A former assistant principal at Virginia’s Richneck Elementary School has been indicted in the high-profile shooting of a teacher by a 6-year-old student, the first case experts said they were aware of in which an administrator had been charged in connection with the handling of a school shooting, the Washington Post reports. A special grand jury in Newport News charged Ebony Parker with eight counts of child abuse on March 11, a little over a year after the shooting generated national attention because of the shooter’s age, according to court records that were made public Tuesday. Newport News prosecutors declined to provide details about the charges but said the special grand jury empaneled to investigate any security lapses that led to the shooting will issue a report on its findings on Wednesday. The panel started taking testimony in September. Abigail Zwerner, the teacher who was shot and seriously wounded, alleges in a $40 million lawsuit that Parker was warned at least three times on the day of the shooting in January 2023 that the boy had a gun, but failed to do anything. Zwerner claims the shooting could have been avoided.
“These charges are very serious and underscore the failure of the school district to act to prevent the tragic shooting of Abby Zwerner,” her attorneys said in a statement. “The school board continues to deny their responsibility to Abby, and this indictment is just another brick in the wall of mounting failures and gross negligence in their case.” Parker’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment but has denied the allegations in a response to the lawsuit. Parker resigned from Richneck after the shooting. Several experts said the case could be the first of its kind. Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare at UCLA who studies school shootings, said the Richneck prosecution might represent a sea change, spurred by the relentless pace of gun violence on campuses in recent years. “Maybe 10 or 15 years ago people could say, ‘I wasn’t educated. I didn’t know this could happen. I thought the kid was too young to have a gun,’” Astor said. “But in this day and age with all the data, reporting and training it’s really problematic for a vice principal not to follow up on these warnings.” Prosecutors have shown a growing willingness to pursue criminal prosecutions for lapses that have led to gunfire at schools, and experts said they think more such cases are likely to come. The parents of a Michigan teen who shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in 2021 were sentenced to 10-15 years each on Tuesday for convictions of involuntary manslaughter for failing to get their son help and keep him from accessing firearms.