NEWPORT NEWS — The gun a jammed after he fired the first round, according to a new report from a special grand jury in Newport 蜜柚APP.
There were seven more bullets in the magazine — and 15 other students in the classroom.
“The firearm had jammed due to his lack of strength on the first shot, inhibiting him from shooting Ms. (Abigail) Zwerner or anyone else again,” the report said. “The firearm had a full magazine with seven additional bullets ready to fire if not for the jamming.”
That was among the many findings in that’s the deepest examination yet into what happened at Richneck Elementary School on Jan. 6, 2023. The 31-page report is detailed and hard-hitting at points.
Among the other key findings:
- The school’s principal and assistant principal closed the doors to their offices after the shooting, leaving a crying student and another student’s grandmother in the reception area.
“After knocking on the principal’s door saying there was a child out in the main room and both (administrators’) doors remained shut, the Grandmother comforted the boy by telling him she won’t let anything happen to him.”
The grandmother told him to “hide in a place where no one can find him,” the report said.
“The boy squeezed his little limbs in the tight space between the copier and the wall and sat all alone waiting until the Grandmother retrieved him when it was confirmed to be safe.”
- When sheriff’s deputies got to the door with guns drawn and “ready to intervene” — arriving on scene within three minutes of the first 911 call — they couldn’t get into the building because of a “broken door buzzer system.”
“They banged on the door, they called the intercom, and even considered trying to shoot out the glass to gain access,” the report said. After nearly a minute of “waiting and banging at the broken door, a custodian roaming the halls saw the deputies and let them in.”
- The 11-member grand jury indicted Richneck’s assistant principal, Ebony J. Parker, with for failing to act on credible warnings that the boy had a gun in school that day. She faces one count for each bullet loaded into the gun. Parker, 39, turned herself in about 2 a.m. Wednesday, and was released on a $4,000 bond. She will be arraigned Thursday in Newport 蜜柚APP Circuit Court.
The grand jury did not charge Richneck’s principal, Briana Foster, who was in meetings that day and was never told about the concerns that the boy was armed.
- The special grand jury called for further investigation into a different school administrator’s “suspicious lack of memory” into what happened with the 6-year-old’s school disciplinary records during the initial police investigation.
When police executed a search warrant for the records, the grand jury report says, there should have been identical copies at the school division’s main office and another in his first-grade classroom. They were in neither place, though some were temporarily in the possession of the school division’s director of elementary leadership, LaQuiche Parrott, who took the boy’s file home.
The grand jury’s report noted that an incident report about the boy choking another teacher during the prior school year was missing from the file upon its return, only coming to light because the complaining teacher had kept a copy in her own records.
“There should be a continuing investigation into the missing files and documents to determine if Dr. Parrott and/or other parties should be charged with obstruction of justice,” the report said. “The testimony of Dr. Parrott leads to far more questions than answers as to why a student’s private and confidential file would be in her car or home.”
Parrott’s testimony that she couldn’t recall the events, the panel said, “suggests something more devious at play.”
Newport 蜜柚APP Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn to look into whether any administrators should be criminally charged, to probe whether any “security and administrative failures” contributed to the shooting, and to make recommendations for improvement. The grand jury heard from 19 witnesses, including Richneck staffers, police and families whose children witnessed the shooting.
“We acknowledge the harm inflicted on all the children in Ms. Zwerner’s classroom that day,” Gwynn said in a statement, thanking the grand jurors for their “diligent service” and recommendations “to protect students going forward.”
The grand jury report opens with an overview.
“A classroom of 15 vulnerable six and seven year old children witnessed the shooting firsthand,” the report said. “Several hundred elementary aged children and teachers throughout the school felt panic during the event,” in addition to parents and others still dealing with the “traumatizing after-effects.”
Then the report delves into the
On Sept. 27, 2021 — when the boy was attending kindergarten at Richneck — he didn’t return one morning from emptying his food tray in the hallway. His teacher, Susan White, found him with a security guard, and the teacher tried to lead him back to class. “No, I don’t want to go back to class!” the boy yelled, and tried to pull away.
Later, White said she was sitting in a kids’ chair teaching the class, when the boy came up behind her. “The child … placed his forearms in front of her neck and pulled down so hard she couldn’t breathe,” the report said. A teaching assistant pulled the boy off of her.
He was taken to a school office, but returned to class a couple hours later. White stepped out and told a receptionist that the boy “had no business being back in class” after the choking. But the receptionist replied that “there was no administrator available to deal with the situation.”
When White later told the then-principal about what happened, the report said, Parker didn’t respond and the principal said only: “Prioritize.”
The plan, the report said, was for the child to attend a different school. But when White arrived at school the next day, the student was at his desk eating breakfast. White told Parker that either she or the boy needed to leave Richneck. Only after “this ultimatum” was he sent to a different school, the report said.
But the boy returned to Richneck the following year, in September 2022, for first grade.
The report noted that the school didn’t have a full-time security resource officer, with one officer being shared between Richneck and another school. But that security officer didn’t have a work phone and there was no posted number for him to be reached.
