A jury awarded $10 million to former first grade Virginia teacher Abby Zwerner, who was shot and seriously wounded by a 6-year-old student in 2023, in a civil case that accused the school’s former assistant principal of ignoring multiple warnings the day of the shooting.
Zwerner, 25, was shot in the hand and chest by a single bullet while at a reading table in her classroom at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia in January 2023. Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and underwent six surgeries. The bullet to her chest narrowly missed her heart and remains lodged there. She no longer has full use of her left hand and has left teaching.
Zwerner’s lawsuit had sought $40 million in compensatory damages. It accused former assistant principal Ebony Parker of gross negligence. In the lawsuit, Zwerner said she went to Parker’s office the morning of the shooting and said the boy “was in a violent mood” and had threatened to beat up another student. The lawsuit said Parker “had no response” to Zwerner’s concerns.
Shortly after, two students told a reading specialist that the boy had a gun in his backpack, according to the lawsuit. Zwerner told the specialist she had seen the boy take something out of his bag and put it in his sweatshirt. The specialist then searched the boy’s backpack and did not find a weapon. The reading specialist told Parker about the incident, according to the lawsuit, and Parker responded that his “pockets were too small to hold a handgun” and “did nothing.”
Another student then told a teacher the boy had shown him a gun in his pocket during recess. When the incident was conveyed to Parker, she said the backpack had already been searched and “took no further action,” according to the lawsuit. When a guidance counselor asked Parker for permission to search the boy again, she allegedly forbade him from doing so, according to the lawsuit. Parker told the counselor the boy’s mother would pick him up shortly, the lawsuit claimed.
The shooting, which police described as “intentional,” occurred about an hour later. Zwerner was the only person injured, and managed to evacuate her classroom after she was shot. A school employee restrained the boy, who said he had “shot that b**** dead,” according to unsealed records. While testifying in court last week, Zwerner said she believed she “had died” after being struck by the bullet.
Zwerner’s lawsuit also alleged that Parker knew the boy “had a history of random violence” at home and school, citing an incident the year before where he “strangled and choked” his kindergarten teacher. Concerns about his behavior were “always dismissed,” the lawsuit claimed, and the boy’s parents did not agree to put him in special education classes with other students with behavioral issues.
A judge previously dismissed the district’s former superintendent and the school principal as defendants in the lawsuit. The superintendent was fired by the school board after the shooting, while Parker resigned.
The boy was not criminally charged in the shooting. Newport News prosecutor Howard Gwynn said in March 2023 that the boy was too young to understand the legal system.
The boy’s mother, Deja Taylor, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. An attorney for the family previously said the firearm used in the shooting was locked away on a high closet shelf, but the boy said he took it from his mother’s purse on her dresser. Taylor said the weapon had been secured with a trigger lock, but officials said they never found one.
Parker faces a separate criminal trial in December on eight counts of felony child neglect after a special grand jury found that she showed a “reckless disregard for the human life” of other students in the school. Each count is punishable by up to five years in prison.
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