What were they thinking?

Plumbing the depths of Mr. and Mrs. Crumbley

I do not understand James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a 15-year old boy charged with shooting and killing four classmates and wounding seven others at Oxford, Mich.’s high school last week.

As you must know by now, the Crumbleys met with school administrators — which some news outlets report were “school counselors,” and yes, there is a difference, and thank you, Edward, for pointing that out — on Nov. 30, the day of the shootings, to discuss their son’s red-flag behavior. The Crumbleys declined to let the school dismiss their son from classes, and then, after they were charged with involuntary manslaughter for their role in supplying a weapon to their son, took off in their late-model Kia and tried to hide.

They were found in Saturday’s wee hours in a commercial building 45 minutes away in Detroit, though their lawyers insist they weren’t hiding, and that it was all a big miscommunication.

Whatevs, lawyers. I believe we can shut down the competition for Shittiest Parents, U.S. Version for the year. We have our winners.

The Crumbleys both have accumulated several misdemeanor charges in their respective pasts, but nothing that rises to this. After a fairly contentious arraignment, the couple pleaded not guilty and they each are being held on $500,000 cash bail. I hope you’ll let me know when you get news of the latest blood-gargling Christian/gun-humping group raising money for the Crumbleys’ bail. I shall make said group(s) my special purpose.

This is the deadliest school shooting since spring 2018, and charging the parents is an unusual move meant to stem the carnage. Dad bought the 9mm Sig Sauer SP 2022 pistol as an early Christmas gift for his son. Mom went to a shooting range to try it out, with the alleged shooter. Without the ample support of Mom and Dad, the alleged shooter might have stewed in his own juice, but no. He had a gun.

The school has plenty to answer for as to why the alleged shooter was able to do what he is alleged to have done. Putting aside the question of whether the gun was in a secure location in the Crumbley home (that is something we most likely will learn in court), all this raises so many questions, including but not limited to:

• What parent, when contacted by a school about troubling, on-campus behavior from their child, reaches out to that child and dismisses school concerns with an “LOL” and a don’t-get-caught?

• What parent, when advised to take their troubled child home from school, refuses to do so and instead, returns to work and leaves the child in the environment where he’s literally a parade of red flags?

• What parent would leave in custody a 15-year old accused of a heinous crime, and drive away to try to avoid legal responsibility? (I think we can see they’d already avoided moral responsibility. Maybe that’s not far a drive between the two.)

• Why parent keeps a gun in the house and allows a troubled teen access? (Please understand my compassion dries up when a teenager aims a gun at anyone. I am not pleading for understanding of the 15-year old. He is lost to me. But I’m not that boy’s parents, who had multiple opportunities to do their job, step in, get help and save some lives.)

• Will this legal strategy serve as a warning to other gun-humping parents who might think twice before cheerfully buying the weapon and the bullets and handing both over to a kid who has no business with weaponry?

Lest we lose sight, the dead are:

• Hana St. Juliana, 14, a basketball and volleyball player, a “happy” and “joyful” kid

• Madisyn Baldwin, 17, an artist who liked to write, whose grandmother posted a tribute that her murder left a “huge hole” in the family’s hearts and lives

• Tate Myre, 16, a football player who was said to have tried to disarm the shooter

• Justin Shilling, 17, who was on the school’s bowling and golf teams, and whose family donated his organs to Gift of Life.

May their memory be a revolution.