Dive Brief:
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Parents of Sante Fe High School shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis are not liable for the actions of their son, who killed 10 people and wounded 13 others in a 2018 attack at the Texas school, a jury found last week, per local reporting. The civil case was brought by a victim’s parents, who sought to hold the shooter’s parents accountable in a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit.
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The shooter's parents sought to bring the Santa Fe Independent School District into the case as a contributor to the damages sought. However, Judge Jack Ewing, who presided over the case in Galveston, Texas, denied their request to implicate the district.
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The jury ultimately held Dimitrios Pagourtzis and online gun and ammunition retailer Lucky Gunner responsible for the shooting, awarding the victim's parents $330 million in damages, according to their lawyers.
Dive Insight:
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs filing against Pagourtzis’ parents claimed that they "failed to teach their son any respect for life whatsoever" and "negligently and grossly negligently failed to secure their weapons in a reasonable and prudent way." The shooter's parents also didn't provide him with mental health counseling, plaintiffs said in the suit.
"If parents know a child has a mental illness … it is that parent's job to get that child help," said plaintiff attorney Clint McGuire in closing statements on Aug. 16, after a three-week trial. "They also knew … that it is their responsibility to safely store their guns."
However, defendant attorney Lori Laird said that plaintiffs are "feeling that we need to blame somebody for what happened."
"We all want to believe that there's consequence for your actions," Laird said. "Unfortunately, life is not that black and white."
While the shooter was held liable in the civil case decided last week, his criminal case for capital murder has been on pause since November 2019, when he was committed to a mental health institution and declared incompetent to stand trial, according to the Texas Tribune.
"Mental illness is an unseen, unknown tidal wave that can come and destroy not only the individual's life that is afflicted with the mental illness, but everyone around him," said Laird in closing arguments for the civil case. "And that's what's happened in this case."
In recent years, school shootings have led to lawsuits against parents, school districts and firearm companies.
In the Robb Elementary School mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers, parents of victims sought $27 billion in damages in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District. That case, filed in 2022, is still in progress.
More recently, Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of a shooter at Michigan's Oxford High School, were each found guilty in a criminal lawsuit on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. That case was the first in which the parents of a school shooter were sentenced on criminal charges and resulted in a 10-15 year prison sentence for each parent.
