An editors’ note about the video on this page is at the bottom of this article.
Newport News police officers and sheriff’s deputies rushed to Richneck Elementary School after a 6-year-old student shot his teacher on Jan. 6, 2023.
Abby Zwerner and 16 students had fled Classroom 11, with the teacher collapsing in the school office.
The boy, identified in court only as J.T., was still in the first-grade classroom. Reading specialist Amy Kovac, who rushed into the classroom after the shooting, was holding him back.
Body camera footage from Officer Brian Torrez, obtained by the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot, shows the boy cursing at Kovac and the officers as police entered the classroom adorned with the alphabet and colorful decorations.
“The gun is there,” Kovac tells the officers. “He just admitted that he had one … he had one bullet.” (In fact, there were seven more rounds in the jammed handgun at the time).
“I got a weapon,” a sheriff’s deputy says, finding the firearm on the floor 15 to 20 feet from the boy.
“Both y’all want a f—ing piece of me, b—?!” the boy tells the officers.
“Stop!” Kovac says as she holds him from behind in a bear hug.
“F— you, b—,” he says.
“Leave the gun there,” Torrez says of the 9 mm Taurus handgun. The deputy stands guard next to it.
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“We have the shooter,” another officer says on the police radio.
“I told the (assistant principal) that there was a threat earlier about it,” Kovac tells the officers.
“That (racial slur) retired last year,” the boy says, though it’s not clear to whom he was referring.
“How old is he?” an officer asks.
“He is 6 years old,” Kovac says. “He has been on a modified schedule. His mother is to pick him up at 2:30. This is his first week without his mother coming to school with him.”
Torrez puts on plastic gloves as he gets on the radio.
“1346, myself, and 2347 — and a sheriff’s deputy — are inside Room 11 with the suspect,” the officer says, referring to officers’ badge numbers. “Gun is secure.”
“I called 911 when I heard this,” Kovac says, referring to the gunshot heard down the hallway. “I’m the reading specialist. I came down the hall. She had blood.”
The 6-year-old says something unintelligible, then says, “F— you, b—,” while flashing a middle finger at Kovac.
“We have some small handcuffs?” a police officer asks. Another officer who enters the room asks about the gun and is told it’s on the floor.
“Do you want me to stay?” Kovac asks.
“You can stay for now,” Torrez tells her. “If you feel comfortable … Um, is he OK?”
“He’s fine,” Kovac says. Then she faces the boy and asks: “You fine? Turn around. When you shot the gun, did anything hurt you?”
“No,” the boy says.
“Let me see your hands,” Kovac says, inspecting them.
“Where is the weapon?” another officer asks.
“It’s on the floor,” Kovac says.
“It’s over there, whore,” the boy adds.
“Stop,” Kovac says. “That’s not how we speak to each other.”
“F— you,” he says as she begins to speak. “F— you. F— you, b—.”
“I mean, he does have the gun residue, looks like,” Kovac says, pointing to a white powdery substance on the boy’s hand.
“OK, let’s just not touch his hands or anything, OK?” Torrez says. Another officer asks the boy’s age, and Kovac again says he is 6.
“My mom had that,” the boy says, gesturing toward the handgun. “I stole that from my mom.”
Court documents say that on the morning of the shooting, the 6-year-old climbed onto his mother’s dresser and took the gun out of her purse — then put it in his backpack and took it to school.
“OK, buddy,” a police sergeant says. “What’s your name?”
The answer is muted on the footage.
“If you want a piece of me, come get it on, b—,” the boy says. “I don’t care if you call backup. I don’t care if I go to jail, b—.”
“OK, buddy,” the sergeant says.
“We know you know that language — and you know that’s not appropriate,” Kovac says. “Mrs. Kovac’s NOT happy with that.”
Kovac testified in May that the boy then “punched me, and my glasses went off.” The body camera footage captures what sounds like a punch, but the view is blocked by Torrez’s hands.
