Her Son Kept Speeding. Now His Friend Is Dead. Should She Be Arrested? (2024)

“Slow the f*ck down!”Elizabeth Puleo-Tague texted her son.

“I have screenshots of you doing 90 mph in the middle of the night,” she texted. “And again two weeks ago 123 mph.”

She texted, “It’s not healthy. It’s not safe. And it scares me to my bone.”

Puleo-Tague argued with her teenager, Kiernan Tague, a lot. They argued when she wouldn’t get him a credit card. They argued when she made him come home from a friend’s house. But in the fall of 2023, the main thing they fought about was the way he drove. She installed Life360—a tracking app that, among other features, uses location data to deliver driver-safety reports—on his phone to track his joyriding. She texted him repeatedly, ordering him to stop. But nothing she tried kept him from speeding around Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, and the surrounding Detroit metro area in his Audi sports coupe. In November, she went on a trip to Canada, leaving her new BMW X3 M series at home.

On Nov. 17, Kiernan slammed the BMW into a tree on Ridge Road at 105 mph. The car split in two. Kiernan escaped with serious injuries. His friend, 18-year-old Flynn MacKrell, died in the crash.

Now, according to a well-reported, difficult-to-read story in the Detroit Free Press, Flynn MacKrell’s parents are urging the Wayne County prosecutor to pursue charges against their neighbor Elizabeth Puleo-Tague. Puleo-Tague knew her son was a dangerous driver, they say. She had access to Life360 data showing that he was regularly joyriding at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. But, they allege, she never took away the keys.

Any parent of a troubled teenager knows that it can be very difficult to stop a kid from getting up to all sorts of trouble. It’s fairly unusual for a prosecutor to charge a parent with a crime when that trouble results in the loss of life. (The Wayne County prosecutor told the Free Press that they’re considering the request and have received evidence from the Grosse Pointe police.) Flynn’s parents, Anne Vanker and Thad MacKrell, are citing as precedent the well-publicized case in nearby Oakland County earlier this year, in which the parents of a school shooter were charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to take away their son’s gun. Those parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, are now serving 10-year sentences in prison. Should Elizabeth Puleo-Tague join them?

Police reports and data obtained by the Free Press paint a damning picture of a teenager out of control—and a mother who absolutely knew how bad things were. Kiernan spent the summer and fall of 2023 drag racing and joyriding the highways of southeastern Michigan, regularly taking photos of his speedometer hitting terrifying speeds. His mom’s Life360 app recorded more than 40 trips over 90 mph in the weeks before the crash, including one day when he cruised for 20 miles at speeds greater than 150 mph.

Flynn MacKrell’s parents point particularly to Puleo-Tague’s purchase of the BMW in October. She knew her son was driving dangerously in the Audi sports coupe, they say, so why would she buy an even faster, more powerful car? (Why anyone would manufacture or purchase a car that can reach 177 mph—that’s another issue.) “She knows he’s out of control, yet she basically gets him a weapon,” Vanker told the Free Press. “It’s like she handed him an AR-15.”

I’ve wrestled with how I feel about this case. Kiernan himself is awaiting trial for second-degree murder. The specter of his mother, too, facing charges for the crimes of a son she feared and couldn’t control gives me pause. On the one hand, it’s impossible to argue that Puleo-Tague shouldn’t have taken her son’s car keys away. And yet the police department’s post-crash investigation revealed a volatile, frightening environment inside their home, one that reminds you that teenagers are fully grown, adult-sized human beings whom it can be difficult to control. Kiernan yelled at his mother, hit her, threw things around the house, broke a table. The Grosse Pointe police recorded 22 interactions with Kiernan since 2018, the majority of which happened because Kiernan was “out of control” at his house. In 2020, Kiernan was arrested for domestic violence and taken to the Wayne County youth home after he hit and bit his mother.

“His mother repeatedly told responding officers that she was afraid of Kiernan,” wrote a police investigator. “The messages between the two suggest that Kiernan’s mother has little to no control over Kiernan. Kiernan regularly drove recklessly and took/used his mother’s credit cards without permission, despite his mother’s repeated orders not to.”

Accidents involving teenage drivers kill more than 5,000 people in the United States every year. Like pretty much every parent of teenagers I know, I have seen what happens when reckless, speed-crazy kids get behind the wheel. In our neighborhood, the boyfriend of my daughter’s childhood friend was killed by a drunken high schooler tearing down a road at 94 miles per hour. And so despite my concerns about the chaos and struggle within Kiernan’s family—further extenuating details of which a trial might bring to light—I’m inclined to think that this is a case worth pursuing.

Parents need to understand that a car, in the hands of a reckless teenager, can be just as deadly a weapon as a gun. If you know your child is driving dangerously, it is up to you to try to stop them—no matter how difficult that might be. Once upon a time, parents had little to no idea what their teenagers were up to, but those days are over. Life360 claims to have 66 million members—1 in 8 smartphone users in the U.S., according to its website. If you’re one of those members—or if you utilize other apps and services to keep track of your kids—you may be doing it to ensure their safety, but you’re also increasing your obligation to their friends, their community, and other drivers on the road.

Just as the Crumbley case served as a warning to the parents of gun-obsessed teenagers that they must take action to prevent a tragedy, so could the public trial of a parent for her child’s speed obsession serve as a warning to parents in similar situations. If your child is driving recklessly, speeding, joyriding, you should operate under the assumption that they just might kill someone someday—and, on top of everything else, you could end up on trial. Take away the keys.