Mother of 6-year-old boy who shot first-grade teacher pleads guilty to felony child neglect

Posted for: Hauviette

The mother of the 6-year-old boy who shot and seriously injured his first-grade teacher has pleaded guilty to felony child neglect.

Deja Taylor entered her guilty plea in a Virginia court Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. Court records show that a stipulation was filed in Newport News Circuit Court.

In January, Taylor’s son, then a first-grader at Richneck Elementary School, used a handgun he brought from home to shoot teacher Abigail Zwerner in a classroom full of children on Jan. 6, 2023. Bullets struck Zwerner’s hand and torso, critically injuring her, and she had to spend nearly two weeks in the hospital. She has also undergone multiple surgeries.

Taylor was charged in April. As part of Taylor’s plea, Virginia prosecutors agreed to drop a misdemeanor charge of reckless storage of a firearm, the AP reported. Prosecutors have reportedly said they will not seek a jail sentence longer than six months, although the felony neglect charge carries a potential five-year prison sentence. A judge will decide Taylor’s fate at a sentencing hearing scheduled for Oct. 27.

According to the AP, the child had told authorities that he got the gun by climbing onto a drawer to reach the top of a dresser, where the gun was stored in his mother’s purse. Taylor had initially told police that she believed her gun was secured with a trigger lock, but federal investigators reportedly never found a trigger lock in their searches.

The stipulation of facts in the plea agreement says that there was no gun safe or trigger lock found during searches by authorities, the AP reported.

Before the shooting, the child had been under a specialized education plan that required one of his parents to attend school with him. The day of the shooting was the first day that the boy was not accompanied by one of his parents, and it came the day after he was suspended for allegedly throwing a cellphone to the ground.

Taylor previously pleaded guilty to federal charges of being “an unlawful user of a controlled substance” — specifically, marijuana — while “knowingly possess[ing] a firearm,” according to federal court documents. That charge, which federal prosecutors have also used against Hunter Biden, was recently deemed improper by a panel of federal judges in the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Taylor is set to be sentenced on the federal charge on Oct. 18.

Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn filed a motion to assign a special grand jury to this investigation to determine if anyone else should face charges related to the shooting, Norfolk ABC affiliate WVEC reported — a move that Zwerner’s lawyer supports.

“As the criminal probe widens, our focus remains on justice for Abby and holding the school system accountable for failing to act on warnings the boy had a gun,” attorney Diane Toscano said in a statement.

Zwerner, through Toscano, has sued the Newport News School District for $40 million, alleging that school administrators ignored several warnings about the boy’s potential dangerousness.

The school has argued that the case should be dismissed because Zwerner was injured while at work, and the risk of being shot is part of the job of being a teacher.