The civil trial over one of the most shocking school shootings in recent memory — a 6-year-old child opening fire on his teacher — continued Wednesday in Virginia, where jurors heard emotional testimony and graphic details about the injuries that nearly ended a young teacher’s life.
Abby Zwerner, 26, was teaching first grade at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News in January 2023 when a first grader pulled a gun from his backpack and shot her as she sat at a reading table. She was hit in the chest and hand. Nearly two years later, she’s suing a former assistant principal, Ebony Parker, for $40 million, arguing that school officials ignored multiple warnings that the child had a gun that day.
On the second day of testimony, jurors heard from Zwerner’s twin sister, Hannah, who described how her sister’s life had changed after the shooting. “She was full of light, outgoing and silly,” Hannah said, her voice breaking. “She’s just not the person that she was.”
Doctors who treated Zwerner also testified about the extent of her injuries. Dr. Daniel Munn, chief of surgery at Riverside Regional Medical Center, told jurors the bullet punctured Zwerner’s lung and came dangerously close to her heart. “Her injuries were life-threatening,” he said. Orthopedic trauma specialists detailed the six surgeries she’s undergone to reconstruct her hand. She still cannot fully use her left hand.
Zwerner’s attorneys argue that the shooting was preventable — that multiple people told Parker the student had brought a gun to school hours before the attack, but she did nothing. In her opening statement, Zwerner’s attorney Diane Toscano accused Parker of “bad decisions and choices that day,” saying she failed to search the student, remove him from the classroom, or alert law enforcement.
“The system didn’t just fail Abby,” Toscano told the jury. “It failed every child in that classroom.”
The shooting happened just after the boy returned from a suspension for slamming Zwerner’s phone two days earlier. The incident stunned the community — and the country — sparking questions about how a child that young could access a loaded firearm and what responsibility schools have to intervene.
Parker’s attorney, Daniel Hogan, pushed back, telling jurors that hindsight is distorting the facts. “No one could have imagined that a 6-year-old, first-grade student would bring a firearm into a school,” he said. “The law requires you to examine people’s decisions at the time they make them — not after the fact.”
Parker is the only defendant in the case after a judge dismissed claims against the district’s superintendent and principal. She also faces a separate criminal trial next month on eight counts of felony child neglect — one for each bullet that endangered students in Zwerner’s classroom.
The boy’s mother, who purchased the gun, has already been sentenced to nearly four years in prison on federal weapons and child neglect charges.