“You’re done,” Kovac tells the boy as she gets up, holding her glasses.
“Young man,” the sergeant says, escorting the boy out of the classroom. “Come here. You’re gonna come with me, son.”
Footage shown at trial
Only a few minutes before the police got to the school, the boy removed the gun from a jacket pocket during an afternoon reading class and shot a single round at Zwerner from about 10 feet away.
The bullet struck the teacher’s hand, with a large fragment ended up in her chest, not far from her heart. Zwerner won a $10 million jury verdict against former Richneck assistant principal Ebony Parker last year.
At Parker’s criminal trial in May, the prosecution introduced the body cam footage — nearly three minutes long — as its first exhibit. At the time, the former assistant principal was being charged with eight counts of felony child neglect, accused of ignoring several clear warnings that the boy had a gun in school that day.
Circuit Court Judge Rebecca M. Robinson admitted the video into evidence, allowing it to be played for the jury.
Before the trial resumed the next morning, Robinson told the prosecutor and defense lawyers that she had received “several media requests” for copies of the video, also called Commonwealth’s Exhibit 1.
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“Do the parties have a position to that?” Robinson asked. “As of now, it is open, but not sealed.”
The conversation lasted less than a minute.
“Judge, I would ask to seal it because a minor is depicted in the video,” Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Joshua Jenkins said.
“Your Honor, I support the Commonwealth’s position,” said one of Parker’s lawyers, Curtis Rogers.
“OK, Commonwealth 1 will be marked sealed,” Robinson said.
A couple of days later, Robinson granted a defense motion to strike the prosecution’s case, dismissing all eight charges against Parker before the defense had to make its case.Challenging the sealing
In June, the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot filed a motion to unseal the video, contending Robinson’s sealing order violated First Amendment case law on access to court records.
At a court hearing in July, Parker’s lawyers asked that the video remain sealed. But Jenkins, the prosecutor, said Virginia law “does not support continued sealing.” In the end, Robinson ordered the video unsealed so long as the child’s face is blurred in the footage.
The boy, now 9 or 10, is in the custody of his great-grandfather in Newport News.
The child’s mother, Deja Nicole Taylor, 29, served time in state prison for child neglect and time in federal prison in part for lying on a background-check form when she bought the gun. She was released from prison in February.
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Editors’ note
Editors with the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot deliberated extensively about whether — and how — to publish body camera video of a Richneck Elementary School classroom after a 6-year-old shot his teacher. We have published it now because we believe it is an important part of an event that has had, and will continue to have, wide-ranging effects.
When the court improperly sealed this evidence during a criminal trial, we enlisted legal help to fight the ruling and won release of the video. That, however, wasn’t enough to compel us to publish. In fact, even as we fought to unseal the video, we were unsure if we would decide to publish it. We knew it was vulgar, if nothing else.
That changed after the court sent the video to us to assist with redactions — in this case, blurring to obscure anything that might identify the child or his classmates.
What we saw and heard was affecting, and led us to conclude the video has news value that supersedes its troubling content. As journalists, we are driven to dig at the whys and hows of issues and events, and this material sheds light on an incident that disturbed and saddened so profoundly that it captured national headlines. Also, the legal battles that followed the shooting are far from over and the results of those battles could have far-reaching implications on the community.
Importantly, it tells us something about the life of this child, himself a victim in this saga, and the circumstances educators at Richneck must have faced.
We also concluded that the video should be viewed with as little editing as possible. While blurring was necessary to comply with the court’s order to protect the child’s anonymity, we decided not to remove or obscure any language he used, a deviation from our general editorial standards. We concluded that it was important for our community to be able to choose whether to see the aftermath of the shooting in as unvarnished a fashion as possible.
We understand there will be those who will view publishing this video as exploitive or motivated by business interests. We strongly disagree, but recognize that the video is upsetting. We hope our readers understand that the decision to publish it was not made lightly.