SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — Survivors of the mass shooting at Oxford High School are filing two $100 million lawsuits against the school district and employees, lawyer Geoffrey Fieger said Thursday.
The announcement comes more than one week after prosecutors say 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley fatally shot four students and wounded six other students and a teacher.
Fieger filed one federal lawsuit on behalf of Oxford students and siblings Riley Franz, 17, a senior, and Bella Franz, 14, a freshman. Riley was shot in the neck while next to Bella during the attack.
That lawsuit accuses school officials of failing to stop an attack that inflicted physical and psychological injuries on students and marked the start of what is expected to be a flurry of lawsuits against the district in the wake of the country’s deadliest school shooting since 2018. Defendants listed in the federal lawsuit filed early Thursday include Superintendent Timothy Throne, High School Principal Steven Wolf, Dean Ryan Moore and unidentified counselors, teachers and staff members.
"The horror of November 30, 2021 was entirely preventable," Fieger said in a statement Thursday.
Speaking Thursday, Fieger said there was a responsibility among counselors and administrators to stop the shooting.
"At Oxford High School, they'll search your backpack if they think you're vaping, but they refused to suspend or search a student who wrote what we now know was reams of homicidal notes and drawings, scenes of classroom slaughter and mania."
Fieger said he hoped that by making the financial cost of "allowing children to be slaughtered" high, it would compel people to make necessary changes.
He said he understood "we can't change the perverted values of the Second Amendment society that values that prioritize gun ownership over the lives of our children overnight," but that by making failure to act costly, it may save lives in the future.
He described Riley and Bella as honor students who "were shot down like they were in a war zone." Riley was accepted into six colleges, he said, and instead of spending her holiday break focusing on that, she has to instead focus on recovering from an injury that Fieger said less than 2% of people survive. Bella was next to her during the shooting and is "literally traumatized as if she was surviving in a war zone," he said.
"This is not unique, the horror this family has to go through," he said.
Teachers were included in the suit, he said, because the district has not been forthcoming about who was involved in critical decisions regarding the decisions to allow Ethan Crumbley to remain in school and to not involve the police liaison officer.
He said he had not heard a "rational explanation" from administrators as to why the police liaison officer was not involved. "As a result, by doing the things they did or didn't do, they placed the students in much greater danger."
Details about a second planned lawsuit by Fieger were not immediately available.
The federal lawsuit filed Thursday chronicles several ignored warning signs, including threats posted on social media, and faults Wolf for downplaying dangers to students in the days leading up to the shooting.
Multiple parents alerted Wolf to the online threats on Nov. 16, prompting the principal to send an email to parents later that day, according to the lawsuit.
"I know I'm being redundant here, but there is absolutely no threat at the HS … large assumptions were made from a few social media posts, then the assumptions evolved into exaggerated rumors,” Wolf wrote.
School district spokeswoman Danielle Stublensky did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Thursday.
Fieger also represented the family of Isaiah Shoels, who was killed in the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, an event he said had many similarities to the shooting at Oxford High School.
Fieger acknowledged that Michigan's governmental immunity laws make it difficult for parents to sue school districts.
Victims suing Oxford schools will have to overcome that immunity, a high threshold in legal cases, said Royal Oak lawyer Todd Flood.
“One of the ways to overcome governmental immunity is by showing deliberate indifference and that it was a state-created liability with gross negligence,” Flood said. “That is the biggest hurdle,” said Flood, who represents several women in a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University that alleges officials covered up dozens of sexual assaults.
“With all of the facts that have been laid out, it is clear to me that this was a state-created liability,” Flood said. “They had all of the tools to prevent this and were in a very unique position to stop this had they just used reasonable care.”
The day of the shooting, the principal and superintendent reviewed Crumbley’s social media posts, according to the lawsuit. That included threats to kill people and a sinister quote posted on Twitter the night before the shooting: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. See you tomorrow Oxford.”
“Despite the posts and knowledge of threats of violence, defendant Throne sent correspondence and emails to parents at Oxford High School reassuring them that their children were safe at Oxford High School,” the lawsuit reads. “By virtue of defendant Throne’s actions, he substantially increased the harm to plaintiff’s Minors.”
The day before the shooting, an unidentified teacher spotted Crumbley searching for ammunition on his cellphone after his father bought him a Sig Sauer 9 mm semi-automatic pistol as an early Christmas present, according to police.
The teacher let Crumbley stay in class, alerted an unidentified counselor but failed to warn the school safety liaison officer, a deputy who works for the Oakland County Sheriff's Department, the lawsuit alleges.
That same day, Crumbley met with the counselor and a staff member and he was allowed to return to school the next day.
“This action assisted with an acceleration of plans to effectuate his slaughter of classmates,” the lawsuit alleges.
The unidentified staff member “made a knowing and deliberate decision to not take any meaningful corrective action against Ethan Crumbley, increasing the risk that plaintiffs’ minors would be exposed to Ethan Crumbley’s acts of violence.”
The day of the shooting, an unidentified teacher found a note on Crumbley’s desk that included a sketch of a semi-automatic pistol and the counselor snapped a photo with her cellphone, according to Fieger.
The note read: “The thoughts won’t stop help me” and included a drawing of a bullet and the words “blood everywhere.”
A second unidentified teacher let Crumbley keep his backpack in the classroom, an apparent violation of school policy, a move that gave the alleged shooter “easy access to store a gun,” the lawsuit alleges.
After discovering the note, Crumbley was removed from class and sat in the school office for 90 minutes, with his backpack, while waiting for his parents to arrive at school, according to Fieger.
The unidentified counselor knew or should have known "such actions would further accelerate Ethan Crumbley’s murderous plans," according to the lawsuit.
School officials, including Wolf and Moore, met with Crumbley and his parents but did not include the sheriff’s deputy, according to the lawsuit. Afterward, Crumbley was allowed to stay in school.
Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard has said Crumbley can be seen on video footage leaving a school bathroom after the meeting armed and walking down a school hallway where he began shooting randomly at students and a teacher at close range.
The school officials, including the Wolf and Moore, “gave Ethan Crumbley the opportunity to go to the bathroom, with his backpack, to prepare for his planned rampage,” Fieger wrote in the lawsuit.
Throne, the superintendent, posted a message Wednesday on the district’s website that said the district has been and will continue to be fully cooperative with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office and Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office with their investigation.
“We haven’t been able to say more because this is an on-going investigation,” Throne said. “We do not have all the facts and cannot interfere with the prosecutorial investigation. We know this has caused frustration and anger but we are doing our best under difficult circumstances.”
