‘Shocking’ failures led to shooting of teacher

Special grand jury in Va. outlines warnings about 6-year-old that school administrators ignored

A 6-year-old boy who shot and wounded a teacher at a Virginia elementary school last year should have been unenrolled after choking a different teacher, but basic lapses by administrators allowed him back, according to a special grand jury report.

The breakdown was one in a long line of failures by school administrators to act on warnings about the boy before he snuck a gun inside Richneck Elementary School in Newport News and opened fire on Abigail Zwerner, a first grade teacher, the special grand jury wrote in the report, released Wednesday.

The panel’s report suggested the shooting could have been prevented, but it also could have been worse: The young shooter had a gun full of bullets with 15 students cowering around him.

“The firearm had jammed due to his lack of strength on the first shot inhibiting him from shooting Ms. Zwerner or anyone else again,” the special grand jury wrote.

The 24-page special grand jury report is the most detailed public accounting to date of the shooting that generated national attention, stirred outrage by parents and led to the ouster of the school district’s superintendent. The panel found a school so poorly protected it was vulnerable to a “probable massacre” in an active shooter situation, officials who kept secrets from parents and a lack of help for the young shooter that might have provided him a lifeline.

The 11-member panel also recommended a criminal probe of a high-ranking member of the Newport News School District for allegedly obstructing the investigation into the shooting, after key pieces of evidence

— the boy’s disciplinary files — went missing.

The special grand jury reserved its harshest judgments for Richneck’s former assistant principal, Ebony Parker, who it found was warned three times on the day of the shooting the boy had a weapon but failed to do anything. It indicted her on eight charges of child abuse, possibly the first time an administrator has been charged in connection with the handling of a school shooting, experts said. Her attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

The special grand jury was empaneled by Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard E. Gwynn to examine whether any security lapses contributed to the shooting last year that left Zwerner struggling for her life.

The problems began almost from the start of the boy’s tenure at Richneck Elementary. In kindergarten, the special grand jury found he walked up behind a seated teacher and used his forearms to choke her. She had to be rescued by an assistant.

Even so, school officials did not create a behavioral plan for the boy, and administrators eventually decided he was to attend a different school, the report found. But by first grade, the boy was back at Richneck and placed in Zwerner’s class despite the fact he had never finished kindergarten.

Among the many safety lapses the report found the school did not have a full-time school resource officer, second grade classrooms did not have doors or permanent walls and the front door buzzer was broken for weeks, which prevented police officers from quickly entering the school after the shooting.

They were forced to bang on the doors until a janitor let them in.