A special grand jury report about last year’s shooting at Richneck Elementary shows that first grade teacher Abigail Zwerner was not the only victim that fateful day, said Newport 蜜柚APP Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn during a news conference Thursday morning.
Gwynn said the report — which he termed “incredibly thorough and brutally honest” — shows in detail the trauma that students, parents and other staff at Richneck have experienced since the shooting.
Gwynn was addressing of the special grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2023, shooting at Richneck, in which a 6-year-old shot Zwerner in a classroom. The report was released publicly Wednesday.
The 11-member grand jury also with eight counts of felony child neglect. Parker is accused of failing to act on multiple credible warnings that the boy had a gun.
“This was preventable,” Gwynn said of the shooting that “changed lives forever.”
Last April, Gwynn asked a Circuit Court judge to empanel the special grand jury to answer what happened and why — “and what can be done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
The report states that, after the shooting, many parents had trouble getting the school to approve transfers.
“For parents who wanted to transfer their child to a different location due to the traumatic effects this had on their child, particularly for those children who had witnessed the shooting, the school, including the NNPS administration, was difficult, obtuse and quite frankly insensitive,” the report says.
This included the parent of the child referred to as “the friend” in the report, who told his teacher that the 6-year-old showed him a gun and bullets behind a rock wall at recess.
This child — who after the shooting reportedly said, “I told you. I tried to keep you safe” — is in therapy and feels that “this was somehow his fault.” School administrators twice denied transfer requests for the child, until his mother hired a lawyer.
Another Richneck parent, Gwynn noted, “had to sell her house and move to another jurisdiction to get the education that her kid deserved.”
The prosecutor said the multiple failings outlined in the report are troubling to anyone who reads the report.
“We are troubled, too,” he said.
Among new details to emerge was that the gun used in the shooting was loaded with a total of 8 bullets — and jammed after the 6-year-old fired the first shot at his teacher. Fifteen other students were in the classroom. The report also revealed that when sheriff’s deputies arrived at the school within three minutes after the first 911 call, they were unable to immediately enter because of a “broken door buzzer system.”
“The lapses in security were appalling and should never have happened,” Gwynn said.
Parker faces one count for each bullet in the gun. She turned herself in about 2 a.m. Wednesday and was released on a $4,000 bond. She made her first court appearance Thursday morning in Newport 蜜柚APP Circuit Court.
Gwynn noted that his office has a good “partnership” with the school division’s new leadership and noted that Newport 蜜柚APP Public Schools had made changes to safety measures.
Though the commonwealth’s attorney’s office invited the school division to participate in the press conference, leadership declined to attend because of pending litigation, Gwynn said.
The school board released a statement Thursday morning emphasizing that student and staff safety is a top priority.
“We thank the Special Grand Jury for their Report on the investigation of the January 6, 2023 Richneck Elementary School Shooting and for their recommendations,” reads the statement. “We have implemented a number of positive changes since this incident and will continue to do so in the future.”
Gwynn’s office is continuing its investigation, including a search for missing documents that were highlighted in the report. The grand jury’s report brought up concerns about Director of Elementary Leadership LaQuiche Parrott’s “suspicious lack of memory” regarding the boy’s disciplinary file.
The report said Parrot took the files to her house, and that an incident report into the boy choking another teacher the year before was found only because the complaining teacher had kept a copy.
The grand jury asked that prosecutors investigate school officials on possible obstruction of justice charges regarding the file.
“We’ll work with the school system to try to ferret out how this happened,” Gwynn said Thursday. “And based on the facts and the law, if we believe somebody else needs to be charged, trust me when I tell you, they will be charged.”
Obstruction of justice has a one-year statute of limitations under Virginia law — and it’s been more than a year since the shooting.
“But an investigation would reveal when exactly acts of obstruction occurred if they did, and whether they were ongoing in nature or not,” Gwynn said, adding that violations of other laws also may have taken place.
Though grand jury reports are not always made public, Gwynn said his office recommended this report be unsealed. He said there were school staff and families of Richneck students who felt that they had not been heard, and releasing the report publicly was a way to give them that opportunity.
“We thought … it was important for every citizen in the city to have access to it,” he said.
Later Thursday afternoon, Zwerner’s legal team complimented the grand jury’s work. The attorneys are currently suing the Newport 蜜柚APP School Board, Parker and other administrators in a $40 million lawsuit expected to go to trial early next year.
“The special grand jury impaneled with citizens from the city of Newport 蜜柚APP spoke loudly and clearly,” attorney Diane Toscano said. “They said it ain’t over yet. They said we have not forgotten. They said, ‘No, Newport 蜜柚APP school leadership, you will not escape accountability for this tragedy.'”
Among the most troubling aspects of the report, she said, are the concerns over the moving and missing disciplinary records.
“If the citizen panel believes that this may have been a cover up, which is their words, I have no reason to doubt them,” Toscano said. “Serious questions need to be answered by the school board and culture that they oversaw of being loose with disciplinary records that put our teachers and students in danger. Was the school system trying to downplay or hide behavior problems across the district? And for what purpose?”
She called on the Virginia and U.S. Departments of Education to open their own investigations into the school system in the disciplinary records and other issues
Toscano said she knew before the report that there were other rounds loaded into the boy’s gun, but she didn’t know until Wednesday that he could have fired more rounds if not for the gun jamming. “That was hard to read,” she said.
Kevin Biniazan, another of Zwerner’s attorneys, said that while prosecutors are seeking “a just and righteous outcome” for the administrators, the former schoolteacher deserves justice in her own right.
“When there is a conversation about what should have been done, someday we’re going to have to reckon with the fact that someday this will go out of the news cameras’ sight, and Abigail Zwerner is going to have to continue to live the rest of her life with these disturbing memories buried into her mind,” he said.
The fight for answers, Biniazan said, “may be more difficult because of the coverup that’s been unveiled by the special grand jury” about the missing files. “But we’ll keep fighting, and we’ll seek those answers.”
Emily Mapp Brannon, a Norfolk lawyer representing several children who were at Richneck on the day of the shooting, called the special grand jury’s report “thorough and appalling.”
“These jurors concluded what the families of Richneck have known,” she said. “On January 6, 2023, the safety of the children of Richneck was of no concern to the administration.”
Nour Habib, nour.habib@virginiamedia.com
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
