By Brad Brooks
(Reuters) -A Virginia school teacher who was shot by her 6-year-old student in 2023 was awarded $10 million in damages by a jury on Thursday, concluding a negligence lawsuit she brought against a school administrator.
Abigail Zwerner alleged that an assistant principal at the Newport News elementary school where she used to teach ignored multiple reports that a firearm was on school property and likely in the possession of the boy who shot her in January 2023.
Police said the boy had taken the 9mm handgun from his home and carried it to school in his backpack. The boy removed the gun once in his classroom and fired a single bullet at Zwerner, hitting her in her hand and chest. Zwerner, who evacuated students from her classroom even after she was shot, has had five hand surgeries and still has the bullet lodged in her chest.
Lawyers for Ebony Parker, the former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary where the shooting took place, argued during the trial that she could not have foreseen the shooting.
Zwerner’s lawyers argued that Parker had been made aware of reports by fellow students that the 6-year-old boy had brought a gun to school, and that she did not act quickly on that information.
Parker faces a criminal trial next month on charges of child abuse and neglect. Deja Taylor, the mother of the boy who carried out the shooting, was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2023 on federal charges of possessing a gun while using a controlled substance and of making a false statement while purchasing a gun.
The trials, along with those of a handful of parents of school shooters in recent years, could set a precedent on the degree of responsibility that parents and school leaders have when it comes to school shootings, which have plagued the United States in recent decades.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; editing by Donna Bryson and Bill Berkrot)
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