We can point a lot of fingers at not only Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old who opened fire in the latest school shooting, killing four students and injuring seven others, but also the shooter’s parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley — who were charged with involuntary manslaughter. And then there’s the school. Oxford High School officials failed to take action when huge red flags popped up.
According to a report on Yahoo News, lawyers suing the Oxford School District claim that school officials have started destroying evidence in the case and have asked a judge to intervene.
A lawyer for the school district said the claim was nonsense, calling it “disgusting” and “a lie,” and said that the district has been fully cooperating with the investigation and has turned over everything it has to prosecutors.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Terrence Berg ordered the Oxford school district to preserve all electronic evidence related to the lawsuit, as the plaintiffs’ lawyers requested.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
“Berg’s one-page order did not mention the plaintiffs’ allegations of destroyed evidence by school officials,” the outlet reports. “These claims are part of a lawsuit that seeks $100 million from the school district on behalf of an Oxford High School student who was shot in the neck and her younger sister who saw it happen.”
As we reported, Riley Franz, 17, was shot in the neck by Ethan Crumbley, and now she and her family are seeking $100 million from the school district. The attorney for Franz and her family, Geoffrey Fieger, claims that the school district failed to protect students and put them in harm’s way by letting a “deranged” and “homicidal” student return to class after the school had seen warning signs that he was about to do something violent. The school called the parents after finding some alarming drawings, but they refused to take Ethan home.
“Not only did defendants fail to take necessary steps to preserve the evidence, but they willfully destructed the evidence by deleting the webpages and social media accounts,” attorney Nora Hanna wrote in Friday’s filing, according to Yahoo News. “Plaintiffs cannot continue to be blindsided by the defendants by having to search for what evidence is being destroyed or altered.”
Featured image via mugshot
