A former Virginia teacher who was shot by a 6-year-old student in her classroom in 2023 testified that she thought she had died that day.
The Associated Press reports that Abby Zwerner was testifying in a lawsuit she has brought against a former assistant principal who is accused of ignoring multiple warnings that the student had a gun.
Zwerner was shot in the hand and chest in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News. Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries and does not have the full use of her left hand. A bullet narrowly missed her heart and remains in her chest.
“I thought I had died," Zwerner testified. "I thought I was either on my way to heaven or in heaven. But then it all got black. And so, I then thought I wasn’t going there. And then my next memory is I see two co-workers around me and I process that I’m hurt and they’re putting pressure on where I’m hurt.”
Zwerner no longer works for the school district and has said she has no plans to teach again. It was disclosed in court that she has become a licensed cosmetologist.
The lawsuit contends that former assistant principal Ebony Parker failed to act after several people voiced concerns to her in the hours before the shooting that the student had a gun in his backpack.
Zwerner testified that she first heard about the gun prior to class recess from a reading specialist. The shooting happened a few hours later.
Parker is the only defendant in the lawsuit. A judge previously dismissed the district’s superintendent and the school principal as defendants.
The student’s mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. Her son told authorities he got his mother’s handgun by climbing onto a drawer to reach the top of a dresser, where the firearm was in his mom’s purse.
