody who is found guilty of what is essentially a manslaughter crime, a murder, a crime of homicide — they cause that death. And in this case, the parents didn't cause the death. They didn't pull the trigger. They simply are parents of someone who was very, very disturbed and acted out in his school.
The other reason why I was so intrigued by this was because it didn't seem to address any of the problems that the case raised. The case is about mental health issues. The case is about extreme gun violence. The case is about school safety. You know, children's lives were lost. It's a tragic, terrible case, but prosecuting and now punishing parents of school shooters doesn't do anything to address those underlying causes that give rise to what is becoming, unfortunately, less and less rare every single year.
And then the third thing was my background in social psychology and the research and work that I've done looking at juvenile delinquency and the role that parents play in either contributing to delinquency or as a protective factor against delinquency. And so, I understood something about how parents view their children and what they're able to do if they ever want to intervene. And I knew that the theory that this case relied on just misunderstood that psychology very completely.
AKB: So, you've told me that you are not trying to defend the Crumbley parents. You acknowledge that their parenting left much to be desired, but there were still some issues in the verdict that you found disputable. Could you introduce some of those to us?
SB: Yeah, the Crumbleys were convicted, kind of, on two very, very similar theories, and it's unclear which one was the most persuasive to the jury. The first, kind of, most direct one is to say that they were responsible for involuntary manslaughter because through their gross negligence in the way that they ignored the signs of mental health struggles in their child and failed to get him mental health treatment — and the fact that they had guns in their home that they allowed him to have access to — that's the basis for them being grossly negligent. That's, in the law, what we call the mens rea, right? That's their mental state. They were grossly negligent, which is what you need for involuntary manslaughter. And that's based on the fact that, again, they failed to sort of understand the severity of his mental health issues, they failed to, you know, get him specific mental health treatment, and they allowed him to be in a home with guns.
But then there's the — well, but then did that cause him to go shoot those kids? And that's the argument that really seems to fall apart when you interrogate it, because obviously he shot those kids himself. And up until this case, that would have been the end of the inquiry. You'd say, well, he's the direct cause, and he cuts that off. Here, they said, well, it was reasonably foreseeable that he was going to do something like this, and that's why we're going to say that you are one of the causes of this. And, you know, my entire argument on the psychology piece is no parent would foresee that their child would commit a mass school shooting without any specific evidence that they had made a threat like that. There have been instances where kids do make threats and the parents will respond and say, my kid is making a direct threat. This is not that situation, so there's far less to go on there.
The other kind of side piece also is there was some argument made by the prosecution that the Crumbley parents had a duty to those kids that were killed. Now, one of the longstanding principles in the law is that parents owe duties to their own children. You have to keep them safe, you have to take care of them, you have to provide them with basic necessities — all of those things — and if you violate those duties, you can be held criminally responsible. And there's a long history of case law that talks about that. But here, they were saying that duty extended to these other children, and that really flies in the face of modern parenting approaches where, again, you're responsible for your own kid in some ways, right — again, in terms of providing them with basic necessities and things like that—but you are not responsible for other kids.
And in fact, we have a very independent-focused culture that does not make us sort of stewards for children in the community broadly. And one of the kind of counterpoints that I bring up in the paper that I think really shows the contradiction here is the way that we treat parents who choose not to get their children vaccinated. That's a choice they're allowed to make. It poses a public health risk to the community in general. But, you know, in terms of our priorities, we say, well, you have that individual right to make that choice, and that trumps any sort of concerns about these other kids.
So, that's just one of the inconsistencies here, where we want to hold these parents liable in this case — you know, sort of the state wanted to hold them liable, the prosecutor wanted to hold them liable — and so they pursue this theory when we don't do this in a whole host of other contexts: public health issues, environmental degradation. I mean, there's a million things that you could point to. And so, this kind of — you know, this is one of the hallmarks of criminal law — is very selective enforcement. But part of the reason why I was so struck by this is it just seemed so counter to the way that we encourage people to think about parenting.v
AKB: Tell us about some of the problems you warn us about in your article. What kind of dangerous precedents are set for the future by this novel legal theory and the Crumbley case verdict?
