A jury in the state of Virginia in the United States has awarded $10m to a former teacher who was shot by a six-year-old student.
The jury on Thursday sided with former teacher Abby Zwerner’s claim, made in a civil lawsuit, that an ex-administrator at the school had ignored repeated warnings that the six-year-old child had a gun in class.
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Zwerner, 28, was shot in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries and still does not have the full use of her left hand.
The bullet fired by the six-year-old narrowly missed her heart and remains in her chest.
Zwerner, who did not address reporters outside the court after the decision was announced, had sought $40m in damages against Ebony Parker, a former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in the city of Newport News, Virginia.
One of her lawyers, Diane Toscano, said the verdict sent a message that what happened at the school “was wrong and is not going to be tolerated, that safety has to be the first concern at school”.
Zwerner’s lawyers had claimed that Parker, the assistant principal at the time, had failed to act in the hours before the shooting after several school staff members told her that the student had a gun in his backpack.
“Who would think a six-year-old would bring a gun to school and shoot their teacher?” Toscano had asked the jury earlier.
“It’s Dr Parker’s job to believe that is possible. It’s her job to investigate it and get to the very bottom of it.”
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Parker did not testify in the lawsuit.
The mother of the student who shot Zwerner was sentenced to four years in prison after being convicted of child neglect and firearms charges.
No charges were brought against the child, who 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 mother’s purse.
Newtown Action Alliance, an advocacy organisation that supports reforms aimed at addressing gun violence, said that the case points to the need for greater regulations over the storage of firearms in homes with children.
“Abby Zwerner was shot by her 6-year-old student using a gun from home,” the group said in a social media post, adding that “76 percent of school shooters get their guns from their homes or relatives”.
Zwerner no longer works for the school district and has said she has no plans to teach again. She has since become a licensed cosmetologist.
While accidents involving young children accessing unsecured firearms in their homes are common in the US, school shootings perpetrated by those under 10 years old are rare.
A database compiled by US researcher David Riedman has registered about 15 such incidents since the 1970s.
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