What a conversation with my son showed me about the Oxford High School shooting | Opinion

So many things about Oxford break your heart. 

My son is 13 now, and even though I know school shootings are statistically unlikely, dropping him off in the morning sometimes feels like a gamble. Letting your child go — to his first sleepover, to the corner store, to eighth grade — is rolling the dice with your heart, hoping this isn't the time your luck runs out. 

On Friday, two years after the shooting at Oxford High School that left four students dead, six others and a teacher wounded, and a community changed forever, the perpetrator of the crime was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

It felt just.

I can't always read about school shootings. It makes the odds seem too high. When it happens in our community, that's not possible. I had to tell my son about Oxford, the first time I had to have such a conversation with him, but not the last.

"Are you sending me to school tomorrow?" he asked.

Horror and heartbreak in Oxford shooting

So many things about Oxford broke my heart. 

Those four beautiful children — Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling — beaming in still photos, loved and cherished, life stretching out before them. I hope, even though I know better, that they weren't afraid. I hope they didn't hurt. 

Their friends and families, who must live with a deep pain the rest of us can't imagine. 

Their parents, who must walk in this world as though their hearts were still in their bodies.

Those who survived, but now live in a world that will never feel as safe, that is so much harder than it was before.

And — the age of the shooter, just 15 when he planned and launched his deadly attack. 

It did not seem as though a 15-year-old should be capable of such horrific acts. But this shooter planned his attack meticulously, stalking and killing four of his classmates, using a gun his neglectful parents had bought him. In his journal, he wrote that he wanted to hear his classmates scream, that he hoped to be America's deadliest school shooter. He wrote that he'd tortured birds, mused about spending his life in prison, and that he wanted to record his killings, to torment his victims' families.

These horrible details would emerge in the months and years after the Oxford murders, each new revelation more awful than the one before.

On Nov. 30, 2021, from the vantage point of 46, it was hard not to startle at his round face, his lanky teenage hair, his adolescent skin and thick glasses.

My son saw it differently.

The day after the attack, as my husband and I talked about what had happened, one of us mentioned the shooter's youth. My son, then 11, couldn't contain himself. 

"What are you talking about?" he burst out. "He's a teenager. He's 15. That's so big, way older than me. I know what's wrong. And he's bigger than me." 

He shook his head, perplexed by our inability to see what was so plain to him; the member of our family who goes to school each day, who feels this threat in a way my husband and I never had to.

Agency and responsibility

After hours of anguished victim testimony Friday, Ethan Crumbley, now 17, was sentenced to life without parole.

As a culture, we rightfully struggle with whether and when to assign children adult responsibility for criminal acts.

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders were unconstitutional. There's ample biological evidence to show that youthful brains are not fully formed, lacking an adult's ability to understand the relationship between actions and consequences. The court's decision didn't bar life without parole for young offenders, but required prosecutors to carefully make the case that a particular crime is so egregious that life without parole is the only appropriate response. Such hearings were held for the Oxford shooter last fall.

Youthful offenders here in Michigan once consigned to die behind bars have been freed, even some who had committed murder; those offenders were able to demonstrate that they had changed, that they were capable of becoming something more. 

It had been hard for me not to see the shooter as a child. My son's response — looking ahead, with all the hope and promise stolen from those kids in Oxford — showed me a different point of view. 

To declare a child irredeemable, beyond hope or help, is weighty. We say it's hard. That it's complicated.

My son reminded me that sometimes, it's not.

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.