NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (WAVY) — While Abby Zwerner continues to cope with the trauma brought on after being shot by a 6-year-old student, so too are the young students who saw the shooting.
Six students are represented in lawsuits against the Newport News School Board, former Superintendent Dr. George Parker, former principal Briana Foster-Newton and former assistant principal Dr. Ebony Parker. The families of the students want answers, still feeling as if they are left in the dark one year later.
“We want to know exactly who reported exactly what, and exactly how did they report it,” their attorney Emily Brannon said. “It’s one thing for someone to say, ‘I told someone.’ It’s another thing if that person sent an email and has a written trail that says, ‘there is a shooter,’ or ‘there is a threat of a shooter.'”
It is a day Alesha Thompson and her son think about constantly — trauma they are working through together, one day at a time. That morning, Thompson said the child showed her son the gun at recess.
“And he told my son, ‘If you tell, I’m gonna shoot you.'”
From what her son recalled, a teacher asked what was wrong. Her son was scared, and told the teacher they were just talking about basketball. Moments later in Zwerner’s class, she said her son spoke up.
“He stood up loudly and said, ‘hey he has a gun,'” Thompson said. “Ms. Zwerner said to him, ‘Shh, sit down, sit.'”
The same teacher from before pulled her son aside again. He told her about the gun.
That teacher apparently told him it will be OK and was not seen taking further action. Moments later, Zwerner was shot.
“He said everybody was screaming, hollering, running, running up to the front,” Thompson said. “It makes me feel like nobody believed him.”
Lowanda Sample-Rusk happened to be in the main office during the shooting, there to pick up her grandchild. Another child was in the office with her when the gun went off.
“I then took the student by his face, told him to hide,” Sample-Rusk said. “I said, I need you to hide for me.”
Amid the chaos, Zwerner walked into the office while holding her gunshot wound. There was blood all over her shirt.
“When she came into the office, she said, ‘I’ve been shot, I’ve been shot,'” Sample-Rusk said.
Sample-Rusk said she tried getting Zwerner and the other young student through the door of the principal’s office. It was locked. She said Principal Foster-Newton opened the door, saw her, a bleeding Zwerner and the student — then, closed and locked the door.
“I was wondering why, but most of all, I wanted to make sure … I was thinking about the teacher, the child I didn’t know what to do with besides hide… and my grandchildren,” Sample-Rusk said.
She is disturbed that no one seemed to call police when Thompson’s son spoke up.
“No one alerted the office besides the teacher coming in,” Sample-Rusk said. “I don’t know what protocol is, but whatever it is, when someone first found out about the gun, or there was news of a gun, me, I used to substitute teach, I would have called 911. I would have taken a chance on losing my job.”
She added, “When I went in the bathroom and washed her blood off of my hands, at that point, that was when I started to cry. It really hit me at that point.”
Thompson and the others said they have not heard from Zwerner since. Her son asks if she is OK. The family wants Zwerner to find time to meet with her former students.
“My son asked me, was it his fault that she got shot because he stood up and told? And I had to reassure him, it wasn’t his fault, ‘you did what you could,’ but he should have never been in the situation of figuring out how to save his teacher.”
As these families work through the stress and PTSD, they seek answers from the school administration, wondering why no one called 911 when the gun was reported.
“I’m wondering, maybe if somebody would have listened and maybe not followed protocol, if they could have prevented her being hurt, the children witnessing this, and now the aftermath of it all,” Thompson said. “The anxiety, the stress, the trauma, the PTSD my child went through.”
Each of the six lawsuits seek $3 million in damages, as well as other punitive damages.