Newly Unsealed Bodycam Shows the Chaos After a 6-Year-Old Shot His Teacher — and Every Warning the School Ignored

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — The footage starts in a patrol car. An officer is driving fast toward Richneck Elementary School, lights presumably flashing, and he is praying out loud: "Heavenly Father, keep our officers safe, keep our students safe, let us make the decisions we need to make." That is what a school shooting sounds like before anyone knows how bad it is — a grown man talking to God because there is nothing else to do with the adrenaline except aim it somewhere.

That bodycam footage, from the morning of January 6, 2023, was unsealed on October 6 — nearly four years after a 6-year-old first-grader brought a 9mm handgun to school and shot his teacher in her classroom. It shows what came after the single gunshot that made this case infamous: officers sprinting into the building, children being marched out of classrooms in lines, a sergeant keeping his voice deliberately cheerful — "We're doing great, keep marching!" — for kids who had just heard gunfire in their elementary school. Another clip shows an officer high-fiving children as they file out. The tenderness of it is almost harder to watch than the chaos.

The teacher was Abby Zwerner. She was 25. The bullet went through her left hand — the hand she threw up, witnesses said — and into her chest, where it remains to this day, lodged inches from her heart. On the witness stand during her civil trial, Zwerner told jurors the last thing she remembers from the school that day: "I thought I was dying. I thought I had died. I thought I was either on my way to heaven or in heaven. Then it all went black."

Read that again. A 25-year-old woman, in front of a classroom of six-year-olds, shot by one of them, bleeding out while believing she was already dead. That is the human center of this story, and everything else — the lawsuits, the dismissed charges, the administrative finger-pointing — orbits around it.

Because here is the part that turns this from a tragedy into a scandal: people warned the school. Not vaguely. Not after the fact. Before the shooting, on the day of the shooting, multiple staff members told administrators that the 6-year-old might have a gun.

According to Zwerner's $40 million lawsuit against former assistant principal Ebony Parker, the warnings stacked up like this: the guidance counselor raised concerns. The music teacher raised concerns. The reading specialist raised concerns. Each of them, independently, flagged that the child might be carrying a weapon. And the lawsuit alleges Parker — the administrator with the authority to act — did not. No lockdown. No search of the child's backpack. No call to police. The gun stayed where it was, and a first-grader carried it into Abby Zwerner's classroom.

That allegation is the entire engine of the $40 million gross negligence suit. It is not a claim that the school should have predicted the unpredictable. It is a claim that the school was told, specifically and repeatedly, and did nothing. There is a canyon of difference between those two things, and Zwerner's lawyers intend to make a jury stare into it.

The footage unsealed this week lands in the middle of that fight. It does not show the shooting itself — bodycams captured the response, not the classroom. But it shows the cost in a way testimony sometimes can't: small children being led down hallways by armed officers, a department's best tactical sergeant using a sing-song voice to keep first-graders calm, a police chief later choking up describing it. Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew told reporters the praying officer was a veteran with a family of his own, and that watching him run toward the school was "very fitting." "I think that's what officers do every day," Drew said. He's right, and it shouldn't have to be said about an elementary school.

So where does the accountability stand? Unevenly. The criminal case against Ebony Parker — felony child neglect charges over her alleged failure to act on the warnings — was dismissed by a judge, who tossed the case and ended the criminal prosecution tied to the shooting. Parker was heard sobbing in court when the dismissal came down. The civil case, Zwerner's $40 million suit, is where the negligence claims now live or die.

The child's mother, Deja Taylor, was convicted in connection with the case — the gun the 6-year-old brought to school was hers. She has faced both federal and state consequences for the unsecured firearm and related charges. As for the child himself: he is a minor, six years old at the time, and the law treats him as what he is — a child, not a criminal defendant. His name has never been part of the public record in the way the adults' names have, and it shouldn't be.

Which leaves the hardest question sitting exactly where it has sat for nearly four years: how does a 6-year-old get a loaded 9mm into a first-grade classroom after three separate adults warned the school it might happen? The bodycam footage gives us the aftermath in vivid detail — the prayer, the sprint, the marching lines of small children, the high-fives. What it can't give us is the hour before the gunshot, when the warnings were allegedly sitting on an administrator's desk. That hour is what the $40 million lawsuit is about. That hour is what the dismissed criminal charges were about. And that hour is the reason this footage, unsealed this week, still has the power to make people angry.

Abby Zwerner still carries the bullet. Let that be the last image, not the bodycam. A woman in her twenties with a piece of metal in her chest, inches from her heart, because the adults in charge of a school allegedly couldn't be bothered to check a backpack. The officers ran toward the school. Somebody should have acted before they had to.