As one chapter closes in the nearly three-year battle to hold someone accountable in the case of a Virginia first-grader shooting his teacher, another will open in the weeks ahead.
Former assistant principal Ebony Parker faces up to four years in prison if convicted in criminal court. The trial is expected to start on Nov. 17. She has been indicted on eight felony counts of child abuse for allegedly ignoring multiple warnings.
This week in a civil trial, after five hours of deliberations a jury awarded Abigail Zwerner, the Virginia elementary school teacher who survived the shooting, $10 million.
Zwerner, who said she lost the use of her left hand after it was punctured by a bullet, filed a $40 million lawsuit against the school district for negligence. A judge dismissed allegations against the principal and another administrator, leaving Parker as the sole defendant. She was found negligent.
Parker was warned by at least three teachers and a student that the child was a threat that day in January 2023, according to trial testimony. They said he might have a gun. Hours later, that 6-year-old pulled out a handgun and fired a bullet through Zwerner’s left hand.
“I thought I would die,” Zwerner, the former Richneck Elementary School teacher, said on the witness stand in October. “I thought I was in, or on my way to, heaven.”
At the center of the lawsuit is who gets the blame when children have access to guns and carry out school shootings. Recent school shootings have resulted in civil lawsuits and settlements in favor of survivors and victims’ families against the entity that oversees the educational institution, the federal government, and a gun manufacturer.
The civil trial verdict in Zwerner’s lawsuit sets a precedent for holding a school administrator personally responsible for failing to act on a potential threat, legal experts said. As of last week, there were 64 school shootings in the U.S. this year, 27 of them on K-12 school grounds.
Now, with the civil trial completed, Parker, who didn’t testify, is heading to trial in criminal court in connection to the school shooting. There, she faces up to four years in prison if convicted for each of the eight felony child abuse and disregard for life charges.
A debate over accountability
As prosecutors increasingly go after the parents of children involved in shootings, some legal advocates fear Black parents will be disproportionately prosecuted in the push for more accountability.
In the Virginia case, the then-6-year-old brought a handgun to school that belonged to his mother, Deja Taylor. Taylor was sentenced to two years in state prison for felony child neglect and an additional 21 months in federal prison for using marijuana while owning a gun. The 26-year-old Newport News mom was released from federal prison in February 2025 and is currently serving the rest of her state prison sentence until May 2026, according to online records.
Taylor is among a handful of parents criminally charged in recent years and sentenced to prison for their child’s offenses when they get a hold of their firearm.
Since May 2024, there have been at least five Black moms and dads across the country who have been charged in connection with their children — ages 2 to 8 — getting access to their firearm. Taylor was charged in January 2024. In other cases, parents were charged in tragedies that included accidental self-inflicted deaths. The parent or parents were charged with either a misdemeanor or felony child neglect; in one case, a weapon charge was added.
The central questions advocates are asking in Taylor’s case are whether the punishment fits the crime and is locking her up in the best interest of her son, whose birthday is in June. He turned 9 this year.
Advocates caution against tearing families apart because incarceration only causes additional harm — and there are alternatives. Sending Taylor to prison and away from her son is a “grave injustice,” says Michael Mitchell, an assistant professor of African American studies and criminology at the College of New Jersey.
“There are other, healthier ways, and probably more prosocial ways, to repair harm that is done,” said Mitchell, a former correction officer who co-authored a 2019 research study titled: “Formerly Incarcerated Black Mothers Matter Too: Resisting Social Constructions of Motherhood.”
According to a 2010 Pew Research Center report, 1 in 9 Black children, 1 in 28 Hispanic children, and 1 in 57 white children in the U.S. have an incarcerated parent. Those statistics have not changed to date.
Was Deja Taylor’s punishment justified?
Jimmy Ellenson, one of Taylor’s attorneys, said Taylor had been in a local detention center since Nov. 15, 2023, without the treatment or resources she needed to address her substance use and maintain her mental health.
In 2023, Ellenson said the best route for her would have been for the Federal Bureau of Prisons to send her to a nine-month residential drug treatment program and then to a halfway house in Newport News for six additional months. But those options were not guaranteed.
