The six-year-old student who shot his teacher in the US earlier this year, boasted about the incident saying “I shot [her] dead”, unsealed court documents show.
While being restrained after the shooting at a Virginia school, the boy is said to have admitted “I did it”, adding “I got my mom’s gun last night”.
His teacher, Abigail “Abby” Zwerner - who survived - filed a $40m (£31.4m) lawsuit earlier this year.
The boy has not been charged.
The boy’s mother, however, Deja Taylor, has been charged with felony child neglect and misdemeanour recklessly leaving a loaded firearm as to endanger a child.
In Ms Zwerner’s lawsuit, filed in April, she accuses school officials of gross negligence for ignoring warning signs and argues the defendants knew the child "had a history of random violence
The documents also mention another incident with the same student while he was in kindergarten. A retired teacher told police he started “choking her to the point she could not breathe”.
Having actually worked around troubled youth and seen literally 100’s of children move through the system, I don’t think you could be more wrong than you are. Prior to working with troubled youth I assumed it was more like 50/50 environment/genetics. I’m completely convinced it’s almost entirely environmental. In nearly 100% of the cases I’ve seen troubled children, they had parents that were doing something profoundly wrong. Whether it be neglect, violence, sexual abuse, etc, there was always something extremely concerning. I think it is actually incredibly rare for a child to end up severely messed up without extreme “help” from the parents getting there.
The problem with your anecdotal evidence is that what you experience can simply be the consequence of children only ending up in the system when they have a troublesome environment.