Several teachers and employees at Richneck Elementary School said they voiced concerns about a student having a gun in school before the 6-year-old shot his first grade teacher one afternoon in early 2023.
They described how they handled the news — from three other students — that the boy had a gun in school that day, and how they reacted when he opened fire.
Surveillance footage showed 18 students running from Classroom 11 — where the shooting took place — to another classroom across the hall, as first grade teacher Abigail Zwerner ran to the school office in search of help.
A surgeon at Riverside Regional Medical Center described the wounds to Zwerner — including a bullet fragment that’s still inside her body. Surgeons can’t remove that bullet, Dr. Alan Chap said, because it’s only two centimeters from her aorta.
And Zwerner’s mother, Julie Zwerner, described the fear she felt when the school principal called to tell her that Abby had been shot. She raced to the hospital.
“Eventually I was told she was in surgery,” Julie said. “So I knew she was still alive … When she saw me come into the room, she said, ‘Mommy.’ I wasn’t called Mommy in years.”
During an eight-day trial underway in Newport News Circuit Court, Zwerner is accusing former Richneck assistant principal Ebony J. Parker of gross negligence, accusing her of failing to take steps when she heard credible reports that the boy was armed.
During opening statements, one of Zwerner’s lawyers, Diane Toscano, said Parker broke written and unwritten promises to protect her teachers.
“It’s Dr. Parker’s job to believe that this is possible, to get to the bottom of it and address it,” Toscano said. Parker did not have the boy physically searched for a gun, and did not call police.
But an attorney for Parker, Daniel Hogan, said “no one could have seen this coming.”
“No one could have imagined that a 6-year-old would have brought a firearm into an elementary school and shot their own teacher.”
Most of the day was taken up by detailed testimony about Jan. 6, 2023.
A Richneck reading specialist, Amy Kovac, said she saw the boy in the morning and he was doing well. “Make good decisions and make Mrs. Kovac proud,” she said she told him.
Later that morning, she said, Zwerner went into Parker’s office to say the 6-year-old had threatened to beat up a kindergartener and was “acting ornery” with a security guard.
But Parker, looking at her computer monitor, did not respond to Zwerner, said Kovac, who was in the office at the time.
“She didn’t look up,” Kovac testified. “No response. I thought it was rude.”
When Zwerner left the office, Parker told Kovac: “Tell her that she can call his mom at any time and she can pick him up earlier.”
Kovac testified that she was in the hallway shortly thereafter when “two little girls” came up to her to tell her that the boy had a gun in his bag.
Kovac said she walked into Zwerner’s classroom, where the student was sitting at a desk near the window. “He was balled up in his seat,” Kovac said, saying she pulled a chair she sat down next to him, with his backpack next to his desk.
“The girls tell me you have a gun in that bag,” she said. “Can I have that bag?”
“No,” the boy replied. “No one is getting that bag.”
The boy also explained that people had been picking on one of his friends, and she replied any student with an issue should tell an adult.
“Do you have a gun in that bag?” Kovac asked again.
“No one is getting that bag,” the boy reiterated.
Newport News Circuit Court Judge Matthew Hoffman sidebars with attorneys during Former Richneck Elementary School teacher Abby Zwerner’s civil lawsuit against the former assistant principal of the school where Zwerner was shot Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, in Newport News court. (Stephen M. Katz / The Virginian-Pilot)
Kovac continued to sit next to the boy during Zwerner’s class, with the boy talking about asking if he could change his shoes for recess. She said yes, and said she left the room to report the matter to Parker about what the girls had told her about the gun.
“I told her that he would not give me the bag, and he was not acting normal,” Kovac said. Bit Parker “nodded” in agreement when she said she was going to be searching the boy’s bag. Kovac said Parker told her to concentrate on testing students who needed make-up testing.
On cross examination, Parker’s lawyer, Hogan, asked Kovac how she could have left the classroom — leaving the boy with free access to a book bag even after other students told her there was a gun inside of it.
