THE parents of a teenager who shot dead four people at a high school in Michigan had ignored their son’s psychiatric problems and his calls for help, witnesses told a court yesterday.

Ethan Crumbley, 15, killed four people and injured six others at his school in Oxford, north of Detroit, on November 30, using a gun his parents had bought him days earlier.

James and Jennifer Crumbley, aged 45 and 43, are charged with manslaughter, a charge very rarely used in such cases, after attempting to flee.

They appeared handcuffed and with their legs shackled before a judge who will decide if there is enough evidence to send them to trial yesterday.

Prosecutors called a series of witnesses to the stand who gradually painted a damning picture of the couple, showing how they appeared to have been wilfully blind to the many warning signals from their son.

An investigator presented text messages sent by Ethan to his mother more than seven months before the tragedy, in which he said he heard noises, saw “demons” and evoked his “paranoia”.

“Can you get home now?” he texted his mother one evening when he was in the family home alone.

“There is someone at home, I think”, before adding, “Maybe it’s just my paranoia.”

Analysis of Jennifer’s phone showed she did not answer until the next morning.

During that time, “she was horse-riding”, said Detective Edward Wagrowski, showing selfie photos she had taken at the time.

To those around her, Jennifer spoke “every day” about riding, but very rarely about her son, limiting herself to evoking a “lonely” child, affected by the death of his dog and departure of his only friend, according to former colleagues and the owner of the stable, where her horses were kept.

The day before the shooting, the school called her because Ethan had being searching for information about ammunition online on his cell phone during class.

She texted him, “Lol. I am not mad, you have to learn not to get caught.”

The next day, the parents were summoned to the school after their son scribbled “my life is useless” and “blood everywhere”, and drew a gun and a bloody body on the paper of his math quiz.

Jennifer had shared a photo of the paper with her department head and with her riding instructor, saying she was just having “a shitty day”.

But the couple left their son in school so they could go back to work. The teenager then took a gun out of his backpack and fired around 30 times indiscriminately.

The hearing will resume on February 23. – AFP, February 9, 2022.