Michigan school shooter sentenced to life in prison without parole

An Oxford High School senior said the sense of security that a school environment is supposed to provide was completely shattered for her when shooter Ethan Crumbley attacked her Michigan school, killing four of her peers.

“The guilt of living when others did not is a heavy burden that I and others like me must bear,” she added.

She requested the judge to sentence Crumbley to life in prison without parole.

The court is back after taking a short break for lunch.

Family members and loved ones of those impacted in a 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan are delivering emotional statements in court ahead of shooter Ethan Crumbley’s sentencing.

The court has heard 21 victim impact statements so far.

Hearing gunshots ring out in the hallways of Oxford High School, one student said they watched their life flash before their eyes as they huddled in a corner with friends, praying they would stay alive.

The student, who is a minor, told their story at a sentencing hearing of the shooter, Ethan Crumbley. He killed four students and wounded seven others in the 2021 shooting.

The student was a freshman when the shooting happened. On that day, the teen said they were nervous about a biology test and were going to use the restroom before it began, but got too busy talking with classmates.

“In the middle of our conversation I heard three bangs,” the student said, which they eventually recognized as gunshots.

The student and their friend were near the door. They grabbed onto each other and ran to the corner of the room, where they crouched down, the teen described.

The student said their phone was across the room, and at that moment, hearing shots ring out, “All I wanted was to contact with my mom.”

Once they were reunited with their families, the student described the warm and tight hugs of her parents.

“The rest of the night was full of grief,” the student said.

“Before this day, I had never seen or heard a gun in person or violence around me,” the student added.

Madeline Johnson gives a victim impact statement on Friday.

Oxford High School senior Madeline Johnson was walking with her best friend Madisyn Baldwin until they had to split to go to their respective classes.

“I said goodbye to her and turned around,” she said. “I didn’t think that the bye was going to be permanent.”

That’s because moments later, Ethan Crumbley opened fire at students in the school, and Baldwin became one of the four victims of the November 2021 shooting.

“As soon as I started walking in the other direction, I heard the first round of bullets. The pattern of them still plays in my head every single day,” Johnson said in her victim impact statement Friday as she stood wearing a shirt that had a doodle that Baldwin drew for her. “This is one of the only things I have left to remember her.”

Johnson said she blamed herself for leaving her best friend that day, thinking that would make things different.

For long, she said she didn’t believe her best friend was gone. “The moment it really sank in that she was gone forever was the day we had to go back to the high school.”

She requested the judge to sentence the shooter with the harshest penalty.

A 14-year-old student who was attending history class at Oxford High School when Ethan Crumbley opened fire said that as the shooting began to unfold, she felt certain that she would be killed.

“I wouldn’t be able to hug my parents goodbye as I left for college,” she recalled thinking during her victim impact statement. “I thought I was never going to be able to get married because it was all about to end here, here in my history class.”

She said the emotional impact of the shooting is ongoing.

Her friend Hana St. Juliana was killed in the rampage. “She didn’t deserve it,” she said.

“Whatever punishment the shooter gets, it will not be enough,” she said.

She then addressed Crumbley directly, who remained staring at the floor.

Crystal Baldwin delivers a victim impact statement on Friday.

Mason and Madisyn Baldwin were cousins, but they were so close, that they were more like siblings, Crystal Baldwin said of their relationship. They rode to Oxford High School every day together until things changed forever when a shooter opened fire in 2021, killing Madisyn.

Baldwin, Mason’s mother and Madisyn’s aunt, said she called her son right away when she first heard that there was a shooting.

“The words he spoke when he answered will haunt me for the rest of my life. I asked him if he was ok, he said, ‘Mom had I been standing where I was 10 seconds longer, it could have been me’” Baldwin said in court ahead of shooter Ethan Crumbley’s sentencing.

She hung up with her son and texted Madisyn who was a senior at Oxford, Baldwin told the court.

“The thought of anything happening to her made me sick to my stomach,” Baldwin said.

The family only found out what happened to her hours later.

When Baldwin finally was able to pick up her son after the shooting, he described a body outside the classroom door and blood on his shoes.

They stayed to watch for Madisyn to come off one of the buses from the school, but she never arrived. Officials told her family that Madisyn had been killed.

“Then came the cries and screaming from Madisyn’’s parents,” she said, and called it a “real-life nightmare.”

Baldwin said while her son Mason will graduate, Madisyn never will. She said her parents attended the graduation ceremony for her class and accepted the diploma on her behalf.

