Parents of Texas school shooter testify in civil trial with echoes of the Crumbley criminal case
CNN
The trials are in different states (Texas v. Michigan) and have far different stakes (civil v. criminal), but they feature the same essential question: Could the shooter’s parents have prevented this massacre?
They ignored signs of their teenage son’s failing mental health. They missed his issues in school. And they allowed him access to the family’s guns, which he used to carry out a devastating school shooting. Those are some of the key allegations made in a Galveston, Texas, courtroom in a civil trial against the parents of Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who as a 17-year-old student in 2018 fatally shot 10 people at Santa Fe High School. A jury tasked with determining if the parents are liable for negligence began its deliberations on Friday. The allegations against Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos are altogether similar to the ones against Jennifer and James Crumbley, who earlier this year became the first parents to be charged and convicted of a crime for the Michigan school shooting carried out by their son Ethan in 2021. The trials are in different states (Texas v. Michigan) and have far different stakes (civil v. criminal), but they feature the same essential question: Could the shooter’s parents have prevented this massacre? “In any of these cases, you’re asking a jury to hold parents accountable for the actions of another person,” said Misty Marris, a trial lawyer who has followed both cases. “It’s something the Crumbley case has shown can be successful.”
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