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Will a jury convict an accused school shooter’s parents? · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Thursday, July 21st. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  When a young person carries out a mass shooting, their parents usually face questions, but rarely criminal charges. That is, until now, with the parents of Ethan Crumbley. He was 15 years old when he opened fire at a Michigan high school last year, killing four people. He's pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges. And his parents, who've been charged with involuntary manslaughter, have pleaded not guilty too. Lisa Miller wrote about this for "New York" magazine.
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  Lisa Miller: It is hard to know both what the parents did and did not know about their kid's mental wellness in the months leading up to the shooting and also what they should have known. This is the prosecutor's argument, you know, that any ordinary parent would have paid a different kind of attention to their kid and intervened ahead of, you know, horrible mass murder at a high school in Michigan.
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  Prosecutors will try to prove that James and Jennifer Crumbley knew about the danger their son could pose and that it could have been prevented. Miller says they'll argue that there were a lot of red flags leading up the shooting that the parents could have done more about.
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  Miller: We know that he was torturing animals and taking videos of that on his phone. We know that he was communicating with this friend and sending the friend videos of himself at night playing with his father's gun and joking about shooting up the school. We know that he kept a journal, in which he was detailing his plans to shoot the school.
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  Miller goes through the mountain of evidence to piece together a timeline of key events ahead of the shooting. Just days before, Ethan's father takes him to a gun shop and buys a handgun. His father checks a box saying that he knows it's illegal to buy a gun for someone else.
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  Miller: And then later that night, Ethan posted on Instagram, "Just got my new beauty." So it was clear, in retrospect from Instagram posts and such, that Ethan thought the gun was his.
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  When Ethan's back in school, his teacher sees him looking at bullets on his phone. A school official has a talk with Ethan and calls his mom.
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  The next day, Ethan's teacher worries about drawings on his math assignment. There's a gun like the one his father bought. Ethan writes, "The thoughts won't stop, help me," "Blood everywhere," and "The world is dead."
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  The school calls Ethan's parents and asks them to take Ethan to a mental health professional that day. His guidance counselor is concerned that he's considering suicide. Ethan's mom says they can't because of work. They leave Ethan at school and the shooting happens later that same day.
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  Now, the prosecutor wants the parents to also be held responsible for what happened. Miller says many people in the community support that move.
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  Miller: Everybody has kids who go or went to that high school. And I think that there's a lot of outrage in town among gun owners and non-gun owners alike. And so, I think what the prosecutor is trying to do here is to highlight the sense of personal responsibility that gun owners ought to have. And so, the question that remains is: is that level of irresponsibility a level of criminal irresponsibility?
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  The January 6th Committee meets tonight at 8: 00 p.m. Eastern. This is the last public hearing planned for now. There's one Republican politician who's getting a lot of attention over the course of the investigation.
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  Liz Cheney: President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child.
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  Representative Liz Cheney, in her role as vice chair of the committee, has been steering viewers through the weeks with stern, incisive monologues like this.
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  Liz Cheney: As our investigation has shown, Donald Trump had access to more detailed and specific information showing that the election was not actually stolen than almost any other American. And he was told this over and over again. No rational or sane man in his position could disregard that information and reach the opposite conclusion. And Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind.
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  For a while, she was a senior leader among Republicans. Her father was the vice president, of course. The ultimate party insider. But her anti-Trump stance makes Liz Cheney an outsider these days. And now, she's being challenged in her upcoming primary in Wyoming. Here's Hannah Knowles, a campaign reporter at "The Washington Post."
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  Hannah Knowles: It certainly helped fuel a primary challenge against her. Harriet Hageman is endorsed by Trump and, you know, she's in serious danger of losing her seat at this point. And certainly, I think a lot of people do not think that would've happened if she had just kind of quietly gone along with the rest of her party and hadn't made herself this top foil to Trump.
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  And the people now trying to come to her rescue include Democrats. Powerful donors on the left are contributing to her campaign. She's also calling on Democratic voters in her state to switch party affiliations so that they can vote for her in the GOP primary. But it might not be enough. Knowles explains what a loss could mean.
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  Knowles: If Cheney loses, that would definitely send a signal that going against Trump, especially in that really combative and vocal way, is, you know, potentially ending your career as a Republican in Congress.
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  No matter what the outcome next month, Knowles says that Cheney's role in investigating January 6th will define her career.
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  Knowles: I think the hearings will cement Cheney's legacy as the person who did kind of everything she could to call out others in her party and to call out Donald Trump and to really just present the clearest possible case for this argument that he's just unqualified to lead the party and has done a lot of damage to our democracy. I think that also we'll see that that message just doesn't resonate with much of the country and, you know, no matter how meticulously it's laid out in these hearings, it's not clear that that will significantly change the political picture for someone like Cheney.
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  They say the two happiest days in a boat owner's life are the day they buy the boat and the day that they sell it. Right now, a lot of very rich people are having that first kind of day. The industry says that sales are booming, driven by the pandemic and this desire for luxurious social distancing. More and more rich people are taking sales tours, like this one in a Denison Yachting video.
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  [START DENISON YACHTING ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Walkthrough Host: Upon entering, you first arrive in the discreet formal dining room. What makes this space unique is that the table is stored overhead and can be lowered down electrically and placed on top of the coffee tables that you see here.
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  [END DENISON YACHTING ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  "The New Yorker" goes deep inside this world, where the biggest boats can go for half a billion dollars. And they come with everything from IMAX theatres to ski rooms. And yes, that is a room where guests can put on their ski gear before taking a helicopter to the mountain top.
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  And different yachts cater to different styles. For example, wealthy people from the Arab world don't care so much for sundecks, since it's so hot where they're cruising. They're all about baroque indoor spaces. Eastern European oligarchs are so important to the yacht business that engineers design boats with banyas, the traditional Russian saunas.
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  As you might expect, crew members have a lot of stories to tell. Most of them are locked away under non-disclosure agreements. But "The New Yorker" managed to pry a few out. One captain had a radio code for a guest arriving by helicopter. "No dog today" meant that the owner's mistress was coming, instead of the wife and her Pomeranian. That also meant that it was time for the crew to put away family photos.
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  This is one of those stories that you wanna read for all of the wacky details, including how yacht dealers tell the difference between normal rich and yacht rich, or as "The New Yorker" puts it, "the haves and the have-yachts."
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  We'll leave you today with an update on an incredible young woman. You might remember these headlines from last year. Alena Analeigh Wicker made the news when she graduated high school at 12 years old and was chosen as NASA's youngest summer intern. Starting college that young is obviously an achievement big enough for a whole lifetime. But now she's 13 and she's not done. Wicker has now been accepted to medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She's a full decade younger than the average incoming med student. Wicker wants to be a viral immunologist.
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  Alena Analeigh Wicker: We can find cures for these viruses.
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  The Phoenix NBC station spoke to her about being the youngest Black person ever accepted to medical school. She wants to get more girls of color interested in science, technology, engineering and math. Wicker even started her own organization called Brown STEM Girl.
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  Alena Analeigh Wicker: I want to inspire the girls. I want them to see that there's no limits.
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  If everything goes as planned, she will be Dr. Wicker right around the time that she's old enough to vote.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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