The buzzing system at the school didn’t work for several weeks, with no process in place to ensure that the person entering the building “was an actual parent or guardian,” the report noted. Parents complained about this issue several times, with one parent suggesting a fundraiser to “fix the door.”
Despite his disciplinary issues the prior year, the 6-year-old student was placed in teacher Abigail Zwerner’s first-grade class, along with 22 other students.
Under the administration’s direction, the by which the boy would come to school from only 9:20 a.m. and 11 a.m., with a reading specialist spending “substantial alone time” with him to try to catch up on his reading. The child also began taking ADHD medication.
The school principal, Foster, “implemented a highly unusual step” where the child’s mother — or sometimes his father — would “sit in class with him.” This arrangement was approved by the director of outreach services for the Newport 蜜柚APP Public Schools.
Even as the boy’s father had a criminal record and his mother was a habitual marijuana user, “a background check was never run on either parent to ensure the safety of the other students also sitting in the classroom,” the report said. The parents of other students in the class weren’t told that “an unverified parent, one with a criminal history, was sitting in class with their children.”
That plan was changed Dec. 13, 2022. The child’s parents were no longer required to sit with him, and he began attending school between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
On Jan. 4 — two days before the shooting — the boy “became defiant during recess,” the report said. “He refused to join reading group, constantly spoke back to Ms. Zwerner and refused to participate in the lesson.”
“During reading time in small groups, the child grabbed Ms. Zwerner’s phone off a table, held it up high while staring her down and slammed it to the ground,” the report said. “The phone case flew off causing the screen to crack.”
Zwerner walked him to another classroom. When he came back into the room to get his belongings, the report said, the boy told Zwerner: “I’m never going back to your room again, you (expletive).”
After a one-day suspension, the boy returned to school on Jan. 6, and went to lunch at 11:15 a.m. “He immediately started showing signs of aggression, including threatening to beat up a kindergarten student and staring down a security guard.” But when Zwerner went to Parker’s office to voice concern, the assistant principal “did not look away from her computer screen” and “did not acknowledge Ms. Zwerner’s presence.”
When Zwerner walked out, the report said, Parker told a reading specialist, Ms. Amy Kovac, that Zwerner “can call his Mom at any time and she can pick up early.”
Kovac was later walking down the hallway when two students “ran up to her saying that the child had a gun in his bag.” Kovac went into Zwerner’s class and asked him if he had a gun. He said no, but wouldn’t let her look in his back pack. Kovac stayed in the room for about 45 minutes until the class ended.
Kovac went back to Parker, telling her that the boy wouldn’t let her check his bag and “wasn’t throwing his back pack around” like normal.
“I know,” Parker replied, but then said nothing more.
When the students were lining up for recess about 12:30 p.m., Zwerner saw the boy pick up a gray zip-up hoodie. “He then rummaged through his back pack and put both his hands in the pockets,” the report said.
Zwerner texted Kovac, who went to search the boy’s back pack outside of his presence but didn’t find anything. Kovac then went back to Parker, saying that Zwerner saw the boy put something in his pocket and wasn’t taking his hands out.
“He has little pockets,” Parker replied.
“The child was now at recess, with thirty-plus other small children running around the playground, with a firearm tucked into his jacket,” the report said. “The child was constantly running behind a rock wall with his friend.”
After recess, another first-grade teacher, Ms. Jennifer West, “called the friend over to her classroom to find out what was going on.”
“The friend was visibly scared and shaking,” the report said. “He said the child would hurt him if he told her,” but that the boy had “had a gun” and “showed him the bullets.”
But when West called the school office to relay this to Parker, the report said, she said the boy’s backpack had “already been searched.”
West asked a counselor, Rolonzo Rawles, to speak with the friend who told her the boy showed him a gun. Rawles did so, then asked Parker for permission to have the boy searched. Such a search, the report said, “could have changed the course of the day.”
But Parker said no, because the boy’s mother was coming soon to pick him up. “The child was not searched,” the report said. “The child was not removed from class. The police or (school resource officer) was not called.”
Just before 2 p.m., Zwerner was sitting at a reading table when the boy “turned his whole body towards her” and “removed his hand from his pocket holding a firearm.”
“He pointed it directly at Ms. Zwerner, and, at less than six feet away, pulled the trigger and shot Ms. Zwerner.”
The teacher looked down to see a pool of blood forming, the report said. The boy “continued to stare at her, not changing his emotional facial expression as he tried to shoot her again.”
Other children ran out of the classroom, with about 45 students ending up huddled in West’s classroom across the hall. “I told you,” the shooter’s friend said. “I tried to keep you safe. I told you.” A receptionist called 911 and declared “lockdown” over the intercom.
Zwerner walked to the school office, and passed out in front of Foster’s door. Foster opened the door, saw Zwerner, and closed the door, telling two other students in her office to hide in the bathroom.
“Ms. Foster then emerged from her office while the grandmother applied pressure with a rag to Ms. Zwerner’s wound until the paramedics arrived.”
Kovac rushed into Zwerner’s classroom.
“(Expletive) you, I shot my teacher,” the boy told her, with the gun on the floor nearby. “She pulled him away from it … and wrapped her body around the child and held him until law enforcement arrived.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
