Texas Jury to Decide if Parents Financially Liable in School Shooting

A Texas jury is set to decide whether the parents of a 2018 Texas school shooter should be held financially liable for damages.

Jurors will resume deliberations on Monday in a victim’s lawsuit that seeks to hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, financially liable

Authorities say Pagourtzis fatally shot eight students and two teachers in the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018. He was 17 years old at the time.

The victims are pursuing at least $1 million in damages.

The victims’ attorneys say 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.

“It was their son, under their roof, with their guns who went and committed this mass shooting,” Clint McGuire, representing some of the victims, told jurors during closing statements in the Galveston courtroom.

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.

Attorneys representing some of the survivors talked about the trauma they still endure.

Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis’ parents, said their son’s mental break wasn’t foreseeable and that they did not know about his plans for the shooting.

She also said the parents kept their firearms locked up.

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

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.

His father claimed in 2018 that bullying turned his son into a killer.

In an interview with The Wall Street , Antonios Pagourtzis, described his son as a “nice boy” who had been “mistreated at school,” prompting the attack.

Earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting.

The pair were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison, the maximum possible, after separate juries convicted them of involuntary manslaughter.

Juries found them criminally negligent for giving the 9 mm semiautomatic handgun used in the shooting to shooter Ethan Crumbley as a Christmas present four days before the massacre.

Unlike the Crumbleys, Pagourtzis’ parents are not accused of any crime.