The six-year-old boy brought a pistol to school on Jan. 6 and shot the teacher in the chest. She now wants to sue the school board.
In the case of the first grader who shot his teacher at an elementary school in the United States and seriously injured her, the first consequences are coming. The School Board of the small town of Newport News, Virginia, fired the district’s public school superintendent on Wednesday night. The vice principal of Richneck Elementary School, where the incident took place, has also resigned, a local broadcaster reported.
The six-year-old boy brought a pistol to school on Jan. 6 and shot the teacher in the chest. The 25-year-old suffered serious injuries. Nobody got hurt except her. According to the police, the teacher managed to get all the students out of the classroom. The teacher is on the mend, her lawyer said on Wednesday. The bullet is still in the victim’s body and recovery will take a long time, a lawyer said.
Action against school administration
Now the teacher wants to sue the school board, which she accuses of serious omissions. Concerned teachers alerted school officials “three times within hours” on the day of the crime that the six-year-old was carrying a gun and threatening others, the victim’s lawyer said on Wednesday. The school board played down the warnings and did not react.
According to NBC reports, shortly before the crime, the teacher wrote to a person close to him in a text message that the boy had a gun in his backpack and that the school board was not doing anything about it. According to police information, the shooting was preceded by an argument. The incident took place in a classroom.
After the crime, it became known that the gun belonged to the boy’s mother. According to the police, she had legally acquired the gun and kept it at home. There the student took the gun and took it to school in a backpack. The police repeatedly emphasized that the act was not an accident, but that the boy deliberately shot the teacher.
Virginia law prohibits storing a loaded firearm where it is accessible to children under age 14. School incidents involving shooters so young are also rare in the United States. According to an organization cited by the New York Times, there have been 16 cases involving shooters under the age of ten since 1970. Children as young as six were involved in three of them, and two of those three incidents were recorded as accidental.
Events in the Newport News underscore the continuing threat of gun violence in America’s schools. In May, 19 children and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
(APA/dpa)