Parents of Oxford School Shooting Victims File $100M Lawsuits Against Michigan School District

Two lawsuits seeking $100 million each have been filed against a Michigan school district, its superintendent, and others after four students were fatally shot and others wounded at Oxford High School, a lawyer announced Thursday.

The lawsuits were filed in federal court in Detroit by Jeffrey and Brandi Franz on behalf of their daughters, Riley, a 17-year-old senior who was shot in the neck in the November 30 shooting, and her sister Bella, a 14-year-old ninth grader who was next to her at the time, attorney Geoffrey Fieger said.

Named in the suits are the Oxford Community School District, Superintendent Timothy Throne, Oxford High School principal Steven Wolf, the dean of students, two counselors, two teachers, and a staff member.

Ten students and a teacher were shot at the school in Oxford Township, roughly 30 miles north of Detroit.

Ethan Crumbley, a 15-year-old sophomore at the school, was arrested at the school and has been charged as an adult with murder, terrorism, and other crimes. His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, later were charged with involuntary manslaughter for giving him access to the weapon, which they purchased for him just four days before the shooting and which the mother described in a social media post as her son’s “new Xmas present.”

Oakland County Prosector Karen McDonald also faulted the parents for failing to alert school officials about the gun they had purchased for their son and for resisting their son’s removal from the school on the day of the shooting when school officials called them into a meeting over a disturbing drawing their son had made. The couple was arrested last Saturday following an intense manhunt after they fled law enforcement. Detroit police eventually apprehended the couple in a commercial building in East Detroit, not far from the Canadian border, where they were hiding after withdrawing $4,000 from an ATM earlier that day.

Last Saturday, Oxford Community Schools Superintendent Tim Throne called for a third party to investigate events that led to the deadly school shooting.

Throne said in a statement that he called for the outside investigation because parents have asked questions about “the school’s version of events leading up to the shooting.”

“It’s critically important to the victims, our staff, and our entire community that a full and transparent accounting be made,” he said.

Throne also gave more details about the school’s interactions with the 15-year-old student who killed four of his classmates and wounded seven others. According to Throne, the student told guidance counselors that his drawing of a bullet with the words “blood everywhere” above a person who appeared to have been shot along with the words “my life is useless” and “the world is dead” was part of a video game design. The disturbing image was discovered by a teacher the day of the shooting.

Throne said that the teen’s demeanor was calm when the school’s staff contacted his parents that day to have a meeting at the school hours before the shooting.

He said the teen’s parents did not notify counselors that they had recently purchased a gun for their son. The day before the shooting a teacher discovered the teen searching for ammo on his cellphone.

“Given the fact that the child had no prior disciplinary infractions, the decision was made he would be returned to the classroom rather than sent home to an empty house,” Throne said. “These incidents remained at the guidance counselor level and were never elevated to the principal or assistant principal’s office. While we understand this decision has caused anger, confusion, and prompted understandable questioning, the counselors made a judgment based on their professional training and clinical experience and did not have all the facts we now know.”

The school administrators have faced increased criticism for not notifying the sheriff’s office immediately after a teacher first alerted administrators to the student’s disturbing drawing the day of the shooting and his cellphone search for ammo the day before the shooting. Had they done so, law enforcement could have removed the student from the school grounds and made sure he had no access to weapons, Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said.

The school’s resource officer should have been in the meeting school officials had with the student and parents the day of the shooting, Bouchard noted.

“We would have very much wanted our school resource officer in on that meeting,” Bouchard said. “He would have taken protocols we have in place to have [the suspect] removed from the school until action has happened. For example, the school told him he had to be in counseling, we would have had him removed from school until that happened.”

However, personal-injury lawyers have expressed doubt that the school district could be successfully sued for letting Crumbley stay in school. That’s because Michigan’s governmental immunity laws set a high bar to wring liability out of public schools and other arms of government.

“You have to show that the administration or faculty members were grossly negligent, meaning they had a reckless disregard for whether an injury was likely to take place,” attorney A. Vince Colella told the Associated Press.

The school’s handling of events leading up to the shooting might meet that standard, according to a Michigan attorney who spoke with the Detroit News.

Todd Young, an attorney representing a number of women suing Eastern Michigan University over the alleged coverup of sexual assaults, told the Detroit News that the facts of the Oxford High School shooting reveal it to be “a state-created liability” in his opinion. “They had all of the tools to prevent this and were in a very unique position to stop this had they just used reasonable care.”

The school district rejected an offer from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to be its third-party investigator. However, Nessel said on Tuesday that her office would still be conducting its own review of the school’s actions preceding the shooting.

“What we can’t do is nothing. It’s not appropriate,” Nessel, a Democrat, said. “I really do think it’s incumbent upon the Michigan Department of Attorney General and the top law enforcement official in the state to conduct a further review.”

Nessel said the review could show what policies, if any, might need to be changed to prevent this kind of tragedy in the future.

“We really might need to revise the way that all school districts operate,” she said, noting that the investigation could reveal that the school was following all of the established protocols but “those just fall short.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.