A former Virginia first-grade teacher recalled the dramatic moment she was shot by her 6-year-old student in her classroom two years ago — saying that’s when she thought she “died.”
Abigail Zwerner — who was an educator at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va. — described for a jury the moment when the boy stood by his desk in her classroom and shot her, piercing her hand and chest on Jan. 6, 2023.
“The last thing I remember at the school — I thought I was dying,” Zwerner said Thursday in a soft-spoken voice on the second day of trial in her $40 million lawsuit. “I thought I had died. 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,” Zwerner testified.
She said the next thing she remembered was two of her colleagues standing over her.
“I process that I’m hurt and they are putting pressure on where I’m hurt,” she recalled.
Zwerner — who was 25 years old at the time and had only been teaching for 2 1/2 years — said she couldn’t forget the look on the boy’s face when he fired the 9mm handgun.
“The look on the student’s face is a large memory that I have,” Zwerner recounted for the jury. “It was a blank look but it wasn’t a blank look at all on his face.”
Zwerner — who resigned from her job and hasn’t been employed full time since — told jurors about the physical and emotional toll the incident has had on her.
Physically, she hasn’t been able to use her left hand normally since and has had multiple surgeries on it, including as recently as April. She explained that simple tasks like opening a bag of chips or a bottle of bottle are hard for her, and noted she had to ask her lawyer to open a bag of chips for her during lunch Wednesday.
“Overall, I would say I do struggle with doing things,” Zwerner testified.
And she said she feels distant in her relationships and fearful of going out.
“I still feel connected and close [in relationships] but it’s also that feeling of distance, a little numbness,” Zwerner said. “I know I trust the person I’m with. I love them. I know them but there is something that’s just different. I can’t necessarily put it into words.”
She said she was supposed to go see the movie “Hamilton” with her mom and sister, a flick she had seen once before, and she remembered it has a scene where two characters have a gun duel — which prompted her to bail on the plans.
Zwerner is suing the former school vice principal, Ebony Parker, for gross negligence, claiming the administrator had been warned by multiple staffers that day that the boy might have a gun and was acting alarmingly. But Parker failed to take any of it seriously, Zwerner’s suit claims.
Parker’s lawyer pressed Zwerner during cross-examination whether she personally ever told Parker she thought the boy might have a gun but the former teacher responded that since another teacher, Amy Kovac, told Zwerner she spoke to Parker about the boy, Zwerner didn’t feel the need to.
Zwerner also said she wondered earlier that day whether the gun was real or a toy.
“The whole day, I was contemplating, it could be real but it also could not,” she said. “When he told students he brought a gun with him to school, there is that possibility.”
Witnesses testified that they heard from two students that the boy had a gun and they told Parker about it and told her he was acting aggressively, but the vice principal refused to search him and said his mom would be arriving to pick him up soon.
Earlier Thursday, a forensic psychiatrist Dr. Clarence Watson told the jury he believed Zwerner had post traumatic stress disorder from being shot. He explained that she has symptoms like difficulty breathing and feelings of panic because at times she believes someone is following her and wants to “finish the job.”
He said she suffers from nightmares and has had suicidal thoughts at times.
And the doctor said he believes the trauma will stay with her for a long time and that she’ll need to continue to receive psychological treatment and take medications for anxiety and depression.
He said her recovery is made more difficult by the fact she has physical scars that remind her of what happened.
Zwerner still has a fragment of the bullet in her chest that doctors were unable to safely remove.
Zwerner’s team is expected to rest its case Thursday afternoon.
The boy’s mother, Deja Taylor, was sentenced in 2023 to two years in prison for child neglect. Parker also faces an upcoming criminal trial for the same charge.
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