Kovac said she was going through proper channels by reporting the matter to Parker.
Kovac dismissed Hogsn’s idea that she could have gotten on her walkie-talkie to alert others about a concern about the gun. “I was not going to cause hysteria,” she said.
Not long after that, Zwerner texted Kovac to say that as her students were lining up for recess, Zwerner saw the student “take something out of his book bag and put it in his jacket pocket.”
Kovac searched the boy’s bag while the students were at recess. She didn’t find a gun, instead finding a math book, a Spider Man puzzle they had made in school and a calculator.
“But he was acting so weird,” Kovac said. She went back to Parker’s office and told her she checked the bag and what she found — but relayed that Zwerner told her she saw the boy moving something from the bag to his pockets.
“Well, he has little pockets,” Kovac responded. Kovac said she was “kind of mad,” and replied that he was wearing a jacket, “and I walked away.”
Kovac went outside during the recess and overhead the other boy telling the shooter to keep his hands in his pocket. Kovac said she again went to Parker and told her the boy needed to be searched, but nothing was done before Kovac needed to leave to test other students.
One of Zwerner’s fellow first-grade teachers, Jennifer West, testified that Zwerner related to her that the 6-year-old and his friend went behind a wall at recess.
West said she was concerned that “something had been hidden,” and when recess was over, she pulled that student in another classroom to press him on what was happening.
“He said (the student) had a gun,” West testified, saying he had shown the boy the bullets. “He was crying and teary eyed …He was visibly scared and worried.”
She said the boy told him that the student would harm him if he said anything.
West called the Richneck office, and music teacher John Sims picked up the phone. West told him about the other boy telling her about the gun. Sims said he relayed that Parker, who said the boy’s backpack “had been searched.”
West called back a few minutes later, asking if the boy’s “person” — apart from his backpack — had likewise been searched. But when Sims walked to Parker’s office to ask her, guidance counselor, Rolonzo Rawles, was already there asking the same thing.
Former Richneck Elementary School counselor Rolonzo Rawles testifies during Abby Zwerner’s civil lawsuit against the former assistant principal of Richneck, where Zwerner was shot by a student, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, in Newport News court. (Stephen M. Katz / The Virginian-Pilot)
Rawles testified that West had asked him to talk to the boy who said the shooter showed him a gun at recess. Rawles said the second boy “was not very coherent” about what he had seen, and Rawles also didn’t think the shooter would have a gun.
But it was such a serious matter, Rawles said, “that we wanted to look into it,” referring to himself, West and Zwerner.
‘Would it be OK if I checked his person?’” Rawles said he asked Parker in her office. But she said no.
“She said we can hold off and wait and maybe when the mom comes to pick him up, we can check” his person, Rawles said. “I didn’t want to step over any boundaries. I wasn’t going to check him without permission.”
He went back to Zwerner’s classroom and told her Parker didn’t want the boy checked.
Not long after, at 1:58 p.m., the boy pulled his gun from his front hoodie pocket and fired at Zwerner, seated about 10 feet away.
“I heard that gunshot and instinctively I walked into that room” Kovac said, with “kids screaming and running out.”
Kovac felt she had a “bubble of God’s protection” around her and walked directly toward the shooter, and “did not fear him.”
“I put my arms around him,” and held him in a corner with her body and legs, as she picked up a phone and called 911.
“This is Richneck, a teacher’s been shot,” she told a police dispatcher. “I have the shooter. Send help.”
Rawles said he went to the classroom, seeing specks of blood on the hallway, then went into the classroom and saw Kovac holding the boy.
He saw the gun on the floor in the classroom and stood next to it to ensure that the boy didn’t come back to retrieve it. He was about to put on plastic gloves when police officers went into the room and picked it up.
At points, Rawles fought back tears as he talked about the shooting itself.
Julie Zwerner, for her part, said her daughter has told her she’s not returning to the classroom. “It saddens me because she was becoming a really good teacher.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
