Richneck AP on Trial Over Failure to Search Six-Year-Old School Shooter

It’s been a while since we last talked about the 2023 shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. For a while it felt like to me that the legal system had already sort of closed the book on Richneck in phases, one lawsuit and one criminal case at a time.

Then suddenly it’s back in the news again, and this time it’s the former assistant principal, Dr. Ebony Parker, sitting in a criminal courtroom facing charges that would have sounded almost unimaginable when this all started.

If you’ll recall, back in January of 2023, a 6-year-old student brought a handgun to Richneck Elementary School and shot his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner, while she was sitting at a reading table in class.

Zwerner was shot in the hand and chest, survived, but had to undergo multiple surgeries and is still living with long-term effects from the injuries.

The child’s mother, Deja Taylor, owned the gun and was later convicted on state and federal charges tied to how the child was able to access it. She was sentenced to prison and, as of very recently, has been released from state custody and is now under supervision after serving her time.

Dr. Parker’s role in all of this is what is now being tested in criminal court. She was the assistant principal at the time, and according to prosecutors, she was repeatedly warned that a student might have a gun on campus that day.

Teachers and staff reportedly tried multiple times to escalate concerns. One of the key details that keeps coming up is that a teacher searched the student’s backpack and didn’t find anything but then warned administration that the gun could have been moved onto the child’s person. That warning was allegedly brushed aside.

There are also claims that when staff suggested searching the student again or taking stronger action, Parker declined and said something along the lines of the student having “little pockets” and that his parent would be picking him up soon anyway.

That detail has always stuck out to me because it kind of captures the entire failure in one moment. It’s not just that information existed; it’s that the response to that information was to downplay it in real time while the clock was still running on a school day with a weapon somewhere on campus.

Now Dr. Parker is facing eight felony counts of child neglect, and each count corresponds to a bullet in the gun that was fired. Prosecutors are treating it as multiple acts of endangerment tied to a single sequence of decisions and omissions. Each count carries up to five years in prison, which means she’s potentially looking at 40 years behind bars.

The civil side of this already played out last year when a jury found Dr. Parker liable for gross negligence and awarded Abby Zwerner $10 million in damages.

In that trial, her defense leaned heavily on the argument that “no one is the sole person responsible” for what happened, that responsibility in a school environment is distributed across multiple staff members and layers of administration. There’s some truth to that in a general sense, because school safety is always going to be a system and not a single switch. But systems still run through decisions, and in this case a jury already decided that Parker’s decisions mattered enough to assign legal blame.

What makes the criminal trial feel different is how rare it is to even see a school administrator charged in a case like this. I can’t even remember off the top of my head another time I’ve covered a school shooting where a school official was actually charged. Usually the legal focus stays on the shooter or, in rare cases, the parents, but this is the first I can remember where a school employee went to trial.

I also have to admit I didn’t even realize Dr. Parker had been charged at first when the trial started popping up in news updates again. That’s on me for being a bit out of the loop for most of the 2020s, but it still caught me off guard when I saw it because it feels like a new phase of accountability that wasn’t really on the radar in the early days of this case.

Since then, Richneck has made a lot of visible changes. There are clear backpack requirements now, weapon detection systems, walk-through metal detectors, and other security upgrades across the district.

On paper it looks like a major overhaul, but it still feels like most of the response is built around catching weapons after they exist inside the system rather than addressing how a 6-year-old ends up with a loaded gun in the first place. That part hasn’t really changed, and it’s still the part that always seems to get deferred to the next policy discussion or the next political cycle.

And speaking of politics, Virginia has had a change in leadership since those early days of the case with the election of Abigail Spanberger to the governor’s office. But I still find myself wondering whether anything meaningfully different is going to come out of it in terms of prevention rather than reaction. Maybe Governor Spanberger will do a better job of that than Glenn Youngkin did, but when you try nothing, the bare minimum seems astonishing.

But at the center of all of this is still Abby Zwerner, who survived something that she absolutely should never have had to survive in the first place.

Now, a system is trying to sort out how responsibility gets assigned when multiple warnings and multiple failures all line up in the worst way possible.

Thanks to Lady Gray for the tip.

(Sources)