Santa Fe, Texas: Jury considers charges against parents of school shooter

CNN
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Deliberations began after attorneys presented their closing arguments Friday in the civil trial against the parents of a Texas high school shooter, more than six years after their son killed eight students and two teachers.

Survivors and family members of those shot at Santa Fe High School in May 2018 sued Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, accusing them of failing to respond to their son's deteriorating mental state before the shooting and failing to properly secure their guns. The parents said they saw no warning signs before the shooting and locked their guns away.

A jury in Galveston, Texas, will decide whether the parents are liable for negligence related to their son's actions. Deliberations will resume at 9 a.m. Monday, plaintiffs' attorney Clint McGuire told CNN.

The parents have not been charged with any crime, and the criminal trial of Dimitrios Pagourtzis – who was 17 when he shot and killed 10 people and injured 13 at the school about 20 miles southeast of Houston – was postponed indefinitely after a judge declared him mentally incompetent. He has been held at North Texas State Hospital in Vernon since December 2019.

The trial also featured emotional testimony from victims and their families, as well as from Pagourtzis’ family members.

The case is reminiscent of the historic criminal trial of James and Jennifer Crumbley, whose son Ethan Crumbley killed four students and injured six others and a teacher at his Michigan high school in 2021. His parents were convicted of manslaughter and each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.

In his closing argument on Friday, the plaintiffs' attorney, McGuire, emphasized that there were signs that Dimitrios Pagourtzis' parents knew about his mental health problems – and that they had not properly secured their weapons.

“We can agree that it is the parents' job to help the child if they know that he or she has a mental illness – be it depression, an anxiety disorder or whatever,” he said.

McGuire referred to emails in which the parents discussed their son's poor health and also to their own statements.

They said “they knew something was wrong, but they didn't know how to fix it,” McGuire said. “They didn't do anything.”

The parents' lawyer alternately emphasized Dimitrios Pagourtzis' mental illness and tried to shift the blame onto the shooter himself.

“Your son has a mental illness. Your son is being robbed of his personhood,” Lori Laird said in her closing argument. “He is no longer the son you raised.”

“The parents didn't pull the trigger,” she said. “The parents didn't give him a gun.”

Laird described Kosmetatos as a “very proactive” mother who was very involved in her son's life – and not the neglectful mother she was described as by the plaintiffs' lawyers.

McGuire said in his closing argument that the shooter had missed 57 days of school, failed classes and was perceived by his classmates as unhygienic and obviously helpless. And 18 days before the shooting, he publicly posted a picture of himself wearing a “Born to Kill” T-shirt.

“And after all that, they didn't put their weapons away safely,” he said. “They didn't help him.”

Dimitrios Pagourtzis said Four months before the massacre, he took a total of nine guns from his parents' gun cabinet so that “they would notice,” McGuire said. He left the keys to the gun cabinet upstairs so he could easily access them, McGuire said.

He also disputed the shooter's claims that he was insane, arguing that he was sane enough to know his actions were wrong. He pointed to writings in which he expressed his desire to “rape and kill” women “before he was caught.” These and other writings suggest he knew his plans were wrong, McGuire said.

He called for “full compensation” for the victims' families. “Anything less than full compensation is incomplete and unjust,” he said.

Other lawyers representing survivors of the shooting also told of lives forever changed. Chase Yarborough still has fragments of a bullet lodged in his heart and a bullet lodged in his head that doctors were unable to remove, said his attorney, Sherry Scott Chandler.

Another victim, 17-year-old Sabika Sheikh, had traveled to Santa Fe, Texas, from Pakistan as an exchange student, her family's lawyer said. “Sabika came to America full of hopes, dreams and ambitions, and she came home in a coffin,” he said.

Laird, in her closing argument, blamed Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer that sold the shooter more than 100 rounds of ammunition without verifying that he was old enough to buy it. Lucky Gunner was a defendant in the lawsuit until last year, when it reached a settlement with the families.

She also said the school was responsible for failures, including failing to inform the shooter's parents about his absences from school and his habit of wearing a trench coat – which the plaintiff's lawyer called a warning sign that he admired school killers like the Columbine High School shooters in Colorado.

She disputed McGuire's account of the location of the gun safe keys, saying the keys were on a cabinet in the parents' bedroom, not in a shared room. “They went above and beyond what their duty required of them, and they did it voluntarily, to try to keep their guns safe,” she said.

The shooter tried to hide his violent plans from his family and there were few signs of the crisis brewing beneath the surface, she argued.

“If he had broken the law, if he had been violent, if he had used drugs, if he had abused animals or started fires or looked at ants with a magnifying glass, anything, you might say, hmm, we need to look into that,” she said. “His grades were getting lower, but he never failed. He started wanting to spend more time alone. Those were the two main things you noticed.”

“There was no evidence of depression or serious mental illness, or any mental illness at all,” she said.