Jury Awards $10M To Former VA Teacher Shot By 6-Year-Old Student

NEWPORT NEWS, VA — A jury on Thursday awarded $10 million to Abby Zwerner, a former Virginia teacher who was shot by a 6-year-old student in 2023, despite warning school administrators that the boy had a gun and posed a threat.

The panel of three men and four women returned its decision against Ebony Parker, a former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, and sided with Zwerner by awarding her damages stemming from the shooting at the school, NBC News reported. Zwerner was shot in the hand and chest by the boy.

Zwerner, who is no longer a teacher, initially sued Parker for $40 million, alleging the administrator ignored multiple warnings that the boy had a gun and posed a threat.

Parker was the only defendant in the lawsuit. A judge previously dismissed the Newport News City Public Schools superintendent and the Richneck Elementary 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 upon conviction.

The outcome of the lawsuit could set a precedent for who shoulders the blame in school shootings. As of last week, there were 64 US school shootings this year, 27 of them on K-12 school grounds.

In the lawsuit against Parker, Zwerner claimed Parker chose to "breach her assumed duty" to protect Zwerner, despite multiple reports that a firearm was on school property and likely in possession of a violent individual."

Zwerner also said that school officials knew the boy "had a history of random violence" at school and home, including that he "strangled and choked" his kindergarten teacher and "chased students around the playground with a belt in an effort to whip them with it."

The boy was transferred out of the school and placed in a different school in the district, but was allowed to return the following year, according to the complaint.

“Who would think a 6-year-old would bring a gun to school and shoot their teacher?” Zwerner’s attorney, Diane Toscano, told the jury. “It’s Dr. Parker’s job to believe that that is possible. It’s her job to investigate it and get to the very bottom of it.”

Parker did not testify in the lawsuit. Her attorney, Daniel Hogan, had warned jurors about hindsight bias and “Monday morning quarterbacking” in the shooting.

“You will be able to judge for yourself whether or not this was foreseeable,” Hogan said. “That’s the heart of this case.

“The law knows that it is fundamentally unfair to judge another person’s decisions based on stuff that came up after the fact. The law requires you to examine people’s decisions at the time they make them.”

The student's mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges in connection with the shooting. 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.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

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