“No child should ever have to experience losing a cousin, friend or daughter ever,” she added.

Linda Watson gives a victim impact statement on Friday.

Linda Watson, whose son Aiden was shot during the Oxford High School shooting, described the horrifying moment she learned what had happened.

“That was a moment I will never forget,” she said during her victim impact statement ahead of shooter Ethan Crumbley’s sentencing.

She added that “it was snowing that day, so I told him to bury himself in the snow.”

Watson described racing to find her son, who had been driven to a nearby business. “Even though it was only minutes, it felt like a lifetime before I found Aiden,” she said.

Aiden had been shot in the leg. “There was a lot of blood,” his mother said. “It covered his shoe in his pants.”

Watson stayed overnight at the hospital with her son. “I was so grateful when he woke up,” she said. “I put my head on his chest just to hear his heartbeat, grateful he was alive because some parents didn’t have that the next morning.”

Aiden has faced a long and painful journey to recover from his injuries, Watson said. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he couldn’t walk and needed around-the-clock care, including help getting to the toilet or to the shower. He’s also experienced emotional aftershocks of the shooting, like debilitating panic attacks.

Watson also described the financial hardships imposed by her son’s medical needs.

At one point, “I couldn’t stop throwing up because I didn’t know if we were going to be okay financially,” she said.

Even two years after the massacre, Aiden still hasn’t been able to return to school full term because of the emotional and physical impacts of his injuries, Watson said. He still experiences chronic pain and nerve damage.

“My son will have to live with pain, trauma, and limitations because of this forever,” she said. “So too, should the shooter have to deal with the consequences of his actions by being incarcerated for the rest of his life.”

Aiden Watson was a freshman at Oxford High School when he came out of his Algebra class to see why kids were running in the hallway.

“By the time I realized [there was an active shooter,] I was staring at Tate Myre. He was shot and he died,” Watson said in his victim impact statement Friday. “I tried to run into my classroom. I didn’t know I got shot until my friend told me I was hit.”

Watson said after he made it outside the school, a stranger took him to another location, away from the shooting scene. “It was someone I didn’t know and he told me that his kid was in” the high school, Watson said. “Instead of going in there to save his kid, he saved me instead.”

During his recovery, Watson said he needed to “change the bandages all the time, and every time, it would peel off my skin and hurt badly.”

“I didn’t realize that I would never be able to run again without having pain,” he said.

Watson told the judge the shooter, Ethan Crumbley, should be sentenced to life without parole. “He should never see the light of day again. He’s a horrible human being.”

A survivor who was trapped in a bathroom with the Oxford High School shooter and Justin Shilling, who was killed, said the moment “was, and always will be, the most terrifying moment of my life.”

“We were stuck helpless and cornered with no defense. I was right there when he was shot and killed, yet I couldn’t do anything about it,” Keegan Gregory said during his statement ahead of shooter Ethan Crumbley’s sentencing.

“I felt then, and still feel now, the guilt of surviving,” he said. “I know that if it wasn’t Justin’s life that was taken, it could’ve been mine, and I’m forever grateful.”

Gregory said he ran out of the bathroom as fast as he could, and saw bodies on the floor and “blood everywhere.”

“I hope this is something that will grow with me and strengthen me, but no longer define me,” he said. “I hope we can all get to a place where November 30, 2021, is a day of remembering the lives who were taken and is no longer remembered in the way the perpetrator had intended.”

Riley Franz, a survivor who was shot during the Oxford High School shooting, speaks during a victim impact statement on Friday.

Riley Franz, a survivor who was shot during the Oxford High School shooting, said she will never again be able to experience life like she used to before the attack.

“I mourn the person I used to be because, although I survived, the original pieces of me didn’t,” Franz said in court Friday ahead of shooter Ethan Crumbley’s sentencing. “I will never have the opportunity to experience life like I used to, with so much joy and clarity.”

Franz said she used to love attending school, but now she frequently has panic attacks at college.

“Now when I sit at a school, I feel anxious — checking for all my exits, highly in tune with all movements inside and outside the classroom, flinching at every sound from the walking upstairs to a pencil dropping, and counting down the minutes until I feel that I can breathe again,” Franz said. “I cannot remember what it’s like to feel safe and secure in any space that I occupy.”

“I deserved to be a child that day, a student who made it to her class, not someone’s target practice,” she added.