Teacher shot by Ethan Crumbley recalls looking into his eyes before he pulled trigger: ‘Aiming to kill me’
A Michigan teacher who was wounded by school shooter Ethan Crumbley recalled in emotional testimony staring into his eyes during his 2021 rampage and thinking “he was aiming to kill me.”
Molly Darnell was shot in the arm while trying to barricade her classroom at Oxford High School as Crumbley, then 15 years old, leered through the door’s window and unloaded a 9mm pistol round that left her bleeding on the floor.
“I realize that he’s raising a gun to me. I remember thinking in my head, ‘There’s no orange tip on that gun,’“ Darnell told jurors in Michigan court Thursday, recounting the realization that Crumbley’s weapon was not a toy.
Darnell, testifying on the opening day of Crumbley’s father’s manslaughter trial, recalled feeling like her arm had been hit by a jet of hot water, but was so focused on getting her door barricaded that she ignored it even as blood poured from the wound, the Detroit Free Press reported.
She eventually managed to get a cart in front of the door, and after fashioning her sweater into a tourniquet began texting her family in case she didn’t survive.
“I texted my husband, ‘I love you. Active shooter.’”
Darnell then received a text from her daughter — at school in another district where word of the shooting had spread — asking if she was okay.
“She said ‘Mom are you okay?’ and I said “I’m sheltered in place, I’m safe, and I love you,” deciding not to mention her injury.
The shooter’s father, James Crumbley, is charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to intervene as his son spiraled into a frightening mental state until he murdered four and wounded seven at his school.
His trial comes a month after his wife and the shooter’s mother, Jennifer Crumbley, was found guilty of the same charge — the first US parents to be charged and convicted for a mass school shooting committed by their child.
Prosecutors have argued that the parents negligently allowed their son access to guns while ignoring his pleas about declining mental health, and failed to alert the school of the mounting dangers around their son.
Texts from Ethan to one of his few friends in which he complained about his parents’ failure to help him were shown to jurors on Thursday, including one where the teen recalled asking his dad to take him to the doctor over voices he was hearing in his head.
“He just gave me some pills and told me to ‘suck it up,’” he wrote in the text, adding his mother “laughed when I told her.”
Other texts included a photo of Crumbley waving around a loaded handgun.
“My dad left it out so I thought, ‘Why not’ lol,” the text with the photo read.
Assistant prosecutor Marc Keast opened the trial by alleging the father purchased a weapon as a gift for his son despite knowing he “had been in a downward spiral,” and then failed to keep it from him as the warning signs mounted.
“These are the four students who never made it home that day. What happened inside that school was truly a nightmare come to life, but … that nightmare was preventable,” Keast said, adding that all three Crumbleys were responsible for what happened, according to the Detroit Free Press.
“The shooter didn’t snap. The shooting was foreseeable, especially to his father,” he added.
Central to prosecutors’ cases against the Crumbley parents has been a drawing he made on his school work the morning of the shooting featuring a gun, a bullet and a bloodied person, and the words “the thoughts won’t stop … help me … blood everywhere.”
The parents were called in to school to discuss the drawings, but prosecutors said they failed to alert anybody that their son owned a gun and elected to let him stay in class. Within hours he burst from a school bathroom and began shooting.
Defense attorney Mariell Lehman argued that James Crumbley did not know what his son was going to do, and that by law he could therefore not be found responsible for the murders.
“Pay attention also to what you don’t hear … ” she said. ““You will not hear that James Crumbley knew what his son was going to do.'”
Ethan Crumbley, now 17, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in December.
His mother has not yet been sentenced.
