If it is true that the sins of the parents are visited on successive generations, is the reverse also the case? Our society cherishes the notion of individual accountability and so it is rare that we hold persons liable for acts committed by relatives or acquaintances. Justice William O. Douglas asserted in a 1945 Supreme Court decision: “The doctrine of personal guilt is one of the most fundamental principles of our jurisprudence. It partakes of the very essence of the concept of freedom and due process of law.”[1]
Even if is unusual to confer guilt on a person for deeds committed by descendants, it is not completely unknown. Maryland civil law, for example, stipulates that parents can be held financially liable for damages incurred by their children.[2] That stipulation pertains to civil penalties, but a similar principle has been applied to criminal liability. Deja Taylor, a Virginia mother, was charged with child neglect after leaving a loaded firearm accessible to her 6-year-old who subsequently shot his first-grade teacher. (To Taylor’s credit, she turned herself into the police).[3]
Meanwhile, “Robert Crimo Jr., the father of Highland Park shooting suspect Robert Crimo III, is facing felony reckless conduct charges for allegedly helping his son obtain a firearm three years before he fatally shot seven people and injured dozens of others at a Fourth of July parade in Illinois last year.”[4] The case is similar to the tragedy played out by the Crumbley family, when, Ethan at 15-years old, showed compelling signs that he intended to open fire at his school and did exactly that with a semi-automatic handgun that was a Christmas present purchased by his father. “Three of his peers, one of whom was only 14 years of age, died within hours. Another passed the next morning in the hospital. Six students were wounded, three critically, and one teacher sustained injuries.”[5] Ethan’s mother is now on trial for involuntary manslaughter and his father is slated to go to court in March of this year.[6]
In an era punctuated with random murders, many people assume young people comprise a small percentage of the perpetuators. However, while such tragedies in the universe of crime overall, are indeed rare, killings by adolescents account for a sizeable portion of public massacres – over 20 percent based on a purposive sample of 112 incidents.[7] Equally disconcerting is the steady decline in the median age, from 39 to 22 in a database of 191 random mass shooters (with ages spanning 11-70) tracked over fifty-four years (1966-2020), a descent very likely attributable to the increase of attacks in educational settings carried out by pupils or former students.[8]
It is true that many juvenile offenders commit acts of performative cruelty because they have suffered severe indignities brought about by familial and/or social circumstances. However, contrary to prevailing popular thought, environmental considerations, whether related to childhood trauma or intimidating experiences in later life, have not been proven, by themselves, to be primary influential agents. On the other hand, when the psychological toll related to a damaging environment is adjoined to one or more internalized precursors (personal perception of physicality, a psychoneurological condition, or a pathological personality) the influence is evident proportionally twice as often (more than 40%).[9] That percentage and the accompanying caveat indicates that the adjudication of caregiver culpability should be based on highly individualized evaluation of each situation.
More relevant, from the standpoint of personal responsibility as well as public policy, is the imperative for parents, educators, social workers, counselors, and law enforcement personnel to be duty bound in familiarizing themselves with signals offered by potential assailants contemplating extreme violence.
Ethan Crumbley was bullied at school. He was also delusional, texting his mother to complain about imaginary villainous entities in the house on multiple occasions when left home alone. In addition, he exhibited anti-social tendencies, engaging in and actually recording acts of animal cruelty. Prior to his rampage, two of his posts on social media alluded to catastrophic mayhem. On the day of his attack a teacher intercepted a series of captioned drawings that illustrated his sanguinary preoccupation. In one panel, beneath an illustration of a weapon he wrote, “The thoughts won’t stop.” When the school notified his parents, the couple refused to take him home and, for their part, administrators failed to search his backpack that hid the 9MM Sig Sauer that he used in the shooting.[10]
Indicators of the incubation of a sudden mass assault are explicated in multiple sources. Four titles follow:
- Peter Langman, Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters before They Strike (Allentown, PA: Langman Psychological Associates, LLC., 2021);
- Adam Lankford, Krista Grace Adkins, and Eric Madfis. “Are the Deadliest Mass Shootings Preventable? An Assessment of Leakage, Information Reported to Law Enforcement, and Firearms Acquisition Prior to Attacks in the United States.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 35, no. 3 (August 2019): 268–273;
- J. Reid Meloy and Mary Ellen OToole, “The Concept of Leakage in Threat Assessment,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 29, no. 4 (June 2011): 513-527;
- Katherine Schweit, Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021).
Others may be found in the Afterword of How Rampage Killers Interpret Their Worlds (sourced in endnotes) and FBI, Active Shooter Resources, under “Resources,” https://www.fbi.gov/resources/active-shooter-safety-resources.
One of the most notorious #schoolshootings was carried out by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School in Colorado almost 25 years ago. “With semi-automatics, illegally modified shotguns, smoke bombs, and crickets (small, improvised cartridges rigged to explode), the pair entered the school from one of the parking lots, firing randomly at students and staff. The frenzy lasted approximately 49 minutes. Thirteen were killed and 25 wounded, at least three impaired for life.”[11] It was not the deadliest attack in an educational setting, but had the entire plan succeeded, it would have been. The boys originally tried to engineer an explosion in the lunchroom. Had the improvised bombs detonated at least 600 students could have been injured, many fatally.[12]
Harris and Klebold planned their ambush for well over a year. They both anticipated the fateful day in their journals. They taped multiple videos in their homes in which they acted out their rage and smugly discussed the brutality they envisioned. They made a short movie for a class assignment in which they posed as hitmen. They went to an isolated area with two friends to test their firearms and filmed that practice session as well.[13] Klebold turned in a narrative about a merciless assassin that his creative writing teacher described as “literary and ghastly – the most vicious story I ever read.”[14] In one of the “Basement Tapes,” the string of recordings they recorded over a period of weeks before their onslaught, Harris showed off his 12-gauge Savage shotgun with the name “Arlene,” etched onto the side and in one scene makes a show of kissing it.[15] Throughout the series, both boys bragged about the rifles and explosives they have amassed. At one point, Klebold points to a cache outside the window and says proudly, “You can’t see it. … That’s why it’s called a bunker.”[16]
This article was originally published on LinkIn on January 31, 2024.
