NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A jury in Virginia awarded $10 million Thursday to a former teacher who was shot by a 6-year-old student, siding with her claims in a lawsuit that an ex-administrator ignored repeated warnings that the child had a gun.
The jury returned its decision against Ebony Parker, a former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News.
Abby Zwerner was shot in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom. She had sought $40 million against Parker in the lawsuit.
Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries and does not have the full use of her left hand. A bullet narrowly missed her heart and remains in her chest.
Zwerner did not address reporters outside the courthouse after the decision was announced. One of her attorneys, Diane Toscano, said the verdict sends a message that what happened at the school “was wrong and is not going to be tolerated, that safety has to be the first concern at school. I think it’s a great message.”
Parker was the only defendant in the lawsuit. A judge previously dismissed the district’s superintendent and the school principal as defendants.
The shooting sent shock waves through this military shipbuilding community and the country at large, with many wondering how a child so young could gain access to a gun and shoot his teacher.
The lawsuit said Parker had a duty to protect Zwerner and others from harm after being told about the gun. Zwerner’s attorneys said Parker failed to act in the hours before the shooting after several school staff members told her that the student had a gun in his backpack.
“Who would think a 6-year-old would bring a gun to school and shoot their teacher?” Toscano told the jury earlier. “It’s Dr. Parker’s job to believe that is possible. It’s her job to investigate it and get to the very bottom of it.”
Parker did not testify in the lawsuit. Her attorney, Daniel Hogan, had warned jurors about hindsight bias and “Monday morning quarterbacking” in the shooting.
““You will be able to judge for yourself whether or not this was foreseeable,” Hogan said. “That’s the heart of this case.
“The law knows that it is fundamentally unfair to judge another person’s decisions based on stuff that came up after the fact. The law requires you to examine people’s decisions at the time they make them.”
Ken Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm based in Cleveland, Ohio, said the verdict should put school leaders on notice to act when they are warned about students with guns and other threats.
“If you have information about a threat to student and staff safety, it is not just ‘see something, say something,‘” Trump said in a statement Thursday. “School administrators and staff need to also know how to ‘do something.’”
The shooting occurred on the first day after the student had returned from a suspension for slamming Zwerner’s phone two days earlier.
Zwerner testified she first heard about the gun prior to class recess from a reading specialist who had been tipped off by students. The shooting occurred a few hours later. Despite her injuries, Zwerner was able to hustle her students out of the classroom. She eventually passed out in the school office.
Zwerner testified she believed that she had died that day.
“I thought I was either on my way to heaven or in heaven,” Zwerner said. “But then it all got black. And so, I then thought I wasn’t going there. And then my next memory is I see two co-workers around me and I process that I’m hurt and they’re putting pressure on where I’m hurt.”
Zwerner no longer works for the school district and has said she has no plans to teach again. She has since become a licensed cosmetologist.
Parker faces a separate criminal trial this month on eight counts of felony child neglect. Each of the counts is punishable by up to five years in prison in the event of a conviction.
The student’s mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. Her son told authorities he got his mother’s handgun by climbing onto a drawer to reach the top of a dresser, where the firearm was in his mom’s purse.
Raby reported from Cross Lanes, West Virginia.