SB: So, the legal precedent that the case set that I think is very dangerous is widening the net for parents to bear criminal responsibility when their children act out, when their children commit crimes, or when their children are harmed. The other way that this case could go, much more common than children who are experiencing mental health issues to this degree acting out and shooting other people, is when they actually shoot themselves. And so, you could see a theory whereby parents become responsible for those deaths on the same theory. So, that's one of the risks.
The other risk is that it's going to be used to just bring in prosecutions against lots and lots of parents whose kids bring a gun to school, whose kids bully other kids, things like that. And we've already seen that happen. There is a recent case that was just concluded against a parent of a different school shooter in Georgia. This is Colin Gray, who was just found guilty of both involuntary manslaughter — very similar theory — as well as murder in that situation, and is facing a lifetime sentence.
Normatively, why is it problematic? The criminal law is often used to put a band-aid on really deep, complex social issues — issues around access to guns, issues around mental health, issues around poverty, issues around homelessness, things like this. And it's not a way of dealing with the problem and actually addressing or solving it. It's a response that says, well, this horrible thing happened and we need to do something about it, and so we're going to slap this person with a criminal lawsuit, and we're going to send them to prison.
This is a part of a pattern of saying the more that we criminalize, the more we can pat ourselves on the back and say we did something, when really it doesn't address the problem at all. Because, as I point out in the paper, there's no evidence that these parents knew how sick their son was, knew what his intentions were, or were in a position to help him.
AKB: Did the Crumbleys act with ordinary care? As you point out in your article, reasonable and ordinary care are slippery concepts, especially when applied after the fact. The prosecution's argument for causation and mens rea had the benefit of hindsight and counterfactual thinking for what was happening in real time. It rested on a lot of behavioral assumptions, really placing responsibility on individual parents who don't have the training, resources, or support to steward public safety today. It's almost as if the state is expecting to outsource policing to families.
Would you explain the psychological background on why the prosecution's argument should have failed?
SB: So, the way that this theory of liability works is it basically says parents should know when their children is having these kinds of mental health issues and when their children are going down a dangerous path of becoming preoccupied with violence, becoming preoccupied with guns, and possibly starting to make threats. And separate and apart from the parents' role in this, there is an evolving body of research that looks at how these, again, unfortunately really tragic mass shooting events happen in adolescence. And typically there is — there's not a predictive model — but there is evidence to show that, you know, there's a pattern of struggling with things like anxiety and depression, becoming fascinated with, you know, sort of violence and guns, and then making joke threats or sort of joking about possibly doing something. These are kind of warning signs, sometimes referred to as leakage, and then in a very small percentage of those cases, they actually do act out.
So, experts — psychologists, people who study gun violence — are developing those models to try and kind of create this way of intervening earlier when you see kids that have these kinds of signs. But parents don't know about, one, that model of behavior, and two, parents don't see their children through the lens of risk assessment.
Parents are not trained to evaluate their children on the basis of what they may or may not do to other children. Parents are largely trained to be really concerned first and foremost with their own children's well-being. Parents who are both working multiple jobs or who are dealing with their own, you know, economic stresses or relationship stresses, and they've got a teenage, you know, child who they think is doing okay — they're not getting notices from the school that there's any issue — are largely going to leave that child alone, as we've again been trained to do. Diaries and, you know, private space — they have their own phones, you're not checking their phones. These are all parenting norms in modern society. And this case says, well, you should have been paying attention. You should have been looking at your kid's phone. You should have been tracking their online activity, and you should have known that they needed to get psychiatric treatment. And of course, other than parents who literally are experts in psychology or counselors or therapists themselves, why would they know that?
So, that's where the psychology research comes in to say, you know, not only did these parents in this particular case not seem to know — there's no evidence that they saw any of the sort of threats or jokes that their son was making — but parents in general are not good places to put the responsibility for intervening on because, again, they're not trained, and they're predisposed to see their children as good. They're predisposed to see their children, when they do act out, as, oh, that's just a blip. That's because something else happened, but it's not because something's really wrong with them. It takes a lot before a parent sort of recognizes that their kid actually does really need help.
