If the parents were blindsided, this is prosecutorial overreach.
I’ll wait for the trial. Or a helluva lot more info.
You are right.
That’s a problem.
I think that there’s a good *civil* case against these people for negligence, just as if their kid ran over someone with their car.
But *criminal* liability for involuntary manslaughter? I’m not seeing it. The idea of involuntary manslaughter is that the accused’s conduct was so egregiously reckless that they knew or should have known the likelihood that their conduct would cause someone to die.
The parents should have taken him home after they saw the notes? Perhaps, but what about the school officials who saw the notes and allowed him to stay? Ultimately, the school made that call, not the parents who weren’t in a position to force the school to allow their kid to stay.
Seems to me that this case boils down to whether merely letting a teen use or have access to firearms is tantamount to recklessness per se. I’m sure that the left would like it to be so, but I think that most Americans would reject that on 2nd amendment grounds.
One media report said that taking him home was an option, but so was leaving him in school.
I would like to see more facts to understand the charges for the crime charged. At a high level, it has the appearance they are being caught up in the emotions to find someone to blame as this kid might be a true mental basket case.
Despite this, many parents would be in shock and denial if called into school and being confronted with such information about killing and blood, etc. Even if they had seen such stuff before elsewhere. It’s similar to people denying their kid has a drug or alcohol addiction.
There was a case in Delaware over 30 years ago where a young man, only child, murdered his parents in their new expensive townhome. At least one of his parents was a psychiatrist who was well known in the state’s profession, may have actually been president of the body governing the state’s profession. Did they not see his son’s mental illness, something they were experts in treating other patients? Or were they in denial for 18 years? Or were they treating him with mind bending drugs? We’ll never know. But if the professionals “couldn’t see it” then, these non-psychiatrist parents cannot be held to a standard that they should have recognized the problem and the law required them to do something after the meeting at the school.
A fact that does not help the parents is that they fled when they knew they had to/agreed to surrender. That is usually interpreted as knowing they did something wrong. I’ll wait to see what facts come out, as the givernment has to prove its case.
Some decades ago I was engaged to a fine woman whose teenage son from her previous marriage had emotional issues. She was a conservative Republican, a gun owner and a NRA member. She also had enough basic common sense to recognize the risk and not leave her guns sitting around where her beloved son could get to them. Maybe the definition of “common sense” has changed since the 80’s? Not sure.
Based on what we have seen in other high profile trials and events it is entirely possible that what the prosecutors have said turns out to be entirely untrue. Think of the Zimmerman or Rittenhouse trials, or the many news reports of MAGA hat wearing attackers who beat up Jesse Smollet.
Even if it is true, the school officials should have acted on the information they had if they really believed the kid was a danger to others. They could have simply sent him home, or called the police, or called an ambulance to have him taken for a psychiatric evaluation. They didn't though, so at the time they must have believed that it was safe to let the kid back into school.
The media and the prosecutor want to blame the parents because the mother tweeted out support for President Trump. Notice how nobody is asking for Darrell Brook's mother to be arrested for not keeping her son away from the car he drove through a parade.