A former assistant principal at a Virginia elementary school ignored multiple warnings that a 6-year-old student had a gun in the hours before he shot his teacher, an attorney for the teacher said Tuesday as trial opened in the woman’s $40 million lawsuit.
Abby Zwerner, a first-grade teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, was shot in the hand and chest in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her classroom. Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries and does not have the full use of her left hand. A bullet remains in her chest.
The lawsuit accuses former school administrator Ebony Parker of failing to act after four different people went to her with concerns that the student brought a gun to school.
Zwerner’s attorney, Diane Toscano, said in opening statements that Parker made “bad decisions and choices that day.”
Parker had the authority but failed to search the student, remove him from the classroom and call law enforcement, Toscano added.
The shooting occurred on the first day after the student had returned from a suspension for slamming Zwerner’s phone two days earlier, Toscano said. It sent shock waves through the military shipbuilding community and the country, with many wondering how a child so young could get access to a gun and shoot his teacher.
“No one could have imagined that a 6-year old, first-grade student would bring a firearm into a school,” Parker’s attorney, Daniel Hogan, told jurors. “You will be able to judge for yourself whether or not this was foreseeable. That’s the heart of this case.”
Hogan said that decision making in a public school setting is “cooperative” and “collaborative.” He also warned of hindsight bias and “Monday morning quarterbacking.”
“The law knows that it is fundamentally unfair to judge another person’s decisions based on stuff that came up after the fact,” Hogan said. “The law requires you to examine people’s decisions at the time they make them.”
Parker is the only defendant in the lawsuit. A judge previously dismissed the district’s superintendent and the school principal.
Parker faces a separate criminal trial next month on eight counts of felony child neglect — one for “each of the eight bullets that endangered all the students” in Zwerner’s classroom, prosecutors said.
Criminal charges against school officials following a school shooting are quite rare, experts say. Each of the counts is punishable by up to five years in prison upon a conviction.
The student’s mother was sentenced to a total of nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges.
