A Michigan sheriff said today that two teachers had concerns over the behavior of Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old boy accused of firing shots inside Oxford High School, just north of Detroit, killing four students and injuring seven other people on Tuesday, CNN reports.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said this about the first teacher on Monday: “A teacher in the classroom where he was a student saw and heard something that she felt was disturbing, … and they had a counseling session about it with school officials, and a phone call was left with the parents.”
The second teacher, on Tuesday, “saw some behavior that they felt was concerning, and they brought the child down to an office, had a meeting with school officials, called in the parents, and ultimately it was determined that he could go back into class,” the sheriff was quoted as saying.
The suspect has been charged with murder, terrorism, and other counts in connection with Tuesday’s shooting, The New York Times reported.
Prior to the shooting, the school had executed active shooter drills to give students a sense of safety if events like Tuesday’s ever visited their school.
There’s very little evidence that these drills protect students in the event of an active shooter, but students at Oxford conducted the drills anyway. Plus, students think they actually help.
“I think the training is helpful,” the Times quoted Joyeux Times, a 16-year-old junior who was at school during the shooting, as saying. “It saved a lot of students’ lives.”
The school used a common active shooter strategy called ALICE, which is an acronym for “alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.” Students are well-practiced in these drills, too.
And thus we have shifted the burden of preventing murder onto the young prospective victims of these crimes.
Consider the picture above of a town that would like to be known for a high school that won a state wrestling title. Instead, the murders will cast a pall of crime and shame on this town forever, no matter how many state titles its high school may win, as the location of the 32nd shooting since August 1 on or near a K-12 campus.