There's also a lot of class bias that goes into what kinds of parents are going to be apprised of those sorts of issues. There's still a great deal of stigma around mental health for young people. So, the idea that a parent would identify their child as having a mental health issue and then take active steps to intervene in it, you know, it really, I think, belies the reality of parenting in modern society. Which is why part of what I say in the paper, and what I am advocating for more broadly, is we need a much more comprehensive approach to dealing with this kind of risk that involves schools, that involves families but also involves community organizations. There has to be a number of different sites that could potentially intervene that are given resources and educated, that are not going to have a, you know, reaction to their own child being the one that someone's pointing a finger at and saying, hey, I think this kid is posing a risk.
AKB: Children are struggling with mental health issues at unprecedented levels today. Tell us more about the psychologically informed approach to mass school shootings in your paper.
SB: With this really alarming trend in young people who are suffering from mental health issues — anxiety, depression — there's been a real surge in this combination of factors: COVID isolation, and then, of course, social media and all these kinds of things. And unfortunately, combined with very, very lax gun control and a culture that really valorizes violence and valorizes guns — and in Michigan, where this happened, you know, it's a place that has a robust gun culture, you know, a hunting culture and things like that — this produces, not in very many cases, but still, one case is too many cases, someone who becomes preoccupied with violence and feels that this is their way to deal with whatever they're feeling. You know, often the kids who perpetrate these mass shootings end up being killed during the course of the shooting, or they spend the rest of their life in prison. Those are the outcomes.
And so, a psychologically informed approach to dealing with this, again, really horrible and largely unpredictable, really random kind of violence, doesn't say after the fact, let's just punish as many people as we possibly can, because that doesn't, again, address it at the outset. The only argument for doing something like this is that it might deter some parents, that it might make them think twice about having more guns in the house. But there are other ways to do that that don't bring the hammer of the criminal legal system down upon parents.
Instead, it looks to the research on gun violence prevention that says education, awareness, mental health resources, mental health advocacy, giving children outlets to talk about their feelings in a safe space. So, if you are a child who's dealing with these feelings, you know, there's — of course, you're not going to tell someone that you're feeling like you have an urge to go out and commit some terrible crime — that would be, you know, send all the flags up. But so, developing programs in schools to kind of tease out whether these feelings are happening and to intervene much, much earlier, and to intervene multiple different ways, that it's not just, well, now we're ripping you out of the home, we're putting you in a psych evaluation, and we're, you know, taking all the guns out of the house, because the threat level has to be really high before the state will intervene in that way.
What I talk about in the paper, and what is absolutely called for — and experts in public health and mental health will say this — is more resources for mental health advocacy in the school system that can partner with parents and partner with other organizations. The other piece of this that's really hard to address, given sort of the law right now, is the access to guns and the very lax gun control laws that we have in this country. That's a harder problem, frankly, to address right now because, you know, in a lot of ways it's legally protected. But the easy, readily access to guns, combined with the way that gun ownership is celebrated, is part and parcel of this problem. And one of the things that I talk about in the paper is, you know, many parents are celebrated for taking their kids on hunting trips and things like this. So, it becomes very difficult to then point the finger at parents when, by and large, we encourage this behavior until the point at which something horrible happens.
AKB: Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciated your paper. I thought it was one of the more accessible ones to read, and I'm looking forward to its publication this December in the UCLA Law Review. Very enlightening to talk to you about, like, the diversity in your critiques of expansive parental criminal liability, especially as pertains to mass school shootings, which I think is, unfortunately, an epidemic and something that our society struggles to contend with.
Thank you so much, Shirin, for joining us today, and we look forward to seeing more of your research in coming years.
SB: Thank you so much.
AKB: Shirin Bakhshay is an assistant professor of law at the UCLA School of Law, specializing in criminal law, psychology and legal empirical methods. Her work focuses on criminal education, sentencing and penal policy. She previously lectured at Stanford Law School and worked as a litigation attorney.
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