“I didn’t know if those were my last moments,” Heidi Allen said during a hearing to determine whether Crumbley should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.
As Allen recalled the horrible day he helped save an injured classmate, Crumbley, in an orange uniform, stared at the defense table from behind his black-rimmed glasses.
Allen testified that he was turning a corner in a school hallway when he saw the shooter come out of a bathroom. He was dressed in black, with a hat and mask, but Allen said that he still knew who he was. They had attended school together since the beginning of high school, he said.
“At that moment a million things went through my head, but I knew exactly who he was. But at the same time, I thought there was no way it could be him,” Allen said.
“Everything stopped for me,” he said, adding that he covered his head and fell to the ground.
“Everything was very calm. There was no screaming, nothing. You could only hear the shots.”
Allen felt the attacker approaching her.
“I just closed my eyes and finally realized that he was gone,” he said quietly during his testimony as several relatives of the victims wept in the room.
Two students close to her were on the ground. Another girl from the hallway was also on the floor.
“I asked everyone in the hallway from where I was standing if anyone was hurt,” Allen testified. And no one responded because they couldn’t.”
No one except Phoebe Arthur, who had been in the hallway with her boyfriend. Arthur was crying. Allen helped her up and looked for an open classroom. Once inside, Allen put the night lock on the door.
“How did you know how to put the night lock?” a prosecutor asked.
“We have drills every year since high school started,” Allen said.
In a drill just a month before the shooting, a teacher asked Allen to install the night lock on the door.
“I didn’t know how to do it,” he said. She came over and showed me exactly how to do it. When the time came, she knew exactly what to do.”
Allen stated that he brought Arthur to the center of the classroom. There was blood everywhere. Arthur had been shot in the chest and neck. Allen used a sweater to apply pressure to his wounds.
Allen prayed with his classmate. She recalled that she thought she was destined to get out unscathed in the hallway: “I asked her if she knew who God was and she said, ‘Actually, she didn’t.’ But I said, ‘I think I’m supposed to be here right now because there’s no other reason for me to be okay, for me to be in this hallway, completely unharmed.’”
Arthur survived. Later, Allen turned the classmate away from her as he left the classroom to prevent her from reliving the horror.
“I just saw him kill someone”
Keegan Gregory, 16, a freshman at the time of the shooting, testified Friday that he survived the carnage as a classmate who hid with him in a bathroom was fatally shot a few feet away.
Gregory and Justin Shilling, then a senior, hid in a stall before Crumbley kicked the door open and found them. Shilling had asked Gregory to hide with him and climb on the toilet so the attacker couldn’t see his feet. Shilling faced the student on the toilet.
Gregory, while in hiding, was frantically sending messages on his family’s group chat.
“I’M HIDING IN THE BATHROOM,” the message read.
He then sent a series of one-word messages: “OMG…HELP…MOM”.
His father answered him asking him to stay still and calm.
He replied: “I AM TERRIFIED.”
At one point, Crumbley kicked the door open. He went out briefly and then came back. The attacker told Gregory to stay put and ordered Shilling to leave the area. Gregory testified that he heard a shot.
He wrote to his family: “HE KILLED HIM. GOD”.
The attacker returned to the toilet and told Gregory to get out, directing him to stand near the pool of blood around Shilling’s head.
“When he pushed the gun away from him I ran behind him and out the door,” Gregory testified. I realized that if I stayed I was going to die.”
Gregory managed to make it safely to an office.
“I SAW HIM KILL SOMEONE. HE PUT ME AGAINST THE WALL AND I RUN AWAY.”
Gregory showed the court a tattoo on his forearm, with the date of the shooting in Roman numerals and four hearts, one for each victim. One of the hearts is red, with a halo over it, representing Shilling.
“If he hadn’t died in there,” Gregory said, “I’d be dead right now.”
The defense did not question these two witnesses.
“I will be the next school attacker”
The emotional testimony came a day after tense exchanges between a shooting victim and the defense attorney who was questioning her and after prosecutors presented audio of two videos that Crumbley recorded before the massacre that led to carried out in his institute with just 15 years.
“My name is Ethan Crumbley, I’m 15 years old, and I’m going to be the next school shooter,” he is heard saying on audio played in court. I’ve thought a lot about this. I can’t stop thinking about it. He is constantly in my head.
Crumbley appeared to look towards the defense table as the audio played.
In the second audio played at the hearing, Crumbley said: “I’m going to have a great time tomorrow.”
During the recordings, Crumbley spoke of the decline in his life and calmly laid out his deadly plan.
“I’m going to walk up to somebody and put a bullet in their skull. And that will be the first victim,” he said. I will open fire on everyone in the corridor (…) I will try to hit as many people as I can. I’ll reload and search for hidden people. I want to teach them a lesson in how they are wrong, how they are being brainwashed.”
Oakland County District Attorney Karen McDonald told the court Thursday that Crumbley’s premeditated approach before the shooting and his propensity for violence are among the reasons why he should receive a life sentence.
Crumbley’s lawyer, Paulette Loftin, said the defense will show that Crumbley is not “irreparably corrupt” and that he should be sentenced to years in prison.
The first witness for the prosecution was Lt. Timothy Willis of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, who oversaw the shooting investigation. He testified that Crumbley circumvented the device’s security and accessed a violent website on a jailhouse tablet in January.
When authorities discovered the search history, which Crumbley had tried to delete from the device, the teen said he couldn’t “resist” visiting the site he had frequented before the shooting, according to the lieutenant.
Prosecutor Marc Keast went over with Willis a handwritten diary that was recovered from Crumbley’s backpack in a school bathroom after the shooting, highlighting excerpts about his plans, which were written weeks and months before the shooting.
Crumbley successfully executed many of the plans he outlined in the diary, Keast told the court.
One entry read: “I want to shoot the school so f*cking bad”.
“The first victim has to be a pretty girl with a future for her to suffer like I did,” Crumbley wrote in another. The first victim of the shooting was Arthur, the lieutenant confirmed.
“I will keep shooting people until the police break into the building,” Crumbley wrote. Then I will turn myself in and plead guilty to life in prison.”
Crumbley pleaded guilty in October to one count of terrorism, four counts of first-degree murder and 19 other counts stemming from the mass shooting.
The week before killing his peers, Crumbley Googled a series of questions about the death penalty and prison terms for 15-year-olds in Michigan.
During Lieutenant Willis’s questioning, Loftin read entries from the attacker’s diary in which he expressed his desire for help to end his negative feelings.
“All one of my professors has to do is send me to the office and… I can get help,” Crumbley wrote. One call and that can save many lives. My evil has totally taken over me and I used to like it, but now I don’t want to be evil. I want help, but my parents won’t listen to me, so I can’t get it. I feel like I’m in a little loop of sadness.”
On Thursday afternoon, Molly Darnell, who was an educator at the school at the time, testified that she stared at Crumbley through a glass window before he stood up and pointed his gun at her.
Darnell said he was trying to put a safety mechanism on a door when he suddenly jumped to the right. A bullet went through his left arm. Months later he realized that the bullet probably would have hit his heart if he hadn’t reacted quickly.
Darnell texted her husband: “I love you. Active shooter,” she stated.
As an adult, Crumbley would be sentenced to life in prison without parole, the harshest sentence under Michigan law. Since he is a minor, the court has to hold a hearing to consider whether he should have the chance of eventual release.
Prosecutors maintain that Crumbley deserves life in prison without parole. Crumbley’s lawyers will present mitigating factors, including his age, his family life and the possibility that he could be rehabilitated, to argue that life without parole is disproportionate.
