Eight Bullets, One Assistant Principal, and a Question American Law Has Never Answered

Twenty children walked into a first-grade classroom at Richneck Elementary School on the morning of January 6, 2023. Their teacher, a 25-year-old named Abby Zwerner, was sitting at a reading table when one of them stood up, pulled a 9mm handgun out of his backpack, and shot her in the chest.

A jury in Newport News, Virginia is now going to spend the rest of this week deciding whether the school's assistant principal that morning, Dr. Ebony Parker, committed a felony by what she did not do in the hours before that shot was fired.

I have not been able to find another case like it in American law.

Parents have been convicted in school shooting cases. James and Jennifer Crumbley in Michigan, after their son killed four classmates at Oxford High School. The father of the shooter at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Resource officers have been tried. Scot Peterson in Parkland, charged with felony child neglect for failing to confront the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. He was acquitted.

But an administrator. An employee of a public school system who was not armed, who was not the immediate adult in the room when the shooting happened. Prosecuted on a theory that her inaction in the hours leading up to that shooting amounted to a Class 6 felony, eight times over. One count for each of the eight rounds in the loaded handgun a six-year-old carried in his backpack to her school.

That is what is happening in Newport News this week. According to multiple national outlets, including CNN and the Associated Press, this appears to be the first time an American educator has stood before a criminal jury on those facts.

What the State Promised

Commonwealth's attorney Josh Jenkins gave the jury his case in his first sentence. There was one and only one person inside Richneck Elementary on the morning of January 6, 2023 with both the knowledge of an unfolding crisis and the authority to do something about it.

Every other moment of his opening statement built outward from that proposition.

He spent the next two hours walking the jury through what he says were four discrete warnings that reached Dr. Parker between roughly 11:45 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. that day.

Zwerner came in first. The boy was in a violent mood, she told Parker. "I don't know what I'll do if he hits me." Then the reading specialist, Amy Kovac. She thought the boy had a gun in his backpack. Searched the backpack. Found nothing. Then Kovac again, half an hour later. Now she thought the gun was in his jacket. Then, around 1:00 p.m., a school counselor. She wanted permission to search the child. According to Jenkins, Parker said no.

Each warning, in Jenkins's framing, met the same response. A blank stare. A look back down at her work. Nothing.

Then the gun went off.

The line Jenkins wants the jury carrying back to the deliberation room is one of those sentences that does the work of an entire argument: the crisis in this case, he said, did not begin with the firing of the gun. It began at 11:45 a.m.

And one more line, late in his opening, that I am going to be thinking about for the rest of this trial: she did not even get up from her desk. She did not even leave her office.

What the Defense Planted

Kurtish Rogers stood up for the defense and gave the jury one sentence to carry too. Based on their actions, it was not a gun.

He repeated it. Based on their actions, it wasn't.

What he meant was this. If the teachers and staff who allegedly carried those warnings to Dr. Parker had truly believed a six-year-old was walking around an elementary school with a loaded handgun, they would have acted accordingly. They would have separated him from his classmates. They would have separated the classmates from him. They would have called police themselves. They did not do that.

So either the warnings were nowhere near as specific as the state's narrative implies, Rogers told the jury, or every adult at Richneck failed equally, and the Commonwealth's decision to charge only Dr. Parker is an injustice.

That is the entire defense in compressed form. And it is going to live in every cross-examination of every state witness this week.

▶ WATCH ON YOUTUBE Four Warnings, Zero Action: The Trial That Could Send an Educator to Prison | Pt 1

Where This Sits in American Law

The statute the Commonwealth is using is Virginia Code 18.2-371.1(B)(1). In plain English, it says that a person responsible for the care of a child commits a Class 6 felony if their willful act or omission in caring for that child is so gross, wanton, and culpable as to show a reckless disregard for human life.

Read that twice. It is going to drive everything in that courtroom for the rest of the week.

American criminal law has historically been more comfortable holding people responsible for what they do than for what they don't do. The exceptions exist. A parent who lets a child starve. A caretaker who leaves an elderly patient in their charge to die. People who put others into danger and then walk away. Those exceptions exist because in those situations, the duty to act is so basic and so clear that failing to act becomes a moral wrong the law is willing to punish.

What the Commonwealth is asking this jury to do is extend that doctrine to a school administrator. To say that the duty Dr. Parker had to the children in her building when she heard about a gun was the same kind of basic, clear duty.

If the jury agrees, that doctrine just got wider in Virginia. Every assistant principal in this state is one student rumor away from a Class 6 felony.

If the jury refuses, the prosecution's theory does not survive. And that becomes the precedent.

What I'm Watching For

Here is what I am going to be watching in that courtroom this week.

The first is the most basic. The Commonwealth has to actually carry the burden the law assigns them. Beyond a reasonable doubt is not a slogan. It is the wall that stands between an individual and the power of the state. In Dr. Parker's civil case last November, a jury found her grossly negligent under a civil standard and awarded Abby Zwerner ten million dollars. That standard is a coin flip's worth of difference between the two sides. The criminal standard is something else entirely. The state must prove every element of each of the eight counts to the satisfaction of all twelve jurors. If one juror has a doubt grounded in reason, the verdict must be not guilty.

The second is the constitutional floor. Dr. Parker pleaded not guilty on Day 1. She is under no obligation to testify in this trial, just as she was under no obligation to testify in the civil trial last fall. That right is hers. Exercising it cannot be used as evidence of anything. We are going to watch whether the system actually honors that.

The third is the jury pool itself. Of the 84 prospective jurors who showed up Monday for criminal voir dire, more than 40 had seen media coverage of the case, more than 30 had discussed it with friends or family, more than a dozen had watched the civil trial, and more than 25 admitted to already having formed opinions about Dr. Parker's guilt or innocence. The 12 who ended up in the box had to filter all of that out. Whether they actually do it is the trial.

My father, Steven M. Askin, fought the federal government in the 1990s for refusing to break attorney-client privilege. They sent him to prison for it. He came back out and helped people for free from a coffee shop in Martinsburg, West Virginia until the second time the system came for him. He was criminally convicted, the second time, for teaching pro se defendants how to ask the questions a courtroom is supposed to answer.

The presumption of innocence is the thing he was teaching them. It applies to people who are sympathetic and people who aren't. It applies in cases where the public outrage is overwhelming and cases where nobody is watching. It applies to Dr. Parker this week.

The Question

Twelve people in a Newport News courtroom are being asked a question this week. Stripped of every detail, the question is whether failing to act on a warning can be a felony when the failure was professional, when the warning may have been ambiguous, and when the consequences were catastrophic.

The state believes the answer is yes. The defense believes the answer is no.

I am not the judge here. But I am watching. And I am going to keep watching, every day this week, until the question gets an answer.

The opening statements are on the channel. The case background is up on the site. Watch with us.