Crossing the Thin Line From School Shooting Accountability to Trucking Company Liability

On Tuesday, November 30, 2023, Ethan Crumbley fatally shot four children at his high school with a handgun purchased for him by his parents. No matter what your politics or personal beliefs, everyone agrees that we live in an era with far, far too many school shootings, but this one stands out in the legal sphere as unique because it marks the first time that parents of a school shooter were charged with manslaughter for killings perpetrated by their minor child. Ethan was charged as an adult in Michigan, and his parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley have been convicted on their own manslaughter charges. There are pundits, politicians, legal scholars, and minds greater than mine devoted to the evidentiary, legal, and societal issues in that case, but for my own small part, it paints a rather stark portrait of the legal landscape in other areas, one of which is trucking litigation.

Imagine, if you will, that you were on that jury. Imagine that the prosecutor walked up to you and told you not that you would be deciding the fate of a minor child who perpetrated a mass shooting at a school, but that you would be deciding the guilt or innocence of his parents. The first thing that would probably cross your mind is that you were deciding whether they had neglected that child so criminally, so egregiously, that his mind had become a weapon against his own preservation, and that he had become dangerous through their barbaric and torturous parenting, but the prosecutor says no, not neglect.

Manslaughter.

We want you to hold them accountable not for creating the conditions that their son was exposed to that made him this way, but for the killings themselves, to be made to stand to their own account for the deaths of those innocent children. Imagine the line that you as a juror would have to draw between their terrible parenting and criminal culpability for manslaughter. I’m not saying it should be a long, short, or straight line. Just imagine it for yourself.

Now imagine that instead of being on a jury for a school shooting, you are on a jury deciding a case where a truck driver has been in an accident where another motorist died. It’s difficult to track “vehicular manslaughter” specifically, because of the wide variance among statutory texts across the nation, but it is simple to say that vehicle-involved manslaughter is a common type of charge and is sometimes seen in trucking cases. Imagine now that instead of the prosecutor telling you that the driver of the truck is on trial, it’s the safety director of the trucking company, the president, or the CEO. Imagine them going into detail in their opening statement that the driver hadn’t slept, was working more hours than permitted under regulations, hadn’t inspected their truck properly, had inspected their truck properly but maintenance hadn’t been done promptly, that they were popping caffeine pills to stay awake and drive because they were trying to get bonuses that their management put in place that encouraged them to drive more, sleep less, drive faster, keep moving, make impossible deadlines for delivery.

This is what leads juries to issue things like the recent string of billion-dollar verdicts. It isn’t fantasy, it absolutely happens. But now imagine that line I asked you to draw – the line that connects a parent’s conduct to killings committed by their child, and compare it to the line you would have to draw between a trucking company president, safety director, owner, or CEO to the deaths of the people killed in a trucking crash. Just compare how long each of them are. If you feel that the line between the truck and the owner is shorter and less attenuated, you aren’t alone.

Bad facts make bad law, as the saying goes, and the Crumbley case has the most extreme of facts. You can say that the jury held them accountable because the nation is tired of so many school shootings, but you could easily say the same thing about highway fatalities. You can say that his parents bought him the gun, but the company provided the truck. And unlike the school shooting, the trucking and trucking insurance industry are constantly opposed by a Plaintiff’s Bar working tirelessly to preserve facts, evidence, testimony, documents, records, pictures, and videos that a prosecutor could tap into for an easy layup. It hasn’t been tried yet, but all that means that there is still time to get out from behind the ball.

Trucking and logging companies, anyone in the commercial space for long or short haul, needs to familiarize themselves with every rule and regulation, needs to be engaging in training their drivers to meet the standards set for them, needs to be updating their safety training regularly, verifying that their drivers are following rest-to-work ratios, that inspections and maintenance are conducted frequently to prevent issues, and that these processes are rigorously documented. If all that seems daunting, you’re not alone. If you need advice, if you want to educate yourself or your work force, if you want us to come do a workshop or give a presentation, we’re more than willing – it’s our civic duty. We all want safer roads, and trucking is a necessary and vital part of our extraordinary economy. Investment in safety on the front-end can save you millions – and now perhaps even a jail sentence the way things are going – on the back end. As we look back on this watershed case and the billion-dollar verdicts, let’s use them to spur ourselves forward to solutions.

If you have questions about this article, or about how to make sure your company is following the rules and regulations of its business, please contact Christopher Adams (cdams@setlifflaw.com) at 804-377-1273 or Steve Setliff (ssetliff@setlifflaw.com) at 804-377-1261.