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”.
Y’all are acting outraged while this boy could’ve stopped the Sandy Hook-shooting. It’s only due to unlucky circumstances that he happened to shoot his teacher instead. Wrong place, wrong time. Poor boy.
Upvote because this response seems about as reasonable as the “put him down” responses.
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I scrolled past this but saw the headline and then BBC and it caught my attention. I scrolled back because this is some strange shit for the UK. I then started reading and saw it say the US and stopped reading. Nothing more to read here.
Well thanks for sharing. Glad to know how you scroll.
See yall next school shooting
Do I have time to eat before?
Yea, they’re on summer break still. Once classes start back up we’ll have them daily again
What. The fuck.
We need to
talk about Kevinpunt this little shitweasel.
‘In kindergarten choking her till she could not breath’ BITCH that’s a 5 year old fuck him up.
I think you woefully underestimate how much it’s drilled into teachers’ heads not to use any sort of physical force at all
Very, very high chance she loses her job and is potentially charged with assault of she had
Loses her job and also can’t get a job anywhere else. It’d essentially be the end of her career
Yeah, rather get choked to death by a baby boy than that!
True, but I think that’s still better than being dead.
Idgaf. If a five year old is choking me till the point I can’t breath there will be (appropriate) consequences. He spends 8 hours a day at that school you bet your ass he will behave in my class.
You can just say you have absolutely zero experience in the classroom, it’s OK.
When I was in classroom nobody was ever choking the teacher and if they tried, they would get dropped kicked like a soccer ball.
Tell that to the teacher from the middle school I went to that got fired for pushing a kid that tried to stab him with a pencil
Sounds like a shiti employer, really. Either get a new one or switch career. At this point I don’t get why one would want to be a teacher in the US. Bad pay, zero respect from parents or admins, plus homework as an adult
Jfc, these people need to be on anti work and work reform to start regaining dignity.
If society cannot respect the teacher, fuck such shiti society IMHO.
Almost like it’s a sad reality out there.
Why the downvotes? He’s right. Some brainwashed dumbfucks in this thread. Teach your kids manners otherwise other people are very fast fed up with the behavior of your kid.
Dropkick that little motherfucker. Ciaooo see you again with your parents after school and if your kid doesn’t behave next time he needs to find another school.
Hello USA. I didn’t know you were awake.
We know ydgaf, that’s why you keep leaving these braindead comments. The world in your head has little correlation with the one we find ourselves living in.
What in the hell?
Murica
FrEeDoM
Kids psychologically profile the same as a psychopath. This is because kids usually haven’t developed their sense of empathy yet.
The intentional shooting itself is all I need to know that the little kid has really significant issues that need to be treated. The fact that he bragged about it isn’t news; he’s six, I’m not expecting him to act maturely about anything.
My mom works in a school as a therapist for very mentally ill children. There are a few that have been sent to the bad kids school because of violence. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me one of the kids shot someone.
This sounds like a villain origin story.
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It’s probably a case of her thinking she can not defend herself out of fear of backlash. Teachers have been charged with assault when defending themselves from students.
I don’t promote violence but someone is attacking you, you have defend yourself. If that leads to charges so be it.
losing your career and being sued into oblivion by the kids parents sounds like a real good choice!
Well then get chocked by a child like a fucking amature.
Yeah I don’t get this she couldn’t do anything because she would get sued is such a reddit argument its a small child you don’t have to punch the kid just push them away and hold your arms out don’t sit there like a dumb ass and let a 4 year old strangle you to death
She’s alive, so she didn’t let him strangle her to death. But you bet your ass, any teachers who want to stay in the profession are waiting until there’s no other choice before putting their hands on a kid, even if it’s just to push them away. And she was like a year away from retirement? Definitely not doing anything to mess that up; many teachers still get pensions if they retire.
Kids still get spankings in a lot of the country no teacher would get in trouble for putting there hands on a kid choking them
lol, ok. Must be nice living in fantasy land where all consequences can be dealt with later.
