Parents, students reveal new details about teacher shot by six-year-old in class

Parents and students at a school where a grade one teacher was shot by a six-year-old have revealed what happened in the classroom.

The first-grade teacher in Virginia who was shot by her six-year-old student was about to confiscate the gun when the child pulled the trigger.

“She was going to confiscate it — and that’s when he shot,” Brittaney Gregory, whose son was in the class, told the Washington Post.

Abby Zwerner, 25, was shot about 2pm Friday at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. She was listed in serious but stable condition at Riverside Regional Medical Centre, the paper reported.

The teacher has been hailed as a hero for warning the other kids to flee when the shooting erupted.

The six-year-old has been taken into custody after the shocking incident, which Police Chief Steve Drew said resulted from a fight and was “not an accidental shooting”.

It was unclear what sparked the fight or how the boy managed to get hold of the weapon.

Abby Zwerner, 25, of Williamsburg, Virginia, was shot intentionally by a student Friday.

Zwerner was trying to confiscate the gun and has been hailed a hero.

Gregory said that when the teacher told the children to run, they fled to another teacher’s classroom and remained under lockdown.

The mum described Zwerner as her son’s favourite teacher, who would leave notes in his backpack.

“I hope you had a great day,” Gregory said the teacher wrote in one. “I want you to know your smile is contagious,” another said, according to the parent.

Gregory said her son is “still in shock” and has nightmares from the shooting.

“He normally sleeps in his own room but the night of the shooting he came into my room. He was talking in his sleep, saying we got to get out of here,” she told the paper, adding that she plans to take her son to a therapist.

Gregory said she found out about the shooting when a neighbour asked her if she saw a report on TV.

“What school?” she said she asked. “‘Your son’s school. They said it was the first grade’,” the neighbour told her, she said.

“My heart instantly dropped,” Gregory said.

When she arrived, police said no kids had been hurt. “Not physically, but this is going to scar him mentally,” she said.

When she was finally reunited with her son, she said “you could tell on his face what he was going through. He was a deer in the headlights”.

Brittaney Gregory’s son is a student in Zwerner’s class. Facebook / Brittaney Gregory

Gregory says Zwerner is her son’s favourite teacher. Facebook / Brittaney Gregory

Meanwhile, another student described the frantic moments after the shooting.

“We were doing math … an announcer came on, she was like, ‘Lockdown, I repeat, lockdown’,” fifth-grader Novah Jones, who was in another classroom, told CNN.

“I was scared … it was like my first lockdown and I didn’t know what to do, so I just hid under my desk like everybody was,” she said during an interview that included her mother, Kasheba Jones.

As police raced to the scene, Novah informed her mother about the lockdown.

“I texted her, ‘Mom, help’,” she said.

“I couldn’t breathe, I was in shock,” her mother, Kasheba, told CNN.

Novah said she had “flashbacks” and found it difficult to sleep that night because she worried that the boy “still had the gun and he was going to come to my house”.

The young student who shot Zwerner was taken into custody. ABC4

Andrew Block, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said it is unlikely the shooter could be prosecuted even though there is no minimum age for being charged with a crime in Virginia.

“As a practical matter, it would be next to impossible to prosecute a six-year-old, no matter how serious,” Block, the former director of the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice, told the Washington Post.

He cited the “infancy defence,” in which people under age seven do not have the ability or mental state to form the intent to commit a crime.

“The bigger barrier, presuming the prosecution could overcome that, is all defendants have to be competent to stand trial,” Block told the outlet.

This article was originally published by the New York Post and reproduced with permission