Students and administrator recall the day Ethan Crumbley shot up their Michigan school
CNN
By Lauren del Valle and Ray Sanchez, CNN
Pontiac, Michigan (CNN) — A 17-year-old girl testified Friday she “just prayed” and covered her head during Ethan Crumbley’s mass shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School, which left four students dead and seven others wounded in 2021.
“I didn’t know if those were my last moments,” Heidi Allen said during a hearing to determine if Crumbley should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.
As Allen recalled the horrific day she helped save a wounded classmate, Crumbley – in an orange jumpsuit – stared down at the defense table from behind his black-rimmed glasses.
Two students and an assistant principal described coming face-to-face with the shooter during the emotional second day of the hearing.
Crumbley pleaded guilty in October to one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first-degree murder and 19 other charges stemming from the mass shooting.
Allen testified that she was turning a corner in a school corridor when she saw the shooter emerge from a restroom. He was dressed in black, with a hat and mask, but Allen said she still knew who he was. They had attended school together since middle school, she said.
“A million things went through my head at that point but I knew exactly who it was. But, at the same time, I just thought there’s no way that could be him,” Allen testified.
“Everything kind of slowed down for me,” she said, adding that she covered her head and dropped to the floor.
“It was very quiet. There was no screaming, nothing. It was just the gunshots.”
Allen sensed the shooter was approaching her.
“I just closed my eyes and eventually I realized he was gone,” she said calmly during her testimony while several family members of victims cried in the courtroom.
Two female students near her were on the floor. Another girl in the hallway was also down.
“I asked everybody in the hallway from where I was if anybody had been hit,” Allen testified. “And nobody had answered because they couldn’t.”
No one except Phoebe Arthur, who had been standing with her boyfriend. Arthur was crying. Allen helped her up and looked for an open classroom. Once inside, Allen put the night lock on the door.
“How did you know how to install the night lock?” a prosecutor asked.
“We have drills every year since middle school,” Allen said.
At a drill just a month before the shooting, a teacher called on Allen to install the night lock on the door.
“I didn’t know how to do it,” she said. “I couldn’t figure it out. She came over and she showed me exactly how to do it. When that moment came, I knew exactly how to do it.”
Allen testified that she took Arthur to the middle of the classroom. There was blood everywhere. Arthur had been shot in the chest and neck. Allen used a sweater to apply pressure on her wounds.
Allen prayed with her classmate. She recalled thinking she was meant to be left unscathed in the hallway.
“I asked her if she knew who God was and she had said, ‘Not really.’ But I said, ‘I think I’m supposed to be here right now because there’s no other reason that I’m okay, that I’m in this hallway, completely untouched.’”
Arthur survived. Allen later turned Arthur’s back to the carnage as they left the classroom to spare her from reliving the horror.
‘I JUST WATCHED HIM KILL SOMEONE’
Keegan Gregory, 16, who was a freshman at the time of the shooting, testified Friday about surviving the slaughter while a classmate who hid in a restroom with him was fatally shot a few feet away.
Gregory and Justin Shilling, then a senior, hid in a restroom stall before Crumbley kicked open the door to find them. Shilling had asked Gregory to hide with him and to climb on the toilet so the shooter couldn’t see his feet. Shilling stood in front of the underclassman in the stall.
Gregory, while hiding, frantically sent messages on his family’s group chat.
“IM HIDING IN THE BATHROOM,” reads one text.
He then dashed off a string of one-word texts: “OMG … HELP … MOM.”
His father wrote back, urging him to stay down, quiet and calm.
He replied: “IM TERRIFIED”
At one point, Crumbley kicked open the door to the stall. He left briefly and then returned. The shooter told Gregory to stay put and ordered Shilling out of the stall. Gregory testified that he heard a gunshot.
To his family, he wrote: “HE KILLED HIM. OMFG.”
The shooter returned to the stall and told Gregory to come out, motioning for him to stand near the pool of blood around Shilling’s head.
“When he moved the gun away from his side I ran behind his back and out the door,” Gregory testified. “I realized that if I stayed I was going to die.”
Gregory managed to safely reach an office.
“I JUST WATCHED HIM KILL SOMEONE. HE PUT ME UP AGAINST THE WALL AND I RAN.”
Gregory showed the court a tattoo on his forearm, with the date of the shooting in Roman numbers and four hearts for each victim. One heart is red, with a halo over it – representing Shilling.
“If he didn’t die in there,” Gregory said, “then I’d be dead right now.”
The defense did not cross-examine the student witnesses.
‘His name’s Ethan’
Assistant Principal Kristy Gibson-Marshall recalled for the court her attempts to save Tate Myre, who was fatally shot in the back of the head that day.
