Texas school shooting: Accused’s parents found not negligent

GALVESTON, TEXAS –

The parents of a former student accused of killing 10 people in a 2018 school shooting near Houston cannot be held responsible for what happened, a jury decided Monday.

The victims’ lawsuit sought to hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, financially liable for the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018. The lawsuit alleged the parents failed to provide necessary support for their son’s mental health and didn’t do enough to prevent him from accessing their guns.

Jurors did, however, hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis responsible and awarded families more than US$300 million total in damages, including for pain and mental anguish.

Authorities say Pagourtzis fatally shot eight students and two teachers. Pagourtzis, now 23, has been charged with capital murder, but the criminal case has been on hold since November 2019, when he was declared incompetent to stand trial. He is being held at a state mental health facility.

“We need to protect our children. They need to feel safe when they go to school,” Galveston County Court at Law Judge Jack Ewing said after the verdict was delivered. “They need to feel safe at home. And that message will carry even outside of the walls and the doors of this courtroom. And hopefully it will follow into the ears of our legislators.”

In April, Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison by a Michigan judge after becoming the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. Pagourtzis’s parents are not accused of any crime.

The lawsuit was filed by relatives of seven of the people killed and four of the 13 who were wounded in the Santa Fe attack.

The attorney representing Pagourtzis told jurors that while his client did plan the shooting, he was never in control of his actions because of his severe mental illness.

Attorney Clint McGuire, representing some of the victims, said the parents knew their son was depressed, getting bad grades, isolating himself, and had taken weapons from their gun cabinet and safe. McGuire said Pagourtzis also wrote disturbing Facebook posts and ordered ammunition and other items online, such as a knife with a Nazi symbol and a T-shirt that said, “Born To Kill.”

But Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis’s parents, told jurors that the couple hadn’t seen any red flags, knew nothing of his online purchases and didn’t know any of their weapons were missing.

Both parents testified during the trial. Antonios Pagourtzis is retired but worked for years in ship maintenance and repair. Kosmetatos works as an executive assistant at an academic health science centre in Galveston.

Kosmetatos told jurors that while her son became more introverted as he grew older, he was a bright and normal child with no significant issues. She acknowledged that he “wasn’t himself” in the months leading up to the shooting but she had hoped it would pass.

Antonios Pagourtzis testified that he wasn’t aware that his son was feeling rejected and ostracized at school, or that he might have been depressed.

The family stored firearms in a gun safe in the garage and a display cabinet in the living room. Dimitrios Pagourtzis used his mother’s .38 calibre handgun and one of his father’s shotguns during the shooting. Whether he got the weapons from the safe or cabinet, and where he found the keys, were among points debated during the trial.

“You can’t secure anything 100 per cent,” Antonios Pagourtzis said.

Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer that sold Dimitrios Pagourtzis more than 100 rounds of ammunition without verifying his age, was a defendant in the lawsuit until last year, when it reached a settlement with the families.

Similar lawsuits have been filed following other mass shootings.

In 2022, a jury awarded over US$200 million to the mother of one of four people killed in a shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee. The lawsuit was filed against the shooter and his father, who was accused of returning a rifle to his son before the shooting despite the son’s mental health issues.