An American court decided on Thursday to award 10 million dollars in damages to a teacher who was shot by a six-year-old student at the school where she worked, reports AFP and Reuters.
Abby Zwerner, the teacher shot PHOTO: Video capture
In January 2023, a child with a firearm shot 28-year-old Abby Zwerner at an elementary school in Newport News, Virginia. Injured in her hand and chest, she was hospitalized for two weeks.
The teacher filed a complaint against the institution's assistant principal, Ebony Parker, accusing her of ignoring warnings that the child had brought a gun to school. She demanded 40 million dollars in damages, denouncing gross negligence. During the trial, she told the court that she thought she was going to die, the News writes.
The mother of the student who shot the teacher has already been sentenced to nearly four years in prison after being found guilty of child neglect and a firearms charge. The child could not be prosecuted.
Although gun accidents involving young children in their homes are common in the United States, school shootings involving children under the age of 10 are rare. A database compiled by American researcher David Riedman has recorded 15 such cases since the 1970s.
Police said that in this case, the boy had taken the 9mm pistol from home and taken it to school in his backpack. The boy pulled out the gun once inside the classroom and fired a single bullet at Zwerner, hitting her in the hand and chest. Zwerner, who evacuated the students from the classroom even after she was shot, has had five surgeries on her hand and the bullet is still lodged in her chest.
Attorneys for Ebony Parker, the former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary, where the incident occurred, argued during the trial that she could not have foreseen the event. But Zwerner's attorneys argued that Parker had been tipped off by the 6-year-old's classmates that he had brought a gun to school, and she did not act quickly on that information.
Parker will go on trial next month for child abuse and neglect.
The trials, along with those of several parents of school shooters in recent years, could set a precedent for the degree of accountability of parents and school leaders in the school shootings that have plagued the United States in recent decades.
