January 6, 2023. Newport News, Virginia. Richneck Elementary School.
First-grade teacher Abby Zwerner was at a reading table with students when her 6-year-old student pulled out a 9mm handgun and fired once. The bullet went through her hand and into her chest.
She survived. She still has a bullet fragment in her body. She no longer teaches.
This week, newly released police body camera footage from the moments after the shooting surfaced publicly for the first time — unsealed by a Newport News court as evidence in Zwerner's ongoing civil litigation. In the footage, the child sits on a teacher's lap as officers enter the room. He curses at them. He tells them: "My mom had that." He says he doesn't care if he goes to jail.
He was six years old.
What the School Knew Before the Shot Was Fired
Here's the part that turns this from a tragedy into something else: multiple staff members warned the school's assistant principal, Ebony Parker, on the morning of the shooting that the boy had a gun in his backpack.
Not rumors. Not vague concerns. Specific warnings, from multiple people, before the shot was fired.
A reading specialist told police in the bodycam footage that she had warned Parker earlier that day. Another teacher had also reportedly flagged concerns. Parker did not search the child's backpack. She did not remove him from class. She did not call the child's parents. Zwerner was shot during reading time.
In 2025, a jury found Parker liable for ignoring those warnings. They awarded Zwerner $10 million in damages. Parker lost her job. Zwerner still has a bullet in her body and will for the rest of her life.
The ADHD Defense, the Care Plan, and the Week Everything Changed
When Deja Taylor — the boy's mother — went on Good Morning America after the shooting, she said her son's actions "can be linked to his ADHD diagnosis." He was energetic. Off the wall. A great kid, she said, but hard to manage.
Child psychologists pushed back immediately. ADHD can cause frustration and impulsivity. It doesn't cause a child to bring a loaded gun to school and fire it at a teacher. "There may have been underlying diagnoses that were missed," one Virginia psychologist told a local station. "ADHD alone is only part of the picture."
Here's what we do know. The boy had a behavioral care plan at Richneck Elementary. He had displayed violent behavior since kindergarten — including choking his kindergarten teacher. Two days before the shooting, he broke Zwerner's phone after she asked him to sit down.
Because of his behavioral history, the arrangement was that a parent would accompany him to class every single day.
The week of the shooting was the first week no parent came.
Taylor was charged with felony child neglect and federal firearm violations for allowing a loaded 9mm to be accessible to a 6-year-old. She was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison.
The sequence: a loaded gun was accessible to a 6-year-old in his home. A care plan existed because his behavior was dangerous. A parent was supposed to be there. Nobody came that week. Staff were warned he had a gun. Nobody acted. A 25-year-old teacher was shot. Every link in that chain was a choice someone made — or didn't make.
The boy, whose face is blurred in the footage, has not been publicly identified. He was six. The legal system treats children that young as incapable of criminal intent. He was not charged.
What the Bodycam Actually Shows
The footage was sealed for three years because the child in it was a minor. It was released this month as evidence in Zwerner's civil case — specifically to show the jury what happened in the room in the minutes after the shooting.
In the video, an officer asks the boy if the gun is on the floor. He tells her where it is. She asks if anything hurt him when he fired it. He says no. A teacher holds him tightly on her lap throughout.
The child lashes out repeatedly — at the officers, at the teacher holding him, at the situation. "I don't care if I go to jail," he says at one point. The language is what you'd associate with someone significantly older.
What this footage is not is an explanation. It doesn't tell you why a first-grader had the emotional landscape to pull a trigger and then curse at police. It doesn't resolve the question of what a school, a family, or a society does with a child like that. It just shows what the first few minutes looked like — inside a room where something had already gone terribly wrong.
Where Abby Zwerner Is Now
She won the lawsuit. She won't teach again.
The bullet fragment in her chest is permanent. Her attorneys say she will deal with her injuries for the rest of her life. She's in her late 20s.
The $10 million verdict was against Parker personally, which means collection is complicated — most individuals don't have $10 million. The legal proceedings around that are ongoing.
What Zwerner said publicly, after years of civil litigation, is that she wants accountability. Not just for Parker. For a system that, in her case, failed at every level before the trigger was pulled — and is still, three years later, working through the legal consequences.
She was reading to her students when it happened.
