Should Parents Pay For Their Children's Crimes?

If you hand them a deadly weapon, then yes.

Photo by Jay Heike on Unsplash

If a parent gives their disturbed child a gun and that child shoots up their school, should the parent be held criminally responsible? If a parent gives their child access to a car after that child has repeatedly driven dangerously and recklessly, and that child kills someone by speeding, should the parent be held criminally responsible?

Yes and yes. And I honestly struggle to see why this is so controversial.

There’s a devastating piece in the Detroit Free Press about a mother whose son killed his friend by slamming her BMW into a tree at 105 mph. The parents of Flynn MacCrell, young man who was killed, are demanding that both the driver and his mom face prosecution. The driver, Kiernan Tague, survived the crash but has serious injuries. And his mother, Elizabeth Puleo-Tague, knew full well that her son was driving recklessly and dangerously: She had dozens of records of him driving well over 90 mph, at times going as high as 155 mph in the family’s (I assume Elizabeth’s) Audi sports coupe; she repeatedly told him to stop, but did not take away the keys. Instead, she bought a faster car, a BMW X3 M.

Buying whatever kind of car she wants is certainly her right. But parenting her child is also her obligation. A kid making bad decisions is generally not a parent’s fault. But when Person A knows that Person B keeps making the same dangerous choices over and over and over again, hands them to the tools to do it, and has authority over them and the ability to either curtail or enable their actions? And when Person B is a minor? That isn’t just a problem of a rebellious teen acting out. It’s a radically, criminally negligent parent. This is not a situation in which the child stole a parent’s keys and went joyriding without their knowledge, or had an ill-fated house party when the parents were out of town. This is a situation in which a parent knew her son was making deadly decisions, texted him to knock it off, and then continued to make deadly tools available to him. She gave him a car, and didn’t take away the keys when he used it dangerously. She left keys to the new one.

Kiernan Tague does indeed sound like a difficult child. His mother said she was afraid of him, and had called the police on him in the past. He broke things and injured her when he didn’t get his way, like when he wanted an American Express Gold card and his mom said no. That sounds awful and certainly abusive. The answer, though, is not to give a violent, unhinged, reckless teenager the car keys.

The mother in this case has not been charged. But the family of the young man who died are comparing the circumstances to that of the Crumbleys, the parents who bought their son a SIG Sauer handgun for Christmas. They knew he was emotionally disturbed and failed to get him help. They made the gun fully accessible to him, failing to adequately lock it up. He used the gun to murder several of his classmates.