“She’s getting no services right now. She’s just wasting time,” Ellenson told Capital B in 2023.
The family is repeating a cycle. Taylor was raised by her grandfather. Her mother was “around” and her father was incarcerated, Ellenson said. By the time she was 15, she had turned to drugs, mostly marijuana.
For the next decade, her addiction continued and her mental health was on a decline following a series of miscarriages before giving birth to her son.
And there were other challenges.
During an April 2021 traffic stop for speeding in Williamsburg, Virginia, police smelled and spotted marijuana as well as edibles that looked like Rice Krispies Treats next to her son, who was 4 years old at the time. She denied knowing about the drugs, and another person in the car claimed ownership of a backpack filled with drugs.
That same year, her son, who Taylor said has ADHD, had a rocky start entering into Richneck Elementary School in Newport News. There were documented behavior-related incidents that kept him out of the classroom for the majority of pre-K and kindergarten, and he did not have an Individualized Education Program in place.
In 2022, just months before the shooting, Taylor filled out a firearm permit application and denied being an “unlawful user of marijuana or other controlled substances.” The application plus the amount of marijuana found inside her home weeks after the shooting led to her federal charges.
“She said ‘no’ that she wasn’t addicted to drugs when we all knew she was,” Ellenson said. “Really, I don’t know if Deja herself knew to what extent she had a substance abuse problem for her to admit she knew it.”
Virginia legalized recreational and medical marijuana in 2021. The state does not have any laws on storing a firearm in a lock box, but it is illegal to leave a loaded gun around a child under 14.
What about alternatives?
Mitchell argues that in cases like Taylor’s, alternatives to incarceration such as restorative justice practices are designed to create a dialogue between the parties involved while preventing more parents from being funneled through the prison system.
“Could we argue that it was a case of negligence? Yes, but I also think we have to consider, again, the larger toll, a deeper toll, that her incarceration is going to have, not only on herself, but her child,” Mitchell said.
“Over the last decade, problem-solving courts have continued to expand in the federal system,” with alternatives to incarceration programs, according to a December 2021 federal report. Probation, parole, community service, and drug-treatment courts are other options.
In 2022, 80% of the over 2 million incarcerated women were mothers. While stints in jail are less than a year, “even a short jail stay can be devastating, especially when it separates a mother from children who depend on her,” according to a report by the Prison Policy Initiative.
“Research on depression and aggression among children of incarcerated parents … found that Black children and children who have both a mother and a father incarcerated exhibited significant increases in depression,” according to an article published in the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice Journal.
Incarceration does little to address mental illness and substance use disorder, “and often, it compounds the problems. The impact of this is that when women leave incarceration, their health is often worse than when they entered,” according to a study released by the National Black Women’s Justice Institute.
More than half of the 21 Black women who were formerly incarcerated in California and participated in the study reported having a “mental illness, substance use disorder, or both, which they directly connected to traumatic experiences before incarceration and the exacerbating effect of the carceral environment itself.”
What happens next?
Taylor’s grandfather, Calvin Taylor, a military veteran and retired correction officer, was granted full custody of her son.
After pleading guilty in June 2023, Deja Taylor’s pretrial release conditions, which included substance abuse counseling, continued. It was her chance to prove to the judge that she wasn’t addicted to drugs. She was facing up to 25 years in federal prison, and she still kept testing positive for drugs.
In June 2023, Calvin Taylor told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that his great-grandson had been doing well at a new school and that the child’s father and his granddaughter had “limited involvement” since he was granted full custody.
“They’re always gonna be his parents, but until they can get their lives together, that’s how we are gonna be,” Calvin Taylor told the news outlet.
During her federal incarceration, the judge sentenced Deja Taylor to a correctional facility with similar programs including parenting classes they tried to have her participate in without incarceration, but the judge had his hands tied, Ellenson told Capital B in 2023.
After the now 28-year-old mom’s release from state prison in May 2026, she will serve two years of probation that includes mandatory substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and parenting classes.
This story has been updated.