So two observations, first how is leaving a loaded gun in reach of a 6 year old not more than a misdemeanor? I don’t even let my kid near a slingshot or pelet gun unsupervised much less anything lethal.
Second, “choking her to the point she could not breath”? How big is this kid that this is even possible? That’s no small feat for a full grown adult if you’re talking bare handed much less a young child.
That the kid at that age even thought that was a thing to do says all too much about the influences on them. We need another Mr. Rogers here…
Second, “choking her to the point she could not breath”? How big is this kid that this is even possible? That’s no small feat for a full grown adult if you’re talking bare handed much less a young child.
I assume it was an old lady because the article mentions it was a retired teacher. Considering the kid has only been alive 6 years, it probably happened the year prior, so if the teacher was able to retire that soon after, they probably were in their 90s or early hundos
That’s possible, to that end the pre-school my youngest attended had a rule of two teachers per class so at any given time one could lead the class and the other watch for troubles since young kids can be volatile at times if they want something right now. Not good if the kid is that misguided to the point of outright violence, but at the same time kids will climb the cubbords sometimes and you need to be able to take them off or catch them if they fall. If the teacher is not physically capable of that then they need an assistant in the room.
That’s exactly the rhetoric that makes it so hard for men to talk about domestic violence.
Confused…? Which part?
I think he’s objecting to “why couldn’t you stop someone smaller and weaker from abusing you?”.
Maybe, but there’s stopping an adult with an actual intent to harm you versus just picking up someone you could probabbly carry under one arm. At some point if you can’t do that well, please don’t get a large dog or such for a pet I guess?
Additionally, the thought was more ‘how can a kid that small even muster the strength to strangle someone to begin with’.
The point is that it’s not about “strength”. And no matter your intend, as long as you picture such events as “whoever is physically stronger wins”, you are destructive.
Why do you think it’s hard for a man to fight back a female partner?
Why do you think it’s hard for a teacher to fight back one of their pupils?
How easy is it for those people to talk about this trauma, if people like you go: “I don’t understand how you can be threatend by someone you can pick up under your arm lmao.”?
So I’m not inclined to get drug off on some distraction with an easily offended sort over the morally correct phrasing or how one should think, but I’ll put it as this.
1: Abuse comes in many forms, not just physical, focusing the notion of keeping it secret and being difficult to talk about on the one most outwardly visible face of it detracts from the larger battles happening in the emotive and mental abuse space.
2: There is a material difference in physical assault perpetuated by an adult or mature child which has a level of malice and intent behind it and that done by a child which, although I’m speculating since it’s not listed, would have been doing this bare handed and without a properly formed mindset to fully comprehend their own actions. A small child at that age likely weighs somewhere under 60 pounds and has hands of relevant size. At some point a person simply needs to be able to fend for themselves or be considered incapable of dealing with a situation, be that in physically resisting or in correcting the behavior of the kid to begin with.
A teacher shouldn’t have to plan for a kid bringing a gun to class, that’s fully on the parents being negligent, but if you work with kids, particularly young ones that haven’t properly learned control of their emotions yet, it should be expected that you’re going to get kicked in the shins here and again and be capable and prepared to deal with that.
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They say it’s so teachers can protect themselves and their students (from the consequences of failed gun laws) but really, it’s just because they have to say something – and it can’t be the truth.
At a civilian level, most of them simply don’t care. They’re confident it will never be their kids and they consider a stranger’s children less important than their own easy access to firearms.
But they can’t say that, so they make flowery comments about freedom, defending their family and how they’re the ones keeping America out of the hands of tyrants, even though they staunchly support tyrants and wouldn’t even wear a mask to protect other people, let alone fight and die for them.
On the corporate and political level, there’s good money and easy votes in guns. It’s no different to tobacco, asbestos and everything else they fought to profit from even as it killed people.
But they can’t say that either. So instead, they coordinate what today’s scapegoat is going to be. Computer games? Too many doors? Timid police? Whatever keeps the money flowing.
The important part for all of them is demanding other solutions are tried before gun control. They know they won’t work, but it will buy them more time and the more time they waste, the better.
