Ethan Crumbley's neighbor says the quiet boy next door "was never, ever OK" years before he executed a mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan on Nov. 30, 2021.
Ethan was 15 years old when he fatally shot four students and wounded seven others using a gun his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, purchased for him as a Christmas gift. He pleaded guilty in October 2022.
"He was never, ever OK – and I honestly believe he could have been," Suzanne Jinerson, the Crumbleys' former neighbor, told the Detroit Free Press.
Jinerson, a 60-year-old retired Air Force officer and mother to three sons, recalled getting in a "huge fight" when Ethan was about 12 with Jennifer Crumbley, who now faces four involuntary manslaughter charges with her husband for their alleged roles in the school shooting.
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Jinerson had offered to babysit the preteen when his parents were out socializing and drinking – something they often did, without their son – so that he could spend time with her son and husband instead of being home alone.
"They would go out and drink and leave him home alone," Jinerson said, echoing the prosecution's depiction of the Crumbleys as absent parents. "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 as a child," she told the Free Press, adding that she doesn't know what her family "could have done differently."
Ethan was only 6 when Jinerson met him for the first time. Her husband and son occasionally went fishing with Ethan, and they even went skiing together at Pine Knob. Jinerson recalled James and Jennifer Crumbley being pleasant enough. The couple invited the Jinersons over for dinner and wine one night on their front patio, and Jinerson remembered Ethan being shy, according to the Free Press.
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She continued: "I need people to understand that this was a 6-year-old boy at one time. I know he's quote-unquote a monster for doing what he did, and I'm not trying to excuse it."
Her husband told the Free Press that as soon as he met Ethan, he told his wife, "There is something wrong," because the boy "never looked anyone in the eye."
In a September court filing, the Crumbleys' defense attorneys wrote, "At the end of the day, [Ethan] was cared for and loved by his parents."
"They sent him to summer school, summer camps and took family vacations. They attended parent-teacher conferences and emailed with teachers about their son," the filing states.
Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald revealed in December 2021 that the school officials met with Ethan and his parents to discuss violent drawings he created just hours before his deadly rampage. The suspect was able to convince them during the meeting that the concerning drawings were for a "video game." His parents allegedly "flatly refused" to take their son home, McDonald said at the time.
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Shortly after his parents left, Ethan took a gun out of his backpack and killed four students.
According to prosecutors, James Crumbley bought the pistol Ethan used in the shooting at a local firearms store on Nov. 26, and Ethan had access to the gun at home before he brought it to Oxford High School. James Crumbley's wife, Jennifer Crumbley, said in a social media post that the gun was a Christmas present for their son.
"He shouldn't have had a gun, plain and simple," Jinerson's husband told the Free Press.
The shooting weighs heavily on Jinerson 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?'"
The four deceased victims of the school shooting are 16-year-old Tate Myre, 16-year-old Justin Shilling, 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana and 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin.
