A year after she was shot by her 6-year-old student in a Virginia classroom, former teacher Abby Zwerner said she still worries about the other children who saw it happen, and wonders how they’re faring.
Wounded by a bullet that struck her hand and chest and punctured a lung, Zwerner rushed the other first-graders into the hallway before she collapsed in the elementary school’s office.
“I hope that they are enjoying school, enjoying their second-grade year,” Zwerner, 26, told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper. “I hope that they’re still kind to their classmates, kind to teachers. I hope that they still have happiness, and that their happiness wasn’t completely stripped away.”
[Researcher David Riedman, founder of a database that tracks U.S. school shootings dating back to 1970] said Saturday that he’s only aware of three other shootings caused by 6-year-old students in the time period he’s studied. Those include the fatal shooting of a fellow student in 2000 in Michigan and shootings that injured other students in 2011 in Texas and 2021 in Mississippi
Maybe not, at least if we don’t know the exact age at least to the month