Accessories to Murder
I said these parents were accessories to murder. The law finally agrees.
After Alison was murdered, I became a man I never expected to be. That first evening, I accepted an invitation to appear on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, and the role that appearance created — the “high-profile shooting” guy — stayed with me far longer than I imagined. It stayed because I told the truth.
One of the earliest tests of that truth-telling came just a couple of months after Alison’s death. Barbara and I were returning home from an appearance with then-Governor Terry McAuliffe when my phone rang: a CNN booker, voice tight, telling me there had been a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. Could I get to a TV uplink immediately?
Before I went on air, I learned the skeletal details of the killer’s home life — my first encounter with the epidemic of shitty parenting that would help define the next decade of my advocacy. The shooter’s mother, Laurel Harper, had essentially built an armory for a son she openly admitted was “born angry.”
My instinct as a parent was immediate and volcanic: why would any sane person give their troubled son a fucking gun? On air, I said the mother should be charged with manslaughter. She wasn’t. The system treated her as a secondary victim, wrapping her in a veil of grief that conveniently obscured her culpability. For years, that story played out the same way, over and over.
The facts of Laurel Harper’s home life read like a case study in deliberate negligence. She shared a small apartment with her son and fourteen firearms — AR-15s and AK-47s with loaded magazines. She took him to the shooting range and called it bonding. She knew he was spiraling. And she walked away without a single charge.
The first crack in that wall of immunity came in 2024, with the conviction of James and Jennifer Crumbley. For the first time, a jury held parents accountable for ignoring a child’s mental health crisis and arming him anyway. It was a landmark — and a half-measure. “Involuntary manslaughter” is the law’s way of saying: you should have known. It stops short of saying: you chose this.
