Unsealed bodycam footage shows a six-year-old cursing at officers and admitting he had a gun after shooting his teacher at a Virginia elementary school in 2023.
Newport News police released the video this week, years after a first-grader opened fire on his teacher inside a Richneck Elementary classroom. The footage, captured on Officer Brian Torrez’s body camera, shows the chaotic minutes after the shooting and the child’s own words as adults tried to contain him.
The Daily Caller reported that a court unsealed the recording on Oct. 6, 2026, following a push by local newspapers. The child’s face is blurred. What remains is a hard record of what responders faced on Jan. 6, 2023, and of the adult failures that put a loaded gun in a first-grade room.
Teacher Abby Zwerner was hit nearly in the heart. The bullet stayed in her chest. She spent almost two weeks in the hospital, underwent six surgeries, and lost full use of her left hand. Reading specialist Amy Kovac held the boy until police arrived. A gun sat on the other side of the room. Court records later said the child, identified as J.T., had taken it that morning from his mother’s purse.
When officers and sheriff’s deputies reached the room, Kovac had the six-year-old restrained. She told them straight.
"The gun is there. He just admitted that he had one,"
Kovac said she had already flagged a threat to the assistant principal earlier. She also explained the boy’s modified schedule: it was his first week without his mother in class, and pickup was set for 2:30. Deputies found the firearm across the room and left it in place while they secured the scene. Over the radio, they told other officers they had the shooter. Someone asked about small handcuffs.
The boy did not go quiet. The bodycam catches him yelling at the adults holding the line in a classroom that had just become a crime scene.
"Both y’all want a f****** piece of me, b****?!"
He kept going. "F*** you, b****." When talk turned to another staff member, he answered with a racial slur and claimed the person had "retired last year." Told the language was wrong, he pointed toward the gun and called a woman in the room a "w****." Kovac corrected him. He answered with more of the same.
"If you want a piece of me, come get it on, b****," "I don’t care if you call backup. I don’t care if I go to jail, b****."
Kovac told him the words were not how people speak to each other and that she was not happy with it. Officer Torrez told her she could stay if she felt comfortable. At one point the camera is partly covered as a punch sound is heard; Kovac later testified the boy hit her. As a sergeant walked him out, she said he was done.
Zwerner later described the moment the round hit. She spoke to PBS News about the blur between injury and survival.
"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. And then my next memory is I see two co-workers around me and I process that I’m hurt and they’re putting pressure on where I’m hurt."
Kovac had heard the gunshot from down the hall, found Zwerner bleeding, and called 911. The Virginian-Pilot later reported seven additional rounds still in the gun. A six-year-old had brought a loaded firearm into a first-grade class, fired it, and still had rounds left.
Newport News Schools closed Richneck on Jan. 9 and 10 and posted that the district was deeply saddened and that support resources were available. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said his administration had offered help and was monitoring the situation while praying for students and the community.
Court documents said J.T. took the pistol from his mother Deja Nicole Taylor’s purse that morning. Taylor, then 29, later served federal prison time for child neglect and for lying on the background-check form when she bought the gun. She was released in February. The boy is now in the custody of his great-grandfather.
That sequence is not complicated. An adult obtained a firearm by deception. The same adult failed to secure it. A first-grader carried it into school, shot his teacher, and left her with lifelong injuries. Federal time for the mother does not restore Zwerner’s hand or remove the bullet from her chest.
Former Richneck assistant principal Ebony Parker was indicted by a special grand jury in 2023 on eight counts of child neglect. The bodycam footage was admitted at her trial in May. Circuit Court Judge Rebecca M. Robinson later dismissed every count.
Zwerner sued Parker and won a $10 million award. Criminal accountability and civil damages ran on separate tracks. The educator who received the warning about a threat walked away from the criminal case. The teacher who took the bullet carries the medical consequences and a civil judgment that cannot undo the damage.
After the dismissal, the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot moved to unseal the classroom video, citing the First Amendment. The court allowed distribution on the condition that the child’s face stay blurred. Newport News police then released the Torrez bodycam. The public can now hear what Kovac and the officers heard in real time.
The footage does not show a mystery. It shows a small child with a stolen gun, a teacher bleeding on the floor, a reading specialist holding the shooter, and officers working a scene no elementary school should ever host. It also shows the gap between warning and action. Kovac said she told the assistant principal about a threat earlier. The gun still entered the room.
Secure storage is not optional when children live in the home. Honest answers on a federal background form are not optional. School leaders who hear about a threat do not get to treat it as noise. When those duties collapse, a first-grade classroom becomes the place where a teacher wonders if she is dying, and a six-year-old spits profanity at the people trying to end the emergency.
J.T. was six. He could not buy a gun, pass a background check, or set building security policy. Every link in that chain belonged to adults, his mother, school administrators, and the systems that later dismissed the criminal case against the assistant principal while the injured teacher collected a civil award and a permanent injury.
Years later, the bodycam is public. The words are public. The medical toll is public. What remains is whether schools and parents treat warning signs, secure guns, and hold officials to the standard the job requires before the next classroom pays the price.
A teacher should never have to bleed on a classroom floor because adults ignored the basics of responsibility.
