With school shootings committed by students becoming an all-too-common occurrence in the U.S., recent incidents have highlighted the potential for parental liability for the injuries and deaths caused by their children’s actions. The potential for students to obtain firearms from home to conduct school shootings may drive officials in Pennsylvania to shore up criminal laws to hold parents accountable for their actions that facilitate school shootings.
Parents in Various States Faced Prosecution and Conviction Following Son’s School Shootings
Several recent school shooting cases have involved criminal charges against the parents of the student shooters. In November 2021, Ethan Crumbley killed four fellow students and injured six others and one teacher using a handgun. Before the shooting, Crumbley’s mother referred to the handgun as a “Christmas present” for Ethan. However, Crumbley had used his own money to purchase the handgun through his father four days before the shooting.
Officials charged Crumbley’s parents with involuntary manslaughter for making firearms readily available and neglecting to address their son’s deteriorating mental health. The Crumbleys kept the firearm in an unlocked drawer in the parents’ bedroom. The parents also failed to act despite repeated reports from school officials that Ethan was experiencing auditory hallucinations and violent intrusive thoughts. Both were sentenced to 10 years in prison.
In January 2023, a six-year-old shot his first-grade teacher with a handgun owned by his mother. The child told police he obtained the firearm from his mother’s purse on the top of her bedroom dresser, where he knew she kept the gun. The mother was later charged with felony child neglect and recklessly storing a firearm, ultimately pleading guilty to the child neglect charge.
Can Parents Face Involuntary Manslaughter Charges in Pennsylvania?
Under Pennsylvania law, a person commits involuntary manslaughter when, as a direct result of an act committed in a reckless or grossly negligent manner, they cause another person’s death. A person acts with recklessness if they consciously disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a death will result from their conduct.
In some school shooting cases, parents faced involuntary manslaughter charges by failing to take actions that could have prevented their child from committing a school shooting. However, Pennsylvania law requires a defendant facing an involuntary manslaughter charge to have done some affirmative act rather than merely having failed to act. Although many states have laws imposing criminal liability on parents who permit their minor children unsupervised access to firearms, Pennsylvania does not yet have such a criminal statute. Instead, Pennsylvania imposes criminal liability for permitting access to firearms in very limited circumstances, including intentionally delivering or providing a firearm to a minor.
But in response to the recent spate of school shootings, Pennsylvania legislators have begun considering new criminal laws imposing liability on parents who permit access to firearms or fail to secure firearms in the home. Until such legislation gets passed, any defense against manslaughter charges against a parent for a school shooting in Pennsylvania would focus on highlighting the fact that the parent did not commit direct actions that facilitated their child’s access to firearms or that the parent took reasonable efforts to secure firearms in the home.
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