Start today at Michigan the jury selection for the trial of a mother, against whom prosecutors have brought charges for complicity in mass murders carried out by her son.

Lawyers are set to begin examining potential jurors in her trial today Jennifer Crumbley for negligent homicide. Her son, then 15-year-old Ethan, killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School in 2021 with a gun his parents had given him as a Christmas present.

Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty in 2022 to 24 charges, including four counts of murder, and was sentenced last month to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Jennifer Crumbley and her husband James Crumbley are being tried separately after being indicted in late 2021 on four counts of negligent homicide. They have remained in prison ever since. James Crumbley’s trial begins on March 5.

When the charges were announced, prosecutors said the Crumbleys’ failure to both secure the gun inside their home and respond to warnings that their son, Ethan, was violent and disturbed, warranted the charges against them. .

Defense attorneys have said in court documents that the Crumbleys had no way of knowing their son was going to carry out the attack.

Legal experts have said the parents’ trial, which appears to be the first of its kind, breaks new legal ground.

Josh Horwitz, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said parents of students who open fire at schools often don’t face justice because there’s a feeling that “enough has been done.” or due to the lax enforcement of laws providing for the safe storage of firearms.

Charging parents when appropriate is an important step, Horwitz said, since studies by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have shown that about 75 percent of all school shooters get their guns from home .

“Rarely do high school shooters go and buy guns from a gun store,” Horwitz says. “The larger lesson from this case is that every gun-owning parent has a role to play, and that is to keep firearms safe.”

According to prosecutors, four days before his Nov. 30, 2021 school shooting, Ethan Crumbley went to a gun store accompanied by his father, where James Crumbley bought him a 9mm handgun.