A jury awarded Abby Zwerner, a former teacher in Virginia who was shot in 2023 by her 6-year-old student, $10 million after she filed a lawsuit claiming negligence by the school's former assistant principal, Ebony Parker.
Newport News School District's insurance authority will be liable to pay out the money awarded to Zwerner. She had asked for $40 million in her original filing.
The seven-person jury found Parker grossly negligent in preventing the unprecedented shooting after a day of deliberations.
The verdict comes nearly three years after Zwerner was shot by her student in her first-grade classroom at Richneck Elementary School on Jan. 6, 2023. The bullet passed through her hand, pierced her chest and caused significant injuries, including a collapsed lung.
She and her attorneys claimed Parker failed to act after several people voiced their concerns about the student potentially having a weapon hours before the shooting happened.
During his closing argument on Wednesday, Zwerner's attorney Kevin Biniazan spoke for nearly an hour about the impact the shooting has had on her — and the impact it will continue to have for the rest of her life.
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Biniazan's key point was that the credible report of a gun with a student — even the unlikely scenario of it being a 6-year-old student — requires action by the administration. Any delay would increase the potential danger to those around that student.
He rejected one of the defense's main arguments that Zwerner and others had accountability to further act when the report of the gun was made, and rejected their stance that it was not Parker's responsibility to ensure the safety of students and staff.
Parker's defense attorney, Sandra Douglas, spoke for about 40 minutes in her closing. She acknowledged that Zwerner's shooting was a tragedy that should have never happened, but told the jury that their burden is to determine "gross negligence," which has a high bar to prove.
Douglas said she does not enjoy having to argue against the victim of a shooting, but that it is her duty as an officer of the court to pursue the truth — and that truth, she said, is there is a "different side to that story." That different side, Douglas argued, is that Zwerner has not suffered as much as she has portrayed.
In Biniazan's rebuttal, he talked about Zwerner's reduced life expectancy from the shooting, which he said is now 53 years.
"When you're deciding what's fair and what's fair, you're not just deciding tomorrow and what might happen the next day," Biniazan told the jury. "We don't get to come back here in five, ten, 15 years and bring you all together and ask Mr. Warner, how are you doing? Are you still waking up at nine? Do you still see that face?"
Parker faces a separate criminal trial related to the case in which she is accused of eight counts of felony child neglect, punishable by up to five years in prison if convicted.
The student’s mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. 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 said.
The boy had a history of behavior issues, according to court documents, but was not charged in this case.
Part of this story was originally published by the Scripps News Group station in Norfolk.
