OXFORD, Mich. – The father of a teenager who was murdered in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting said Tuesday that the jury’s conviction of the shooter’s mother is a step toward accountability.
Craig Shilling, father of Justin Shilling, a student who was killed in the shooting, was one of the family members who attended the trial of Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford shooter. Both the shooter’s mother and father were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the four students murdered by their son on Nov. 30, 2021.
It’s the first time in U.S. history that parents of a school shooter have been charged in connection with the shooting. Craig Shilling was also present for the landmark verdict read by the jury on Tuesday, Feb. 6, declaring Jennifer Crumbley guilty of all four counts.
“We have been asking for accountability across the board, and this is ... one step toward that,” Craig Shilling told the media after the verdict was read. “I feel that moving forward is gonna not necessarily be any easier because of what we left behind, but it gives us hope for a brighter future.”
After hearing testimony from 22 witnesses, including Jennifer Crumbley herself, over the course of seven days, and deliberating for a day and a half, the jury found prosecutors had proved Crumbley failed to take steps that could have prevented the shooting. Oakland County prosecutors have long alleged the parents ignored their son’s apparent cries for help, and instead focused on their own hobbies and gave their son easy access to the murder weapon.
Crumbley now faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, and is scheduled to be sentenced on April 9. Though Craig Shilling was glad for Tuesday’s guilty verdict -- he shook hands with the prosecutors as they exited the courtroom -- he told the media that there were still more people who needed to be held accountable for their roles.
“There’s one more parent out there,” Craig Shilling said, speaking of the shooter’s father, James Crumbley. The shooter’s parents decided to sever their trials, and James Crumbley’s is scheduled to begin on March 5.
---> What jury forewoman said was 1 key piece of evidence in finding Jennifer Crumbley guilty
Craig Shilling also indicated Tuesday that he believed some staff members of Oxford High School should be held accountable because they “could have done more” to prevent the shooting. But when asked if he thought those individuals should face criminal charges, he said that’s a “gray area” that he leaves up to the prosecutors, who he trusts “wholeheartedly.”
The Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office has decided not to pursue charges against school staff and administrators, such as a school counselor and the dean of students who had direct interaction with the shooter on the day of the massacre. Several staff members and the district are still involved in lawsuits related to the shooting.
In her closing argument at Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, Prosecutor Karen McDonald said she agreed that the school didn’t do “everything they should’ve done.”
“I’m not gonna tell you that I think it was OK they didn’t look in the backpack -- I don’t think it was. But this is about Jennifer Crumbley’s actions, and any attempt to make it about what [two school officials] did or didn’t do -- like it or not -- who did not have any of the information that was so jarring ... it’s about what she knew and what she didn’t say.”
Prosecutors argue that if the shooter’s parents had told school officials about the gun they recently purchased for their son, the outcome could have been much different.
But despite the mountains of evidence introduced in the case against Jennifer Crumbley, the shooter’s mother reiterated on the stand that she wouldn’t handle the situation differently, even with what she knows now. The mother offered several reasons for that, one being that she didn’t believe her son required mental health help based on text messages that she considered to be “family jokes.”
When asked how he felt when Jennifer Crumbley said she wouldn’t do anything differently, Craig Shilling said it felt like a slap in the face.
“Something like that hurts, because I would do a lot differently. I would do a lot of stuff different,” Craig Shilling said.
Members of the media asked Craig Shilling what he would say to Jennifer Crumbley if given the opportunity. He replied, “I can’t sat that on the air.”
You can watch Craig Shilling’s full statement from Tuesday in the video up above.
Since the shooting death of his 17-year-old son, Craig Shilling has been left “completely lost in a seemingly endless sea of raging emotions with no care as to what happened to me,” he told the courtroom during the December 2023 sentencing of the Oxford shooter himself. Both Justin Shilling’s mother and father spoke then about the grieving of their son, and how difficult it has been to cope with the loss.
Still, when directing his remarks directly toward the shooter, Craig Shilling injected feelings of hope.
“As you rot away, lamenting over your wasted life, you should take time to ponder the fact that, although you have taken four lives, the selfless gesture of organ donation by my son saved at least five lives,” Craig Shilling told the shooter in December. “Thus, overshadowing your delusions of grandeur and effectively nullifying all that you feel you’ve accomplished. Stew on that for a while, and maybe you’ll realize that as long as there are good people in the world, willing to selflessly give of themselves to help others, evil will never triumph.”
---> ‘He didn’t deserve to die this way’: Justin Shilling’s parents speak at Oxford shooter’s sentencing
The shooter was sentenced then to life in prison without the chance for parole.
When asked what he wanted people to know about his son on Tuesday, Craig Shilling said Justin was “an awesome individual. I think about him every day ... He loved life and he deserved to live it.”
Click here for full coverage on the Jennifer Crumbley trial.