For the past two years, Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox has had behind-the-scenes access to an unprecedented effort by a Michigan prosecutor to charge the parents of a 15-year-old school shooter with involuntary manslaughter. The Post agreed to wait until the cases against Jennifer and James Crumbley were resolved to publish what he witnessed Before her closing argument, Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald picked up a Sig Sauer handgun that had ended four teenagers’ lives in 2021, Cox writes. McDonald, 53, gripped the black pistol in her right hand, and in her left, a 14-inch steel cable affixed to a lock. The safety device was identical to one the Crumbleys owned but never used. With her sleeves rolled up, McDonald threaded the cable into the empty magazine well and through an open port at the gun’s top. She clicked it into the lock, stunned by how easy it was to do. “It’s 10 seconds,” she said to herself.
McDonald demonstrated it to her team during James Crumbley’s involuntary manslaughter trial. “That’s all it would have taken,” she said,. “And we’re here. And four kids have died.” No U.S. prosecutor had charged the parents of a school shooter with homicide. It was a decision celebrated by those desperate for a new approach to address gun violence and criticized by some experts who called it prosecutorial overreach. The Crumbleys maintained they’d done nothing wrong and shouldn’t be held responsible for their son’s actions. Even some of McDonald’s most experienced attorneys opposed what she was doing, dubious that she could win convictions in prosecutions that would cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. She did win, at a pair of nationally televised trials that set new legal precedent. To make history, McDonald endured death threats, a judge-imposed gag order and much public scrutiny and skepticism. The Washington Post embedded behind the scenes with prosecutors, attending strategy sessions, witnessing their obsessive research on potential jurors and arguments over high-risk witnesses, watching their chaotic scramble before one of the case’s most critical moments and their agonizing wait for a verdict they’d feared had been lost.