Boy who shot Virginia teacher showed violent tendencies, lawyer says
A lawyer for a Virginia teacher shot and wounded by a six-year-old in her class last month said the child had exhibited previous violent tendencies and once choked another educator until she could not breathe.
An attorney for the teacher who was shot, Abby Zwerner, made the claims in a notice to the Newport News school district stating the teacher’s intention to sue over the attack on 6 January at Richneck elementary school.
Two days before Zwerner was shot, her lawyer Diane Toscano said, the student smashed her cellphone and was given a one-day suspension. He returned to school with a 9mm handgun and fired at the 25-year-old Zwerner while the teacher sat with her class at a reading table, wounding her in the hand and abdomen.
The lawsuit notice contains new details of the student’s history of behavioral problems and violence, including his trying to whip other children with a belt and choking another teacher in a forearm lock after coming up on her from behind. The document was obtained by the Associated Press in a public records request.
Previous reports have said that concerned teachers and other staff at Richneck repeatedly warned administration that the child was in possession of the gun on the day Zwerner was shot. But administrators “couldn’t be bothered” to alert law enforcement, Toscano said.
“It is a miracle that more people were not harmed,” Toscano wrote in the notice, which was dated 24 January but only just received by the AP.
“The shooter spent his entire recess with a gun in his pocket, a gun that was loaded and ready to fire … while lots of first-grade students played.”
The letter, which alleges negligence and recklessness, identified assistant principal Dr Ebony Parker as the administrator who failed to act. “[She] did not call the police, she did not put the school on lockdown, she did not evacuate the school,” it said.
Parker resigned from the school district last month, the local outlet WAVY News reported. It is not known if she has a lawyer.
The suit notice is addressed to George Parker III, the then superintendent of schools who was relieved by school board members of his duties effective 1 February with a reported severance payment in excess of half a million dollars. He is not related to Ebony Parker.
The choking case described by Toscano was confirmed by the teacher in an interview with the AP. She said that in 2021, the boy came up behind her as she sat in a chair in the front of the class, locked his forearms in front of her neck and pulled back and down hard. She said a teaching assistant pulled the boy off her.
The teacher requested anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school district. She said she reported the choking to school administrators, but she did not receive the kind of supportive response she had hoped for from them.
“I didn’t feel safe the rest of the year because I knew if they didn’t protect me when he choked me and I couldn’t breathe, then they wouldn’t protect me, my kids or my colleagues if he did something not as harmful,” she said.
The child was removed from the school for a while, it is alleged, then was reassigned to a different class.
The letter gives a previously unreported timeline of Zwerner’s shooting – which has reignited calls in some quarters for more meaningful gun control in the US – and the buildup to it.
Toscano said that, about two hours before she was shot, Zwerner went to Parker’s officer to advise her the child seemed “more ‘off ’ than usual,” had threatened to beat up a kindergartner and was “in a violent mood”.
Other teachers became aware that the child had a gun, which he showed during recess to other students and threatened to shoot them if they reported it – but a search of his backpack did not reveal it, the notice asserts.
The assistant principal Parker ignored additional warnings from staff who believed the student hid the gun on his person, the notice claims, and refused to allow further searches “because the shooter’s mother would be arriving soon to pick up the shooter”.
The boy remained in class, pulled out the gun about 45 minutes later, and shot Zwerner once, hitting her upper torso and left hand, the notice maintains.
Toscano wrote that Zwerner has continued to recover physically, but the psychological wounds “cut deeply and remain fresh”.
“It is my hope that the school district will not want to drag Ms Zwerner through litigation after the trauma she has sustained,” Toscano wrote.
The director of legal services for the Newport News school system, Len Wallin, told the AP by email that its insurer handles notices of litigation.