[1] Scott Broom, “Breaking Down How Parents Can and Can’t Be Held Responsible for Their Kid’s Crimes,” WUSA9, posted and updated February 10, 2023, https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify /parents-criminally-responsible-for-crimes-of-their-children-maryland-law-legal-fact-check-2023/65-137ec7f6-8739-4689-b476-639528cd245d; United States Supreme Court, Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945), decided June 18, 1945, 326, https://supreme.justia .com/cases/federal/us/326/135/.
[2] Broom, “Breaking Down How Parents Can”; Maryland Courts, “Juvenile Delinquency,” 2.3, https://www.courts.state.md.us/legalhelp/juveniledelinquency.
[3] Audrey Conklin, “Parents Facing More Felony Charges for Kids’ Gun Crimes, Experts Say,” Fox News, posted, October 3, 2023, https://www.foxnews.com/us /parents-facing-more-felony-charges-kids-gun-crimes-experts-say.
[4] Ibid.
[5] S. Lee Funk, Why Rampage Killers Emerge: Conditions and Characteristics (Academica Press, in print), Chapter Three, primary and contemporary sources referenced therein.
[6] Tresa Baldas and Gina Kaufman, “Jennifer Crumbley Breaks Down During Trial, Seeing Video from Son’s Rampage for 1st Time,” Detroit Free Press, posted January 25, 2024, updated January 26, 2024, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local /michigan/oakland/2024/01/25/jennifer-crumbley-involuntary-manslaughter-trial-oxford-high/72352334007/.
[7] 25/112 = 22.3 percent, from on compilation in S. Lee Funk, How Rampage Killers Interpret Their World: Developmental Portraits (Academica Press, in print), Table 3.1; and Funk, Why Rampage Killers Emerge, Appendix. Based on the following definition: “[I]ndividuals or persons acting conspiratorially who voluntarily and illegally attack a group of strangers or innocuous acquaintances in a public setting within a single period (often 90 minutes or less) with premeditation without anticipated material, political, social, or religious gain.” Funk, How Rampage Killers Interpret Their World, Introduction.
[8] James Densley and Jillian Peterson, “Op-Ed: Older Mass Shooters Are Rare. Here’s How They Differ from Young Assailants,” Los Angeles Times, posted and updated January 25, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-25/mass-shootings-monterey-park-half-moon-bay-age-suspects-victims-profile; extracted from research maintained by Dr. Jillian Peterson and Dr. James Densley for The Violence Prevention Project, Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, https://www .theviolenceproject.org/; covered in Sharon Shahid and Megan Duzor, Voice of America: Special Report
History Of Mass Shooters, updated June 21, 2021, https://projects.voanews.com /mass-shootings/.
[9] Funk, Why Rampage Killers Emerge, Chapter Six. The book concentrates on prefatory factors necessary for the moral dissolution associated with rampaging and each precondition is carefully surveyed in the text.
[10] For more detail, upon publication, refer to Funk, Why Rampage Killers Emerge, Chapter Three with accompanying notes and Funk, How Rampage Killers Interpret Their World, Chapter Five with accompanying notes.
[11] Funk, How Rampage Killers Interpret Their World, Chapter Three, primary and contemporary references therein.
[12] Dave Cullen, Columbine (New York, NY: Hachette Book Group, 2009), 13-14.
[13] Fox News, “Columbine Killers Documented Training on Tape,” posted October 22, 2003, https://www .foxnews.com/story/columbine-killers-documented-training-on-tape; Eric Harris, Journal, in Mathijs Koenraadt, ed. and transcriber, A Teenage Philosophy of Awareness and Existence: Analysis of the Columbine Shooters Worldview, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Morningtime, 2015), 46, 47; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “Transcript of the Columbine ‘Basement Tapes,’” transcriber, Peter Langman, School Shooters .info: Resources on school shootings, perpetrators, and prevention, s.vv. “Eric Harris,” “Dylan Klebold”; “Hitmen for Hire,” time stamped December 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1998, Daily Motion, uploaded by Paula Gorman, [2012?], https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xuhh0o”; Dylan Klebold, A Virtual Book: EXISTENCES, in Koenraadt, A Teenage Philosophy of Awareness, 91; [C. Shepard?], transcriber, partial transcript, “Rampart Range Video,” A Columbine Site, under “Columbine Video Archive,” s.v. “March 6, 1999” (video now “unavailable”), http://www.acolumbinesite.com/.
[14] Cullen, Columbine, 308.
[15] Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “Transcript of the Columbine Basement Tapes,” ed. and transcriber Peter Langman, School Shooters. info, s.vv. “Eric Harris,” “Dylan Klebold,” under “March 15 – Late March/Early April 1999,” https:// schoolshooters.info/.
[16] Harris and Klebold, “Transcript of the Columbine Basement Tapes,” under “Late March/Early April 1999.”