Mother of boy, 6, who shot teacher faces sentencing
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — The mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in Virginia was sentenced Wednesday to 21 months in prison for using marijuana while possessing a firearm, which is illegal under U.S. law.
Deja Taylor’s son took her gun to school and shot Abby Zwerner in her classroom in January, seriously wounding the teacher. Investigators later found nearly an ounce of marijuana in Taylor’s bedroom and evidence of frequent drug use in her text messages and paraphernalia.
Taylor’s conviction in a U.S. court provided the first measure of accountability for the January shooting, which revived a national dialogue on gun violence and roiled the military shipbuilding city of Newport News.
Taylor, 26, still faces a separate state conviction for child neglect in December. And Zwerner is suing the school system for $40 million, claiming administrators ignored multiple warnings that the boy had a gun.
U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis imposed the exact sentence prosecutors requested.
“This case cries out for a prison sentence,” the judge said.
Davis said there was a “direct line” between Zwerner’s wounds and Taylor’s decision to combine heavy marijuana use with gun ownership. Taylor’s son would never have obtained the gun if his mother had followed the law, the judge said.
The other children in Zwerner’s classroom “will grow up in this community … will have to deal with that for the rest of their lives,” Davis added.
Before Taylor was sentenced, Zwerner described the almost incalculable impact the shooting had on her life. She spent nearly two weeks in the hospital after the bullet struck her left hand and chest, breaking bones and puncturing a lung.
Zwerner told the judge she has undergone five surgeries just to try to return movement to her left hand. The psychological costs include post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.
“I have nightmares of blood, gore and death – always involving a firearm,” she said.
Zwerner, who no longer works for the school system, said she has lost her sense of herself and suffered “tremendous financial losses.”
“I feel like I have lost my purpose – I loved children,” she said, adding: “I struggle with deep emotional scars every day.”
Gene Rossi, one of Taylor’s attorneys, read a brief statement from Taylor: “I am deeply sorry and deeply remorseful for my actions.” Taylor said she would feel that remorse “for the rest of my life.”
Taylor’s grandfather, Calvin Taylor, has had full custody of her son, who is now seven, since the shooting in January. He told the judge how sorry he was for what happened to Zwerner.
He said the boy was placed in a first-grade classroom due to the coronavirus pandemic, despite spending only 54 days in a formal school setting, in preschool and kindergarten.
The elder Taylor said the boy is now “doing great” and was “star student of the week” at school last week.
The federal case against Taylor comes at a time when marijuana is legal in many states, including Virginia, while many Americans own firearms.
Some U.S. courts in other parts of the country have ruled against federal law banning drug users from owning guns. But the law remains in effect in many states and has been used to indict others, including Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
Federal prosecutors in Taylor’s case had argued that her “chronic, persistent and … life-affecting abuse extends this case far beyond any occasional and/or recreational use.”
“This case is not a marijuana case,” they wrote in a letter to the court. “It is a case that underscores the inherently dangerous nature and circumstances that arise from the corrosive cocktail of combining consistent and long-term controlled substance use with a deadly firearm.”
Taylor agreed to a negotiated guilty plea in June. She was convicted of using marijuana while owning a gun, and of lying about her drug use on a federal form when she bought the gun.
Taylor’s lawyers had asked the judge for probation and house arrest. They argued that Taylor needs counseling for issues such as schizoaffective disorder, a condition that shares symptoms with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
They also said she needed treatment for marijuana addiction.
“Addiction is a disease and incarceration is not the cure,” her lawyers wrote to the court.
Taylor’s attorneys also argued that the U.S. Supreme Court could eventually strike down the federal ban on drug users from owning guns. For example, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in August that drug users should not be automatically barred from owning guns.
Other lower courts have upheld the ban, and the Justice Department has appealed the 5th Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to hear the case.
Federal law generally prohibits people from possessing firearms if they have been convicted of a crime, committed to a mental institution or are an unlawful user of a controlled substance, among other things.
Taylor’s son told authorities he obtained the gun from his mother by climbing a drawer to reach the top of a dresser drawer, where the firearm was in his mother’s purse. Taylor initially told investigators that she secured her gun with a trigger lock, but investigators never found one.
It wasn’t the first time Taylor’s gun had been fired in public, prosecutors wrote. Taylor shot her son’s father in December after seeing him with his girlfriend.
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Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington contributed to this report.