Most of the words you’re about to read aren’t mine. They are words from several surviving victims of a mass murder exactly two years ago in Michigan, speaking yesterday at the sentencing hearing of the gunman who killed the ones they loved. Like Craig Shilling, who lost his 17-year-old son Jason. Life in prison, he said of the shooter, “is not enough.”
Ethan Crumbley, now 17 himself, methodically shot eleven people at his high school on that dreadful day. He killed four and injured seven more.
The judge in the trial gave him the most he could in a state that doesn’t have a death penalty: life without parole. For the people he killed and the people who lost them, it’s the best they could expect.
For the mother of Madisyn Baldwin, who also died that day, life without parole is the sentence the killer deserves. After recounting how “my scream should have shattered the glass” when she identified her daughter at the morgue, she told Crumbley in her victim impact statement, “I don’t wish death upon you, that would be too easy. I hope the thoughts consume you and they replay over and over in your head. I hope the screams keep you up at night.”
The father of another murdered teen, Tate Myre, told Crumbley he hopes he spends the rest of his life "rotting in his cell.”
The sister of another victim, Hana St. Juliana, drew tears when she said, "Instead of speaking at her wedding, I spoke at her funeral. Instead of fishtailing her hair for a game, I curled her hair in a casket.”
But it was Jason Shilling’s dad who spoke both most angrily and most eloquently about how a mass murderer ruins more lives than just those he massacres.
“My grief has consumed me,” he started, "and has squeezed out every bit of joy and happiness in my life.” He said that the shootings that hideous day “have rocked three generations of my family and have altered our future forever. We have fallen into the darkness.”
Shilling then told the court what that means. “Anxiety, stress, sleepless nights, and uncontrolled emotional outbreaks make even the simplest most normal things difficult.”
Then came his own wishes for the young man who murdered his son. “I believe that once an individual crosses the boundaries of basic humanism and maliciously kills another person, that individual should meet the same fate.” But in Michigan, and 29 other states, that’s not an option. Craig Shilling despairingly had to accept that. “In lieu of legal execution, I feel strongly that that individual should never be allowed to walk among his peers again. This is why I’m going to ask you to lock this son-of-a-bitch up for the rest of his pathetic life. My son doesn’t get a second chance and neither does he.”
If Ethan Crumbley had been sentenced to anything less than life without possibility of parole, that second chance could come. There are organizations that work toward that end. The home page of the website for The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth begins with the headline, “No child should spend life in prison.” They argue, “Adolescent development research has proven that children’s brains and characters are still forming. They do not have adult levels of judgment or ability to assess risks.”
That may be. Crumbley’s court-appointed attorney told the judge at the sentencing hearing, “His life is worth salvaging. His life is worth rehabilitating.” But for Hana St. Juliana’s father, it makes no difference. “His age plays no part,” he told the judge. “His potential is irrelevant.” I agree. If he wants to redeem his sorry life, he can do it in prison.
But the Michigan legislature is considering passing a law that would require the possibility of parole in every case where a minor has committed a capital crime, no matter how heinous. 28 other states already have similar laws. If Michigan goes that way, there is no guarantee that it won’t retroactively apply to Crumbley.
Why? When I think about him, or any of the 42 mass murderers so far this year— there were two more just this week in Nevada and Texas— I do not accept that every life is precious. Some are pure evil. How can you see Crumbley’s life through any other lens when you learn that the night before he shot his classmates, he recorded himself saying, “I’m gonna have so much fun.”
Craig Shilling called it “unbearable” to know that his son Jason is “never going to walk through the door again.” I call it unbearable if Ethan Crumbley ever gets to walk through a prison door to freedom. No matter his age, he has forsaken that right.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Each and every time I read of yet another atrocity like those that seem to occur daily, I shed tears of abject hopelessness that we have, as a society, descended into this pit of utter disregard for our fellow humans and that we cannot seem to find the intelligence, the humanity, and the wisdom to climb out of it.
Obviously we need gun control on a scale unimaginable in this sick Republican-dominated country, and we also need the death penalty for mass shooters caught alive and for traitors like the January 6 and insurrectionists like tRump himself and for his traitorous attorneys. This from a Democrat, sick of all this violence, by the way!