That’s why their current solution is “free, universal healthcare for everybody in America, including 5 year olds and people who don’t want treatment, done to a standard far beyond even the most cutting edge of medicine, completely and permanently curing people in less time than it takes to buy a gun”.
Which they then block anyway, because it’s important their conditions for supporting gun control are never met.
@LarryTheMatador @PoliticalAgitator
Yup. I followed them because of this.
there’s good money and easy votes in guns.
Despite it’s current reputation, it’s easy to forget how powerful the NRA was in the eighties and nineties. Zero republicans could get on a ballet without the NRA rating seal of approval.
There’s a massive amount of inertia in American politics.
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NRA checks will continue to arrive on schedule and in the agreed upon amount.
It was $8 million a year until 2012, after which it doubled to $16 million a year. I wonder what could have happened to require such a substantial increase in bribes?
Yes but they seem to be forgetting the very obvious thing that will happen (and has already happened) when you have more guns being brought into schools, even by those you (misguidedly) trust.
For some reason they don’t seem to be able to get that not having guns in or anywhere near a school is the best way not to have shootings at schools.
That article highlights just one obvious problem. Here are others:
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We can’t even rely on our cops to shoot only the people who need to be shot. Now we’re going to trust that teachers will be able to perform better under those stresses - which may include the need to shoot one of their own students - than cops do? How on earth does that track?
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Legal gun owners go on shooting sprees too. Really easy for you when you are already whitelisted to be showing up to school armed.
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A variation on the article I linked: Careless teacher with a gun leaves it in the bathroom and kid finds it and shoots themselves and/or others with it instead of turning it in.
But the solution could be as simple as the gun is locked and retrievable by the teacher either by biometrics or code. It could also trigger a school wide alarm if the firearm is released so it would give other classes a chance to lock down. The option is there if the teacher needs it they don’t need to be having the gun on themselves.
Sure, if none of the teachers ever break the rules or are careless with that system in any way, it will prevent everything except the part where we expect teachers to be better than cops at target identification and using a firearm under stress, and also expect them to be willing to shoot a student they know personally.
We’re also expecting them to accept all the trauma that comes with that, while getting paid shit, and having chosen a career in education.
That’s why I said the option would be there if they chose it. They wouldn’t be required to but it would be nice that they had the option to fight for their life.
Better gun control would mean there would be a much lower chance they would ever be in a situation where they need to fight for their life.
Legal gun owners go on shooting sprees too.
And teachers have to deal with an incredibly stressful situation all day which ever-restrictive Republican education laws in many states make even more stressful. Put guns in the mix and one of them will go postal one day.
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No, no, no, you’ve gotten it all wrong. We need armed teachers to shoot dangerous books.
There’s no way we can ban all of the dangerous books, so we need teachers to shoot them out of the hands of our precious youth.
Not just teachers: this obviously wouldn’t have happened, if all the other students had been armed, too.
The only thing that can stop a bad 6-year-old with a gun is a good 6-year-old with a gun.
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Bringing whole new level to “Kindergarten Cop” I don’t think Arny could have predicted this
Maybe because of the tumor?
Eets naht ah toomaaah!
It’s not a tumor
Tbf most Westernized nations have utterly starved any mental health care initiatives of needed funding, to the point that shitty things like this happen.
I guess you haven’t been to non-westernized nation’s mental health care facilities?
Great “article” BBC. Let’s vilify the 6 year old who is too young to be any more fucked up than his home environment has directly caused him to be or to otherwise grasp the finality of these actions, with only a brief mention of the mother, and no discussion at all about the easy access to guns which lies at the root of every such story.
This article clearly paints a picture of how the adults in this child’s life clearly ignored their obvious violent tendencies.
5/6 year olds don’t behave like that unless their parents have created that behavior through neglect or abuse. Given the other things we know about the mother from quality reporting, that tracks.
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@be_excellent_to_each_other @STRIKINGdebate2
What if the parents don’t have the $1000’s to spend on mental healthcare for the child?
'Murica seems to forget that there are hundreds of thousands of people who can’t afford insurance while working $7 per hour jobs.
