Probe of staff after teacher’s shooting at school continues
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A criminal investigation into staff members at a Virginia school where a 6-year-old shot his teacher will continue, prosecutors said Thursday, one day after a former assistant principal was charged with felony child neglect.
“We’ll work with the school system to try to ferret out how this happened,” Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn said at a news conference. “And based on the facts of the law, if we believe somebody else needs to be charged, trust me when I tell you, they will be charged.”
Ebony Parker was charged in indictments unsealed Tuesday following a special grand jury report that says she showed a “shocking” lack of response to multiple warnings the boy had a gun in the hours before he shot teacher Abby Zwerner in her first grade classroom.
But the grand jury focused on many other matters of concern, notably missing files — including disciplinary records — for the student who shot Zwerner. Every other student’s file was located at Richneck Elementary, but investigators could not find his, the report states.
The student had a long history of violence at the school, including choking other children as well as his kindergarten teacher, the report states.
LaQuiche Parrott, director of elementary school leadership, returned one file she said was in her home or car, the report states.
“It is at its best a complete lack of competence as to how things were run and recorded, and at its worst a cover-up for the child’s past disciplinary record by the school administration,” the grand jury stated.
The shooting at Richneck Elementary occurred in January 2023.
The grand jury is no longer empaneled. But Gwynn said his office will continue investigating.
Parrott did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment from the Associated Press.
Parker, the former assistant principal, attended a court hearing Thursday morning to discuss who her attorney would be. But the matter was continued until next month. Parker did not comment to reporters and ran from cameras outside the courthouse.
Meanwhile, attorneys for Zwerner on Thursday called for investigations into the shooting by the U.S. Department of Education and the Virginia Department of Education in the wake of the grand jury’s report.
The report also bolsters Zwerner’s $40 million lawsuit against Newport News Public Schools.
The criminal probe in Newport News is among a small number of recent criminal investigations in the U.S. that are signaling a shift toward greater accountability of adults — teachers, parents and police — when it comes to preventing school violence.
“In tragic school shootings, civil lawsuits are very common whereas criminal charges have been much more rare — although this is changing,” said Amanda Nickerson, a school psychology professor at the University at Buffalo.
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Uvalde, Texas, are still investigating the police response to the 2022 elementary school shooting, which is one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The gunman was killed roughly 77 minutes after police arrived on the scene.