The students at Oxford High School were trudging between rooms during passing time, the short recess between classes. It was late November 2021, a mid-day like any other. Oxford is located just outside Detroit, Michigan, so it was cold, about minus 1C, and snow covered the ground. At 12.46pm, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley ambled to the south end of one of the school’s hallways.

Ethan, wearing a grey hoodie, jeans, and a backpack, moved easily among the other students. He was lanky, with hunched shoulders. Squinting through his glasses, dark hair falling messily in front of his eyes, he looked somewhat like a ruffled hatchling. He was a quiet boy, an average student and, according to some of the staff at Oxford High School, no trouble at all.

Ethan entered a bathroom around 12.50pm, walked into one of the stalls and put down his pack. He took out a black notebook, pens, a juice bottle and his laptop. At the bottom of the bag, a jet-black Sig Sauer 9mm handgun jostled among rounds of ammunition. As Ethan fed the gun chamber with bullets, several other kids heard the rhythmic sound of metal on metal, like the tick of a grandfather clock. Then, click-clack, the sound of the gun cocking.

He had been planning this for months. He had Googled police response times. He’d looked up the difference between .22 and 9mm-calibre ammunition, the latter being more destructive, searched if Michigan had the death sentence, and he’d thought about who he wanted to kill. “The first victim,” he wrote in his journal, “has to be a pretty girl with a future so she can suffer just like me.”

Ethan slipped out of the stall, leaving his backpack and notebook behind. His hand was clenched around the butt of the pistol inside the front pocket of his hoodie, but his demeanour was calm as he emerged into the hallway crowded with students. Then he yanked his right hand from his pocket, raised his arm 90 degrees, held it there, straight and rigid, and began to fire into the crowd.

In seven seconds, he shot seven students, fatally wounding Hana St Juliana, 14, and Madisyn Baldwin, 17. The hallway erupted in screams, the frantic squeaking of rubber soles on linoleum, the sounds of backpacks and textbooks slapping to the floor. Ethan moved towards a classroom, where students hid behind desks, some recording the attack on their phones, some leaping out of the ground-floor windows. “Please don’t let this be real, please don’t let this be real,” one teenage girl pleaded into her cellphone’s camera, over the crack of gunshots.

Oxford’s assistant principal, Kristy Gibson-Marshall, saw the kids running down the hallway towards her. She was in her fifties, with longish, wavy dark hair. At first, she thought the students were laughing but as more of them passed by, she realised they were panicking. Then Gibson-Marshall heard her boss’s voice over the PA: “We’re on lockdown. This is not a drill.” Gibson-Marshall knew remaining in the corridor would break protocol, but something drove her down the hallway anyway. The smell of burnt gunpowder grew stronger. So did the sound of screaming and gunfire. Outside classroom 225, she saw Tate Myre, 16, slumped in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice. Then she saw Ethan. Gibson-Marshall wondered why he was there alone and not running away. She asked the boy if he was OK. “I didn’t believe it could be him,” she later testified. But Ethan didn’t respond. He stared straight ahead and walked back down the hallway.

A few minutes later, Ethan reached another bathroom. Keegan Gregory, 15, and Justin Shilling, 17, were inside. The two boys did not know one another but, hearing gunshots, Shilling told Gregory to come into the stall to hide with him. Gregory squatted on the toilet seat so that the shooter wouldn’t see his feet and texted his family, “Help! Gunshots, I’m hiding in the bathroom.” Shilling tried to hide behind the cubicle door.

Ethan, possibly alerted by Gregory’s tapping, kicked the stall door open. He hesitated, then shouted at Shilling to come out but told Gregory to stay put. Both boys complied. As Gregory resumed texting his parents, Ethan shot Shilling. “He killed him,” Gregory wrote. “OMG.” Ethan turned back to Gregory and asked him to lean against the wall. Instead, Gregory ran past him. Ethan hurried out of the bathroom around 1pm.

Further down the hall, he saw police officers who had arrived at the scene. At first, they ran straight past. But when one noticed he was carrying a pistol, they began shouting at him to get on his knees. Ethan did as instructed, raising his hands in the air.

He had always planned to comply. He wasn’t going to kill himself. He was too curious for that. “I know that rarely shootings have happened in Michigan,” he’d written in his journal. “Which means I will be the cause of the largest school shooting ever in the state.” Ethan wanted America to hear what he’d done, and he wanted to be incarcerated for life.

The rest of the article can be read here:
https://www.ft.com/content/71860853-f33c-416d-92dd-074e2881da38