Jennifer and James Crumbley were discovered by police and arrested in a Detroit warehouse Saturday morning following an hours-long search. The two are the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the fifteen-year-old who stands accused of murdering four fellow students and injuring several others at a Michigan High School.
Sitting in separate rooms, the two appeared for their arraignments via video conference and spoke little beyond confirming that they understood the charges brought against them. They pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and bond was set at $500,000 each.
Before the couple went missing, an attorney for the Crumbleys had told authorities they would turn themselves in if they were charged. Still, following the prosecution’s announcement that they were being indicted for involuntary manslaughter, the parents stopped responding.
The lawyer told detectives she had repeatedly attempted to contact her clients via phone call and text message but had so far been unable to reach them.
Oakland County‘s fugitive apprehension team, FBI agents, and U.S. Marshals searched for them until police received a tip Friday that their car had been spotted in a parking lot.
The couple was located early Saturday morning, on the first floor of an industrial or commercial building in Detroit, around forty miles south of their home. Their vehicle was parked outside.
Detroit Police Chief James White said, “They appeared to be hiding in the building,” and, though he could not know their intentions, that “isn’t indicative of turning themselves in, hiding in a warehouse.”
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said the person who helped the Crumbleys by letting them into the building could potentially face charges for either aiding and abetting a fugitive or obstruction of justice.
“We believe they were assisted in that location to get there, to get in, and we’re gathering that information,” he said in a news conference Saturday afternoon.
The defense attorneys and the prosecutor disagreed during the arraignment about whether the Crumbleys were fleeing prosecution. The Crumbleys’ lawyers, Shannon Smith and Mariell Lehman, maintained that the couple had intended to turn themselves in before they were arrested.
They said the couple left town on the night of the shooting for their safety but always planned to return if indicted. However, the Crumbleys were supposed to attend an arraignment on Friday afternoon, which they missed, making them fugitives and initiating the search to find them.
Smith also claimed she and her colleagues had attempted to contact the prosecutor’s office throughout the day on Friday but had been unable to reach them to arrange for their clients to turn themselves in. Prosecutor Karen McDonald argued that the clients did not need to contact the prosecution’s office to turn themselves in to authorities.
Additionally, a law enforcement official said that on Friday, the couple withdrew $4,000 from an ATM in Rochester Hills, ten to fifteen miles from Oxford.
Law enforcement had been tracking their location via cellphone pings but lost the signal when the phones were turned off. McDonald cited the ATM withdrawal and “attempts to hide their location” as contributors to their steep bail, adding, “These are not people that we could be assured will return to court on their own.”
