Trial of Oxford High School gunman Ethan Crumbley’s mother Jennifer gets underway in Michigan

Within hours of that meeting, Ethan began shooting.

In his opening statement Thursday (local time), Marc Keast, an Oakland County prosecutor, emphasised that Jennifer Crumbley was not charged with murder, nor was she simply accused of being a bad parent. But, he said, because of her “willful disregard for the danger that she knew of,” she was a cause of the mass shooting that Ethan carried out.

“Jennifer Crumbley didn’t pull the trigger that day,” Keast said. “But she is responsible for those deaths.”

Keast spent much of his opening statement describing the litany of troubling signals leading up to the shooting – signs of a “deteriorating mental crisis” that he said Jennifer Crumbley knew of but did not share with the school – while suggesting that prosecutors would also highlight her actions in the aftermath. After Ethan’s arrest, the Crumbleys fled the area, and police later found them in the basement of a Detroit art studio.

“Her first instinct was to lie,” Keast said. “Her second was to run.”

Shannon Smith, a lawyer representing Jennifer Crumbley, said the prosecution was trying to lay blame for a heinous attack on a woman who “did the best she could” in raising her son.

Smith said Jennifer Crumbley learned only after the shooting about many of the alarming signs, such as Ethan’s text exchanges with friends, that the prosecution would point to as evidence of Ethan’s mental descent. Smith said that Ethan hid these signs from his mother and that school officials had never told her about some of the more troubling instances of Ethan’s behaviour.

“He did something she could have never anticipated or fathomed or predicted,” said Smith, who also told the jury that Jennifer Crumbley would take the stand.

Smith insisted that the Crumbleys went to Detroit after the shooting because they were facing death threats and that they had planned to turn themselves in after learning they were facing charges.

After the opening statements on Thursday, the prosecution called its first witnesses, beginning with a teacher and an assistant principal who were at the high school the day of the shooting. As surveillance video was played in the courtroom, the witnesses described the chaos and violence that unfolded, sometimes breaking down in tears.

The final witness of the afternoon was Special Agent Brett Brandon of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who responded to the shooting. Through Brandon’s testimony, as well as Facebook messages, Instagram posts and surveillance videos introduced as evidence, the jury learned how Ethan’s parents took him to buy firearms, including the one used in the shooting, and brought him to the firing range multiple times. Brandon also testified that the guns, which were not registered, did not appear to be very securely stored in the Crumbley home.

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The most heated exchange of the day came during a mid-morning recess after the jury was sent out of the courtroom for a break. Jennifer Crumbley had been sobbing audibly as the videos of the shooting were played. Prosecutors complained to the judge, Cheryl Matthews, that the defence was not abiding by the instructions to keep emotions in check during the court proceedings. Smith, the defence lawyer, responded that the videos were horrific.

Matthews counselled patience.

“Everyone here is human,” she said. She emphasised that she was trying to run a fair trial, and that if people found things too excruciating to bear, they should leave the courtroom.

But, she added: “I’m not a robot. I’m trying to keep myself from sobbing. I’ll do it at six o’clock tonight.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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