Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

The parents of the 15-year-old high-school suspect in custody for this week's deadly school shooting near Detroit, Michigan have left their son to the the tender mercies of the juvenile justice system and are evading the law as fugitives rather than being charged with involuntary manslaughter for their alleged roles in the the deaths of four students. 

 

The lawyers for the parents of the Oxford High teenager charged in Tuesday's school shooting said Friday that James and Jennifer Crumbley are returning to the area to be arraigned on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

The Oakland County Fugitive Apprehension Team was searching Friday for the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old Oxford High sophomore charged with first-degree murder of four students and other criminal charges, after county Undersheriff Mike McCabe said the couple had stopped responding to their attorney.

"On Thursday night, we contacted the Oakland County prosecutor to discuss this matter and to advise her that James and Jennifer Crumbley would be turning themselves in to be arraigned," lawyers Shannon Smith and Mariell Lehman told The Detroit News. "Instead of communicating with us, the prosecutor held a press conference to announce charges."

"The Crumbleys left town on the night of the tragic shooting for their own safety. They are returning to the area to be arraigned. They are not fleeing from law enforcement despite recent comments in media reports."

James and Jennifer Crumbley of Oxford were named in criminal warrants Friday, with each being charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of four Oxford High School students who were allegedly slain by their son. They also were named in a noon press conference held by Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald to announce the charges.

Their case is charged in 52-3 District Court in Rochester Hills, and an arraignment is tentatively set for 4 p.m. Friday.

“Their attorney had assured us that if a decision was made to charge them, she would produce them for arrest,” McCabe said Friday.

That agreement with attorney Smith was sometime in the morning, McCabe said around 2 p.m. Friday.

“Our last conversation with the attorney was that she had been trying to reach them by phone and text, and they were not responding,” he said.

McCabe said Fugitive Apprehension Team officers were out searching for the couple as of mid-afternoon Friday. The Crumbleys own a 2021 black Kia Seltos with the license plate DQG5203 and a 2019 white Kia Soul Station Wagon with the license plate DZH8994, according to the sheriff's office and Secretary of State records.

 

The "more to this tragic story than we knew" part is that the parents completely failed to stop their son from taking his father's brand-new Sig Sauer pistol to school, and in fact made gun fetishization such an integral part of the lives of the family that it amounts to being charged as an accessory to four deaths.

The stunning details McDonald described Friday from the forthcoming criminal complaint against the parents reveal the Crumbleys not only bought the gun for their son, but failed to secure it, leaving it in an unlocked drawer of their bedroom.

Jennifer Crumbley and her son both appeared to brag about the new gun in various social media posts McDonald cited. Shortly after his father bought the gun, Ethan Crumbley posted a photo of it to his Instagram page writing a caption interspersed with heart emoji that read, “just got my new beauty today, Sig Sauer nine millimeter. Any questions I will answer.”

Jennifer Crumbley captioned a post of her own on social media that read: “Mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present.” McDonald told The Washington Post that the post was a reference to a visit the two made to a gun range.

But officials at Oxford High School first raised concerns about Ethan Crumbley’s behavior days before the gun was even purchased: On Nov. 21, a teacher noticed Crumbley using his cellphone to search for information on firearm ammunition. Jennifer Crumbley did not respond when the school contacted via voice mail about her son’s “inappropriate” search, McDonald said.

Instead, she exchanged a text message with her son that read, “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”

 

And then of course, they skipped town late last night rather than be arrested, because the prosecutors gave them the benefit of the doubt than never would have been extended to Black folk or people of color at all.

 

Parents of the Year.

 

Par for the course for Gunmerica though. I don't expect a jury in Michigan to convict any of them.

Climate Of Worry, Con't

2021 will be the hottest year on record most likely, and December may be the most record-setting month of the year, with temps some 30 degrees above normal.

 

Winter, by the meteorological definition (Dec. 1 to Feb. 28), began Wednesday morning, but the weather is feeling more like mid-fall or mid-spring in many parts of the contiguous United States. High temperatures are set to spike 20 to 30 degrees or more above normal through Thursday, with the core of the unusual warmth over the eastern Rockies and the nation’s heartland. In much of this area, temperatures will swell into the 60s and 70s.

Through the end of the week, the National Weather Service projects 90 new record highs.

Though the intensity of the warmth will ease by the weekend, there are signs that milder-than-average weather could prevail over most of the Lower 48 into at least mid-December.

Relatively cooler conditions will exist across portions of the Northeast and New England thanks to a steady stream of air filtering down from Canada and the north, but only that sliver of the country should experience the chill.

Warm, high pressure sprawled over the West has already led to numerous temperature records. On Sunday, 46 records were set from San Diego to Seattle.

On Tuesday, most of the records in the West were concentrated in California. San Jose soared to a record of 73 degrees. Modesto, Calif., and Palm Springs both soared to 91 degrees, the warmest spots in the nation. That tied a record in Palm Springs last set in 1949. Nearby Riverside and San Jacinto broke records at 89 and 87 degrees, respectively. Some of the warmth oozed east toward the southern Plains; Oklahoma City set a record high of 75 degrees.

The heat in California caps off one of its hottest and driest Novembers observed. Statewide rankings are still being compiled, but for many stations November was more than a degree warmer than previous records. Palm Springs had an average monthly temperature of 72.7 degrees, 1.8 degrees above its previous warmest November in 2017. The city didn’t see a stitch of rainfall all month long, which was also the case in Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Riverside and Victorville. San Diego reported a trace.

 

And of course all of this will only get worse in the months and years ahead.

That's The Sound Of the (Secret) Police

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is really, really committed to his own statewide police force answerable only to him, which he would never, never use for nefarious purposes.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control. 

DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines. 

But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be "not encumbered by the federal government." He said this force would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them. 

The move by DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied. 

Democrats in Florida immediately expressed alarm at DeSantis' announcement. US Rep. Charlie Crist, who is running as a Democrat to challenge the governor in 2022, tweeted, "No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police." 

State Sen. Annette Taddeo, another gubernatorial candidate, wrote on Twitter that DeSantis was a "wannabe dictator trying to make his move for his own vigilante militia like we've seen in Cuba."

The Florida State Guard was created in 1941 during World War II as a temporary force to fill the void left behind when the Florida National Guard was deployed to assist in the US combat efforts. It was disbanded after the war ended, but the authority for a governor to establish a state defense force remained.

States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis' plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis' office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York.

 

Yes, other states have state police forces answerable only to the governor, most notably Texas. The problem is I trust Ron DeSantis about as far as he can throw me, especially with wanting a guard solely for political reasons.

And bad ones at that.

Hopefully the state legislature will balk at this, but I doubt it.

StupidiNews!

• The House and Senate have passed a stopgap funding measure that will keep the federal government going through mid-February, defying a threat by Senate Republicans over vaccine mandates.
• Former Trump confidante Bernie Kerik says he will cooperate with the January 6th Committee's subpoena for documents, but only if he can testify in public, he says.
• Google says it will delay employees' return to office over COVID past its planned January 10th deadline, citing omicron variant concerns.
• Trump election fraud conspiracy theorists Lin Wood and Sidney Powell have been ordered to pay Michigan nearly $200,000 over their false Big Lie claims of voting machine fraud.
• A ransomware attack on Planned Parenthood has compromised the medical data of some 400,000 patients nationwide in October.