Array
First grade teacher Abigail Zwerner was shot by one of her students in January. Zwerner later filed a lawsuit against the school. In an interview last month, she described multiple warnings the school received that the student was armed prior to the shooting. Three separate warnings were ignored and the administrators who received the warnings never called the police.
Police decided weeks ago that they would not and indeed probably could not charge the 6-year-old with a crime. Under Virginia law no one under the age of 7 is considered capable of forming criminal intent. As I suggested before, that doesn’t actually seem to be the case with this child. He was suspended for a day after breaking Zwerner’s cell phone and then returned to school with the gun, intent on harming her. He shot her as she was reading a lesson. The bullet passed through her hand and entered her chest. She escorted her other students out of the room before going to the principal’s office where she collapsed. The student was held by another teacher until the police arrived.
The big outstanding question in this case (beside how much the district will end up paying Zwerner) is how the 6-year-old got a loaded gun. A lawyer for the boy’s mother claimed the gun was locked up on a high shelf but hasn’t explained how it got from there to his backpack. Today, we learned that two charges have been filed against the boy’s mother, one felony and one misdemeanor.
Deja Taylor, 25, of Newport News, is facing one felony count of child neglect and one misdemeanor count of recklessly storing a firearm so a child could gain access to it.
