A Virginia judge dismissed all eight felony child neglect counts against former Richneck Elementary School assistant principal Ebony Parker after just three days of prosecution testimony, ending the criminal case tied to a January 2023 classroom shooting that left a first-grade teacher with a bullet still lodged in her chest.
Judge Rebecca Robinson ruled that the evidence presented against Parker did not amount to a crime under Virginia law. She called the prosecution's approach a "mashup of legal theory." Parker, who had been accused of ignoring repeated warnings that a six-year-old student had a loaded gun in his backpack, left the Newport News courthouse without comment, The Hill reported.
The dismissal leaves teacher Abby Zwerner, who spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, endured six surgeries, and lost full use of her left hand, without any criminal accountability for the institutional failures that preceded the shooting. A Newport News jury did award her $10 million in a civil verdict last November. But the City of Newport News, her attorneys say, continues to resist paying.
The facts the prosecution laid out over three days paint a grim picture of inaction. Special prosecutor Josh Jenkins told the court that multiple school employees warned Parker they believed the child had a gun in his backpack. Parker's response, Jenkins argued, was to tell them the boy's mother would be arriving soon to pick him up.
Jenkins did not mince words in his closing argument:
"Does she say 'search the child'? No. Does she say 'call the police,' or does she call the police? No. Does she remove the child from the classroom and separate him? No."
He went further:
"She didn't even get up from her desk. She didn't leave her office. Warning after warning after warning, she did nothing."
That sequence of events, warnings received, warnings ignored, a child left in a classroom full of roughly 19 students with a loaded firearm, was apparently not enough to satisfy the legal standard for felony child neglect in Virginia. Judge Robinson said no law was violated.
Zwerner testified Tuesday during the criminal trial. She described the student's behavior leading up to the shooting, telling the court that days earlier the boy had slammed her phone to the ground. On the day of the shooting itself, she said, he was in a "violent" mood.
The bullet fired by the six-year-old went through Zwerner's hand and pierced her chest, narrowly missing her heart. It remains there today. She does not have full use of her left hand.
Zwerner was not the only one scarred. On Wednesday, parents of children who were in the classroom that day testified about the lasting damage. One mother described her daughter's ongoing fear: "Slamming of a door, loud bangs, doorbells are what scare her."
Another mother detailed her son's symptoms, "bedwetting, stomach aches, headaches, school avoidance", and added plainly: "He was literally afraid to go to school."
When adults in positions of authority fail to act, children pay the price. That principle holds whether the setting is a Virginia elementary school or a North Carolina high school where a counselor faces felony charges for alleged misconduct with a student.
Parker's defense attorneys, Stephen Teague and Curtis Rogers, took a different tack. Rather than dispute that warnings were received, Rogers argued that classroom teachers themselves bore responsibility. If they believed a gun was present, he said, they should have separated the child from the other students.
"That did not occur. Each one of those individuals had the authority to move those classmates."
In other words, the defense strategy was to point the finger downward, at the teachers in the room, rather than upward at the administrator who received the warnings and chose to wait for a parent pickup that never came in time.
WAVY, the Nexstar affiliate covering the trial, reported that Parker was visibly emotional after Robinson's ruling and was comforted by her defense attorneys.
The criminal dismissal does not erase the civil verdict. A Newport News jury found in Zwerner's favor last November, awarding $10 million. But collecting that money has been its own fight.
Zwerner's attorney Jeffrey Breit issued a statement after Thursday's ruling that made clear the battle is far from over:
"From the beginning, our focus has remained on obtaining justice in civil court for the preventable failures that led to Abby being shot. A Newport News jury has already spoken, returning a $10 million verdict in Abby's favor. Yet even today, the City of Newport News continues to resist accepting responsibility and delivering the justice that verdict represents."
Fellow attorney Diane Toscano pointed to an irony in the city's legal posture. She said Newport News had argued it could deny insurance coverage in the civil case because of possible criminal conduct. With the criminal case now dismissed, Toscano said, "that is no longer an excuse that the City can hide behind."
The question of whether public officials face real consequences for failures that endanger the people they serve is not limited to school settings. The same accountability gap has drawn attention in cases involving officials accused of enabling fraud at the state level.
Attorney Kevin Biniazan, also representing Zwerner, stressed that the teacher did not seek the criminal prosecution. "This was always the Commonwealth's criminal case, not Abby's civil case," he said. "Abby complied with the subpoena requiring her testimony once again, despite the emotional toll of repeatedly reliving this tragedy."
The prosecution had charged Parker with one count of felony child neglect for each of the eight bullets in the gun the six-year-old brought into Zwerner's classroom. It was an aggressive legal theory, and Robinson rejected it entirely.
The judge's ruling raises a hard question for Virginia lawmakers: if an administrator can receive multiple warnings that a child has a loaded weapon, decline to search the child, decline to call police, decline to remove the child from a room full of first-graders, and still not violate state law, then what exactly does the felony child neglect statute cover?
That gap between common-sense accountability and the letter of the law is the kind of thing that erodes public trust in institutions. Parents in Newport News sent their children to Richneck Elementary expecting basic safety. What they got was an administrator who, by the prosecution's own account, did not leave her desk.
Cases involving criminal conduct in Virginia schools have drawn sustained public attention, and for good reason. When the system cannot hold adults accountable for protecting children, the system has a problem that goes beyond any single courtroom.
Parker walks free. Zwerner still carries a bullet near her heart. The children who were in that classroom still flinch at loud noises and dread going to school.
The City of Newport News still owes $10 million it appears unwilling to pay. And Virginia's felony child neglect statute apparently does not reach an administrator who sat at her desk while a six-year-old carried a loaded gun into a first-grade classroom.
The broader pattern, institutions failing the most vulnerable, then hiding behind legal technicalities, is not unique to Newport News. Whether the failures involve deadly oversights in county jails or negligence in elementary schools, the people who suffer are never the ones making the decisions.
When the law cannot reach the conduct that common sense condemns, the law needs fixing. And when a city fights harder to avoid paying a jury verdict than it fought to keep a gun out of a first-grade classroom, the priorities speak for themselves.
