NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Newly unsealed police body-camera footage shows the chaotic moments after a 6-year-old boy shot his first-grade teacher at Richneck Elementary School, capturing the child cursing at the reading specialist restraining him, telling officers he stole the gun from his mother, and declaring he did not care if he went to jail.
The nearly three-minute video, recorded by Newport News Officer Brian Torrez on Jan. 6, 2023, was ordered released this week by a circuit judge after The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press challenged an earlier sealing order. The child’s face is blurred in the public version. Court records identify him only as J.T.
The footage begins as officers enter Classroom 11, still decorated with alphabet charts and colorful student work. Reading specialist Amy Kovac has the boy in a bear hug. Zwerner and about 16 students had already fled. Zwerner collapsed in the school office with a gunshot wound that passed through her left hand and into her chest.
“The gun is there,” Kovac tells arriving officers. “He just admitted that he had one … he had one bullet.” A sheriff’s deputy then announces, “I got a weapon,” pointing to a 9mm Taurus handgun on the floor roughly 15 to 20 feet away. Investigators later said the gun had jammed after a single shot and still held seven additional rounds.
On the recording, the boy repeatedly swears at Kovac and the officers. “Both y’all want a f—ing piece of me,” he says at one point. He also tells them, “My mom had that. I stole that from my mom,” and, “I don’t care if I go to jail.” Kovac, still holding him, tells officers he is 6 years old, had been on a modified schedule, and that this was his first week without his mother accompanying him to school. She also says she had warned the assistant principal earlier that day about a possible threat.
Kovac later testified that the boy punched her and knocked her glasses off. The body camera captures the sound of a strike before a sergeant escorts the child out of the room.
Court records and earlier search-warrant affidavits fill in the minutes before police arrived. Zwerner was seated at a reading table when the boy pulled the handgun from his jacket pocket and fired from about 10 feet away. After the shot, Kovac ran into the classroom, found the boy near his desk with the gun on the floor, and held him until officers arrived. She previously told investigators the child said he “shot that b---- dead” and that he had taken his mother’s gun the night before. Documents say he climbed onto a dresser that morning, removed the firearm from his mother’s purse, and brought it to school in his backpack.
Staff had raised alarms for hours. Teachers and a counselor reported that the boy had shown a gun or claimed to have one. A backpack search turned up nothing. Former assistant principal Ebony Parker was told the weapon might be in the child’s pocket and, according to testimony and civil filings, declined further searches, citing the mother’s expected arrival and limits on who could search a student. Zwerner herself had flagged concerns about the boy’s behavior earlier that day.
A civil jury in November 2025 found Parker grossly negligent and awarded Zwerner $10 million. That verdict has been entered by the trial court and is under appeal; Zwerner has not yet collected the award. In May 2026, a judge dismissed eight felony child-neglect charges against Parker mid-trial, ruling that prosecutors had not shown a crime under Virginia law. The charges were dismissed with prejudice.
The boy’s mother, Deja Nicole Taylor, pleaded guilty to felony child neglect and was sentenced to two years in state prison, above the term jointly recommended by prosecutors and the defense. She also received a 21-month federal sentence related to the firearm purchase and was released from prison in February. The child, now 9 or 10, is in the custody of his great-grandfather in Newport News.
Zwerner has said in court that she thought she was dying after the shot. The bullet remains in her chest. The unsealed video, played for jurors during Parker’s criminal trial before the charges were thrown out, is the most direct public record yet of what officers found inside the classroom once the shooting was over.
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