Prosecutions and lawsuits spread blame for school shootings

Meanwhile, in Uvalde, Tex., civil suits seeking to hold city officials and others responsible for a 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School continue to make their way through the courts.

In a country where mass killings occur at a relentless pace, it’s not just the shooters who are being held responsible, as the blood and death haunting classrooms and playgrounds alters society’s collective sense of accountability.

Gun manufacturers, gun stores and public officials have all faced civil suits. Parents are being scrutinized over how their children got access to firearms used in school shootings. And experts say the criminal charges against a Virginia school official are particularly striking, and could inspire more prosecutors to look deeply at the conduct of teachers or administrators in the wake of classroom massacres.

Americans are frustrated by the political impasse over proposals to restrict access to guns and are “just exhausted” by the bloodshed, said Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare at UCLA who studies school shootings. At the same time, training and data about school shootings has spread far and wide, and practices for preventing and responding to them are well established.

“Every principal and vice principal should be aware there is a level of culpability right now,” Astor said. “To say, ‘I wasn’t aware, I didn’t see the signs’ is not acceptable for us as a society. It’s not just a small trend. I think we’ve reached a level where we just don’t want to take it anymore.”

In 2023, there were eight incidents of planned shootings in schools, a number that has been on an upward climb over the last several decades, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. Last year, the database tallied 348 total school shootings, including those that resulted from fights and were otherwise spontaneous. And every few years the country has been shaken by an assault producing massive casualties: 26 gunned down in Newtown, Conn.; 17 killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla.; 21 dead in Uvalde.

Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, the litigation arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, said these civil suits are aimed at both accountability and deterrence. “It’s really expanding the tools that we have … to advance behavior change and shake up the way that we’ve been approaching gun violence,” he said.

Attempts to hold others accountable for a shooter’s actions are not entirely new. They date back at least to the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, in which two 12th-grade students killed 12 of their classmates, one teacher and themselves.

Those murders spurred a flurry of lawsuits against local officials, including law enforcement. Most were dismissed — although one suit against police was settled for $1.5 million. The families of victims also sued the shooters’ families and two people who allegedly helped the teens get access to guns, settling the case for $2.5 million.

But experts say they are seeing a rise in civil suits and novel criminal prosecutions like the one in Richneck. And a paper published this year in the Yale Journal on Regulation found there is an “increasing willingness of the plaintiffs’ bar to bring claims” against gun manufacturers following a shooting or mass killing event, including those in Newtown and Uvalde. The report noted there have been seven high-profile suits pursued against gun manufacturers in the last three years alone.

Josh Koskoff, a Connecticut attorney who has represented the families of several mass killing victims, cites a rising sense of helplessness combined with frustration over legislative inaction. It’s led families to look for alternate solutions, including lawsuits seeking to hold gun manufacturers and sellers responsible for the deaths their weapons cause.

Koskoff represented the families of nine people killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Newtown, Conn., securing a landmark $73 million settlement with the now-bankrupt Remington Arms, which manufactured the gun the perpetrator used to kill 20 first-graders and six educators. He also represents families in Uvalde, where he said they were “reviewing their legal options.”

“It used to be you might look at a situation and your heart would go out to a family that had lost a child, but you’d think it’s too big a hurdle to hold the gun industry accountable,” he said. “But now, lawyers see the possibilities in bringing cases where they may not have seen them before.”

‘Coming at this from all sides’

It was a 15-year-old high school student who gunned down four of his classmates at Oxford High School in Michigan and wounded seven others. Ethan Crumbley was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes.

But prosecutors almost immediately assigned some of the blame to his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, who bought their son the weapon while, they said, ignoring his mental health struggles. The day of the shooting, the parents had been summoned to the school to discuss violent images and messages their son scrawled on his homework — including a drawing of a gun and the words “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” The Crumbleys never told school officials he had access to a gun.

In a rarity,…