NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (WAVY) — Two days after Deja Taylor’s six-year-old son broke the cell phone of his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner, he took his mother’s 9mm semi-automatic gun to school.
According to a court document as part of the lengthy legal process that ensued, Taylor believed she left the gun in her purse with a trigger lock on top of her bedroom dresser.
“We determined the firearm was in the residence where they lived, he obtained the firearm, placed it in his backpack, and brought it to school,” Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said in a Jan. 9, 2023 news conference. “He was then brought to school by his mother.”
The document outlined that the child had been removed from the school a year before the shooting “after he choked his teacher until she couldn’t breathe.” Then, in fall 2022, the child was put on a modified schedule “because he constantly cursed at the staff and teachers.”
The timeline of the events that happened on the day of the shooting comes from information by Abby Zwerner’s legal team in her Notice of Intent to File Lawsuit as well as other sources, including previous coverage of the Richneck Elementary School shooting. Times are approximate.
Between 11:15 and 11:30 a.m.
Zwerner went to Assistant Principal Dr. Ebony Parker and told her the child seemed “off,” was in a violent mood and had threatened a younger student.
There had been several issues with the six-year-old prior to the shooting.
That’s what concerned Drew — the anger that would lead to the act of a 6-year-old shooting his teacher.
“If there are any records dealing with aggression, behavior, anger issues from the school, I would like to review those records,” Drew said in a Jan. 27, 2023 interview with 10 On Your Side.
11:45 a.m.
A teacher was told that the shooter had told students he had a gun in his backpack.
12:30 p.m.
That teacher searched the shooter’s backpack and found nothing. However, that teacher told Parker what Zwerner had told her:
“She saw the shooter take something out of his backpack and put it in his pocket,” the teacher said.
Zwerner feared it was a gun.
According to the Intent to File Lawsuit document, Parker seemed to dismiss the gun claim. Parker responded to the teacher that the child “had small pockets, insinuating that he could not possibly have a gun on his person.”
A teacher asked if the child could be checked for a weapon.
“No, because the shooter’s mother would be arriving soon to pick up the shooter,” the document noted.
Police, still, have not been called.
1 p.m.
A teacher is informed by a student that the shooter showed him a gun while at recess and threatened to shoot him if he told anyone.
The Intent to File Lawsuit document states that several people told Parker the student had the gun on his person, but as stated, she would not allow anyone to search him because “his mother was on the way to pick him up.”
1:59 p.m.
The student shoots Zwerner once while she is reading to the class, hitting her in the left hand and upper chest.
Only then are the police called to the school.
Drew said surveillance video indicated Zwerner was the last person to leave her classroom.
“She made a right turn and started down the hallway, and then she stopped. … She turned around and made sure every one of those students was safe,” Drew said.
A school employee rushed into the classroom and physically restrained the child after hearing the gunshot, with the child becoming “a little combative” and striking the employee. Zwerner, after evacuating her class to safety, went to her school’s administrative office and received first aid.
In an interview with Drew on January 27, 2023, we pressed this issue with him. During the day when there were several people with some knowledge of this, that the student perhaps had a gun, and no one called 911.”
“That is correct,” he said.
Are you disappointed with that?
“Yes … if there was thought of a firearm at a school especially at an elementary school, we should be called, we should be called,” he said, adding, “I would rather find out it was nothing and go there, than to have to respond to what we had on the 6th.”
2:04 p.m.
A WAVY News story noted that deputies arrived at Richneck Elementary and entered the classroom where the shooting happened. They found a 6-year-old child being physically restrained by a school employee, and while the child “became combative,” officers took him into custody and escorted him out of the building and put him in a police car.
Medics arrived to the school two minutes later, and were cleared to enter the building a minute after that. By 2:09 p.m., they had made contact with Zwerner and were taking her to a local hospital by 2:11 p.m.
Officers began clearing the school and evacuating students. They, along with Richneck Elementary staff, first took them to the gym, where they stayed until being reunited with their families. Children who witnessed the shooting were taken to the library, where they were monitored by detectives, teachers and school counselors. They were reunited with their families within about three hours of the police department’s initial response.
After police determined the school to be safe, forensics entered the school and processed the crime scene, finding one spent shell casing, a backpack, a cellphone and a 9 mm Taurus handgun.
On that day, there was no security guard on duty at the school. Schools shared a unarmed security guard.
Following the Jan. 6 incident, according to Newport News Public Schools, two unarmed security guards are now assigned to each elementary school.
Elementary schools do not have student resource officers that are armed police officers. SROs are only assigned to middle and high schools.