Way back in January 2023, there was a shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. Only one person was injured and that was teacher Abigail Zwerner. The really shocking part of the story was who carried out the shooting. He was a 6-year-old boy whose name wasn't given because of his age.
From the very start, there were a lot of questions animating this story. How did a 6-year-old get hold of a loaded gun? Why didn't the school find it after reports circulated that a student had brought a gun to school? But the most basic question of all was this: What kind of 6-year-old kid fires a gun at a teacher?
Eventually, we would learn that the boy's mother, Dejah Taylor, spent much of her time smoking pot, which explains why she didn't notice that he'd taken her handgun to school. She would eventually be sentenced to nearly four years in prison for the drug use and for lying on her application to buy the gun (where she claimed not to be a drug addict).
Abby Zwerner would leave her job and, despite the best efforts of the school district to make her shooting into a job related injury, she would sue the district and one of the assistant principals, Ebony Parker, for $40 million. She would eventually win a $10 million settlement.
Through all of this, I started to get a picture of this case that suggested (at least to me) that there was a racial element here that the media was ignoring. The 6-year-old was black and so was the assistant principal who did nothing about reports that the boy had brought a gun to school.
Testimony on Tuesday focused on how the two teachers, the guidance counselor and the reading specialist shared information with Parker about the threat throughout the day.
Amy Kovac, the reading specialist, was in Parker’s office when Zwerner told Parker the boy had threatened a kindergartner and had been aggressive with a security officer during lunch. Parker never looked up at Zwerner, who had to leave to return to class, Kovac testified.
Two girls in the hallway later told Kovac that the boy had a gun. Kovac went to Zwerner’s classroom after lunch and sat with him.
“The girls tell me you have a gun in the bag,” she said she told him. “I said, ‘Can I have the bag?’ And he said, ‘No, no one is getting that bag.’”
Here was my take last October:
My own take, and you definitely won't find anyone at CNN or the NY Times talking about this, is that there is an underlying racial element to this case which is mostly being ignored. The child who shot Zwerner that day is black. Ebony Parker, the do-nothing assistant principal is also black.
Meanwhile, Abby Zwerner (the victim) and Amy Kovac, the two people who kept going into Parker's office to warn her about the gun, are white.
I'd be willing to bet that Ebony Parker is someone who is professionally concerned about the "school to prison pipeline." People who share this concern tend to be fixated on the need to "reduce criminalization." In practice that means being more lenient with student misbehavior and avoiding creating a record of bad behavior that could lead to police involvement down the line. From this perspective, the best thing to do when students, particularly minority students, are creating disruptions is to adopt restorative justice practices and, at all costs, avoid calling the police.
A kid bringing a handgun to school is a legitimate reason for calling the police. Why didn't Parker do that? The fact that she did nothing is suggestive of the mindset that may have been motivating her actions that day.
Of course the police were eventually called, after the shooting took place. Those cops had body cameras on and finally this week we're getting to see their arrival at the scene of the shooting more than 3 1/2 years ago. I think this video explains a lot. (Some NSFW language).
🚨 A 6-year-old shot his teacher. Richneck Elementary, Jan 6, 2023. Court unsealed Officer Brian Torrez's bodycam Oct 6, 2026. 🎥 The Virginian-Pilot / Daily Press https://t.co/TPphaycltx
— Patriot (@_Patriot1776Q_) October 7, 2026
You can see the police are pretty shocked by what is coming out of this 6-year-old kid's mouth. But of course they can't say anything or react because they know they are being filmed. A stray comment from a white cop about a black child talking like he's Snoop Dogg could end his career.
This was not the first time this kid had talked like this in class. It wasn't even the first time he'd attacked a teacher. He did that for the first time in kindergarten.
A 6-year-old Newport News boy who shot and wounded his first-grade teacher constantly cursed at staff and teachers, tried to whip students with his belt, and once choked another teacher “until she couldn't breathe,” according to a legal notice filed by an attorney for the wounded teacher...
The choking incident described in the notice was confirmed by the teacher. She said that in 2021, the boy came up behind her as she sat in a chair in the front of the class, locked his forearms in front of her neck and pulled back and down, hard. She said a teaching assistant pulled the boy off her...
“I didn't feel safe the rest of the year because I knew if they didn't protect me when he choked me and I couldn't breathe, then they wouldn't protect me, my kids or my colleagues if he did something not as harmful,” she told The Associated Press.
You get the picture. This little kid is living his best thug life every day at school, being a verbal and physical threat to everyone around him and no one can say a word. Why? Because he's black and it was 2021 (in the case of the choking incident). Right at the height of BLM's cultural impact, no one wanted to say that this kid was a little monster. And so he got shuffled off to another school and then brought back on a modified schedule where his mother had to attend class with him to keep him under control. The day of the shooting, as you heard above, was the first day his mother hadn't come to school with him.
There was also a pretty clear indication that he brought the gun specifically to shoot Zwerner.
Two days before the shooting, the boy allegedly “slammed” Zwerner's cell phone and broke it, according to the claim notice. He was given a one-day suspension, but when he returned to Zwerner's class the following day, he pulled a 9mm handgun out of his pocket and shot her while she sat at a reading table, the notice says.
Virginia law says that a child doesn't have the capability of forming criminal intent, therefore you can't charge a child with a crime. I don't think that's true in this case, though he arguably was too young to really understand what he was doing or saying. He's on a very bad path and everyone around him has been afraid to say it out loud. He's being insulated from real consequences because he's black.
To be clear, I think this kid is very much a victim as well as a perpetrator. He didn't teach himself to talk like that or to respond to people with threats and physical attacks. He got that from the dirtbag adults around him. But regardless, once he started lashing out at teachers and other kids, he should have been removed. And once he started attacking teachers, the police should have been called. And certainly once there were rumors he'd brought a gun to school, something should have been done. It wasn't and I think we all know why.
Had this been a white kid and he was using this language toward minority kids, no one would have tolerated or stayed silent about this behavior. But as it is even the police can't react to him after a shooting.
I hope this kid gets help. He's really young. Maybe if he's socialized by some actual adults he can come back from this. If not he's going to wind up dead or in prison. That's another problem with ignoring this behavior for years out of fear of being called racist. It hurts everyone, but especially this kid.
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