Gibson-Marshall testified that after hearing an announcement for the lockdown protocol she headed toward the sound of gunfire.
“In my mind, I needed to go help,” she said.
Gibson-Marshall knew the shooter, who was a student at an elementary school where she worked years earlier. She recalled giving him hugs as a kid, though she hadn’t interacted with him much since he attended the high school.
In court, the assistant principal referred to Crumbley by his first name, occasionally glancing over at the defense table with a slight smile and teary eyes.
Gibson-Marshall testified that she saw the shooter down a hallway and the body of Myre in a pool of blood.
When Crumbley walked toward her, she didn’t immediately believe he was the shooter. She thought maybe he had recovered the gun from the actual shooter.
She testified she asked Crumbley if he was OK. He turned his head away, pistol in hand, and walked passed her.
The administrator turned her attention to Myre. A bullet had struck the back of his head and exited through his eye socket, she testified.
She spoke to him until help arrived, not knowing if he could hear her. She told him she loved him and needed him “to hang with me.”
“I just needed to save him for his mom,” Gibson-Marshall recalled in tears, adding she knew him and his family for years.
Myre’s face had turned blue as Gibson-Marshall desperately tried rescue breathing.
“I could taste his blood. There was so much blood, it was all over me. It took me a long time – months, probably almost a year – to get the taste of Tate’s blood out of my mouth,” she said.
In a nearby hallway, Crumbley surrendered to police. Gibson-Marshall heard an officer ask the shooter to identify himself.
“His name’s Ethan,” she told the officers before returning to Myre.
On her way out of the courtroom, Gibson-Marshall hugged Myre’s weeping parents.
Later Friday, Crumbley’s defense team called their first witness, Dr. Kenneth Romanowski, a corrections expert who evaluated Crumbley’s records from the Oakland County Jail.
He did not interview Crumbley and has never met him, he testified.
Jail records revealed behavioral incidents earlier this year in which Crumbley repeatedly rammed his head into the door of his jail cell and hit his head against the cell wall, the corrections expert testified.
Romanowski testified that juvenile offenders often have a better chance of being rehabilitated in prison because of their lack of maturity and development.
“Everybody has the potential to change,” Romanowski said. “He has to make that choice.”
On cross-examination, prosecutor David Williams asked the defense expert whether he was aware that Crumbley shot victims at point-blank range.
The expert, who was tasked by the defense with only reviewing the shooter’s jail records, confirmed he was not aware of how the victims were killed or Crumbley’s violent writings and behaviors prior to the shooting.
Dr. Fariha Qadir, a jail psychiatrist, testified she diagnosed Crumbley with major depression and adjustment disorder with anxiety. She prescribed him depression and mood-stabilizing medications.
Crumbley has reported hearing internal voices and feeling anxiety and paranoia, she said, but he has not been diagnosed as psychotic.
He has been on continued watch for most of his incarceration and at times, suicide watch, Qadir said.
‘I am going to be the next school shooter’
The testimony comes one day after tense exchanges between a shooting victim and the defense attorney cross-examining her and following the introduction by prosecutors of audio from two video clips Crumbley recorded before the rampage he carried out at his high school when he was 15 years old.
“My name is Ethan Crumbley, age 15, and I am going to be the next school shooter,” he is heard saying on the audio that was played in court. “I’ve thought about this a lot. I can’t stop thinking about it. But it’s constantly in my head.”
Crumbley appeared to look down at the defense table as the audio was played.
In the second audio file played at the hearing, Crumbley said, “I’m gonna have so much fun tomorrow.”
During the recordings, Crumbley talked about the decline of his life and calmly laid out his deadly plan.
“I will walk behind someone, and I will shoot a bullet into their skull. And that’s the first victim,” he said. “I’m gonna open fire on everyone in the hallway … I will try to hit as many people as I can. I will reload, and I will find people hiding. I want to teach them a lesson of how they are wrong, of how they are being brainwashed.”
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald told the court on Thursday Crumbley’s premeditated approach ahead of the shooting and propensity for violence are among the reasons he should receive a life sentence.
Crumbley’s attorney, Paulette Loftin, said the defense will show Crumbley is not “irreparably corrupt” and should be sentenced to a term of years in prison.
The first prosecution witness was Lt. Timothy Willis with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, who oversaw the shooting investigation. He testified that Crumbley bypassed device security and accessed a violent website on a jail computer tablet in January.
When authorities discovered the search history, which Crumbley had attempted to delete from the device, the teen said he could not “resist” visiting the site he’d frequented before the shooting, according to the lieutenant.
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CNN Laura Ly and Artemis Moshtaghian contributed to this report.
