Abby Zwerner, a former Virginia teacher who was shot by a 6-year-old student in her classroom in 2023, testified Thursday that she thought she had died in the shooting.
“I thought I was dying, I thought I had died,” Zwerner said. “I thought I was either on my way to heaven or in heaven, but then it all got black, and so I then thought I wasn’t going there, and then I, my next memory is I see two coworkers around me, and I process that I’m hurt, and they’re putting pressure on where I’m hurt.”
Zwerner also said she held up her hand just before the shooting because she could tell she was about to be shot.
“The moment went by very fast,” she said.
Zwerner was testifying in her $40 million lawsuit filed against a former assistant principal who is accused of ignoring multiple warnings that the student had a gun.
Zwerner was shot in the hand and chest in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News. Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries and no longer has the full use of her left hand. A bullet narrowly missed her heart and remains in her chest.
The shooting sent shock waves through the military shipbuilding community and the country, with many wondering how a child so young could access a gun and shoot his teacher.
Zwerner no longer works for the school district and has said she has no plans to teach again. It was revealed in court Wednesday that she has become a licensed cosmetologist.
Zwerner answered questions on the stand for more than an hour.
A physician testified Wednesday that Zwerner can’t make a tight fist with her left hand, which has less than half its normal grip strength.
Former assistant principal Ebony Parker is accused of failing to act after several people voiced concerns to her in the hours before the shooting that the student had a gun in his backpack. Parker is the only defendant in the lawsuit. A judge previously dismissed the district’s superintendent and the school principal as defendants.
Parker faces a separate criminal trial next month on eight counts of felony child neglect. Each of the counts is punishable by up to five years in prison.
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.
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