I’ve written about the civil trial of Ebony Parker before. She’s the former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, where Abby Zwerner was a teacher. Zwerner was shot by a 6-year-old who brought his mother’s gun from home, apparently with the intention of shooting Zwerner.
The bullet fired by the child went through her hand and into her chest. She survived after two weeks in the hospital and later sued claiming Parker had been warned four times the child in question had a gun but did nothing about it.
Legally, the case turns on a pretty simple question: Who is responsible in a situation like this? And the defense’s answer to that question has been everyone and also no one in particular. As this case enters its final stage today with closing arguments, what worries me is that this defense argument could be a winner.
At the center of the lawsuit is who gets the blame when children have access to guns and carry out school shootings, which continue to plague the country. As of last week, there were 64 US school shootings this year, 27 of them on K-12 school grounds…
An expert for the defense testified Monday the assistant principal did not breach professional standards or act with indifference.
Dr. Amy Klinger, an expert in education administration and school safety, said it would have been difficult for anyone to foresee the incident and testified the assistant principal’s role is collaborative and school safety is a shared responsibility among all staff.
“No one is the sole person responsible for school safety,” she said.
Parker did not breach professional standards or act with indifference, Klinger said, and it would have been difficult for anyone to foresee the incident.
The language about foreseeing the outcome seems like an intentional effort to confuse the jury. I don’t think any reasonable person believes that elementary school assistant principals have powers to foresee unlikely events. If Parker had been asked the day before is such an event was likely, I’ll stipulate she would have said no.
But the question in this case should be, what did Parker actually do when presented with evidence the unlikely thing had already happened? She was told four separate times that the student may have brought a gun to school. The kid had refused to have a teacher’s aid look in his backpack. He had taken something out of the backpack and showed it to kids on the playground. Two kids reported he had a gun. And Parker’s response was…nothing. She literally did nothing.
The defense argument boils down to this: No one in her position would have believed such claims about a six-year-old with a gun. Or put more simply, she was right to ignore the reports. Even after the fact, when everyone knows she was wrong (and that she could have probably prevented this shooting by acting), the defense is still arguing she was right to do nothing.
This is giving me Coward of Broward vibes. Scot Peterson was the school resource officer who was on duty during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. Instead of heading into the building when he heard gunfire, Peterson took up a position outside, hiding himself behind a barrier and did nothing. He claimed he didn’t know where the shots were coming from and in a 2023 trial he was acquitted of all charges.
This case also reminding me of the Uvalde, Texas shooting where chief of police Pete Arredondo did almost everything wrong, violating training he had received and treating an active shooter like a barricaded suspect. He did this despite the fact that there were people bleeding out in the room with him, including the wife of a fellow officer. That officer came and begged Arredondo to act and was escorted outside. Arredondo then spent an hour looking for a key to a door that wasn’t locked while parents outside were clamoring to get in the building to get their kids out of harms way. His case hasn’t gone to trial yet but there’s a chance a jury could give him a pass too.
I’m not saying that Ebony Parker is history’s worst monster. She strikes me as someone completely unprepared for anything outside the normal churn of her job. She’s clearly no hero and the defense argument here is that no one should be expected to be a hero. Maybe a jury will find that convincing but if so it’s going to send a message to everyone at every school that no one is really responsible for the safety of teachers or other kids. If something seems unlikely then it’s okay to ignore it. Not your problem, really.
Parker is still facing multiple criminal counts of endangering children for her inaction that day. So even if she wins here that won’t be the last chance to hold her accountable. But the civil case is widely seen as a trial run for the criminal case. If she gets off here, it’s a signal no one wants to hold her accountable.
It really is amazing though how little is expected of the people in these positions. If something goes wrong and you’re the chief of police or the assistant principal, some defense lawyer will argue nothing is really your fault. And in this case I’m worried some jury will believe them.
This case should go to the jury this week so we may not have to wait long for the outcome.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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