A US teacher who was seriously injured when she was shot by a 6-year-old student is showing signs of improvement, the city’s mayor said.
Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones said the condition of the teacher, a woman in her 30s, “is trending positively” as she remains hospitalized.
Police Chief Steve Drew met with the teacher and her family Saturday morning. “He has improved and is currently in stable condition,” police said in a news release.
The boy shot and wounded the teacher with a handgun in a first-grade classroom Friday at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News.
Drew said the shooting was not accidental and was part of an altercation. No students were injured.
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“We didn’t have a situation where somebody was rolling around the school shooting,” Drew told reporters, later claiming the shooting was not an accident. Drew said the student and teacher had met in the classroom.
He said the boy had a gun in the classroom and investigators were trying to figure out where he got it.
“Today our students got a lesson in gun violence,” said Newport News Schools Superintendent George Parker III, “and what guns can do to disrupt, not only an educational environment, but a family, a community”.
Joselin Glover, whose son is in the fourth grade, told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper that she got a message from the school saying one person had been shot and another was in custody. “My heart stopped,” she said. “I was freaking out, really nervous. I’m just wondering if that person was my son.”
A school shooting involving a 6-year-old is extremely rare, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. In 2000, a 6-year-old boy fired a bullet from a .32-caliber handgun inside Buell Elementary near Flint, Michigan, 60 miles from Detroit, hitting 6-year-old Kayla Rolland in the neck , according to an AP article. of the time He died half an hour later.
Students and police gather outside Richneck Elementary School on Friday. Credit: Billy Schuerman/The Virginian-Pilot via AP
Virginia law does not allow children as young as 6 to be tried as adults, and a 6-year-old is too young to be placed in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice if found guilty. A juvenile judge would have the authority, however, to revoke parental custody and place a child under the jurisdiction of the Department of Social Services.
From 2010 to 2021, there were more than 800 school-related shootings involving 1,149 victims.
Thirty percent of those occurred inside the school building, Fox said. “There are students who killed teachers, more typically high school students,” Fox said. “I don’t know of any other cases where a 6-year-old shot a teacher.”