The six-year-old student who shot his teacher in the US earlier this year, boasted about the incident saying “I shot [her] dead”, unsealed court documents show.
While being restrained after the shooting at a Virginia school, the boy is said to have admitted “I did it”, adding “I got my mom’s gun last night”.
His teacher, Abigail “Abby” Zwerner - who survived - filed a $40m (£31.4m) lawsuit earlier this year.
The boy has not been charged.
The boy’s mother, however, Deja Taylor, has been charged with felony child neglect and misdemeanour recklessly leaving a loaded firearm as to endanger a child.
In Ms Zwerner’s lawsuit, filed in April, she accuses school officials of gross negligence for ignoring warning signs and argues the defendants knew the child "had a history of random violence
The documents also mention another incident with the same student while he was in kindergarten. A retired teacher told police he started “choking her to the point she could not breathe”.
This isn’t a “troubled” 6 year old. Troubled kids don’t have consistent patterns of aggressive activity and consistent noted attacks on students and staff. This child should NOT be in a normal school or classroom for that matter. It’s not really defeatist as much as it is someone who’s worked in the school system long enough to know that our priorities shouldn’t be on keeping this kid from others when he’s a threat. The ultimate failure falls on the principal/admin for not searching the student properly and listening to staff and student warnings, but there’s also a failure that we have a system that puts children like this with “normal” functioning children. At the end of the day we sometimes have to make calls for the greater society that feel like throwing our hands up but are really working towards a more perfect system.
Yeah, “troubled” was probably not the right word for me to use. This kid is beyond troubled. You make some good points, especially about needing alternate tracks to keeps kids like this away from “normal” kids. You’ve given me some things to think about, thanks!
There’s a balance between the extremes. It’s too early to assume he’s beyond saving, but he also should be kept away from kids and teachers who don’t need this trauma. He needs to be in intensive therapy and it seems like everyone has failed him. I read there was violence in his family, and it’s likely he’s emulating that and he certainly is troubled. He deserves to have someone try. A lot of kids have recovered from what looks like psychopathy.
Yeah. Small children kind of inherently have traits that would be sociopathic/psychopathic in adults. They don’t even realize other people have feelings and thoughts that are different from their own until they’re like 4 and they’re still developing that awareness even at 8 years old. It’s harder to have empathy when you’re barely aware that someone might be feeling differently than yourself. Most have little to no impulse control, are very narcissistic (again, not really internalizing other people have their own thoughts and feelings), and generally will do whatever to get their way. Most of them grow out of it. It’s really the interest in violence that’s unusual; but if that’s what the kid has been exposed to, then it that’s the main issue.
My only thing with it is he went from “counseling, therapy and drugs might help” to he’s a psychopath when he showed no remorse. Which to me is sort of a sign to cut our losses. Or at least move him to an area where we can control it.