A jury in Texas resumed their deliberations Monday morning as they try to decide whether the parents of a student accused of being the shooter at a Houston area school in 2018 should be held liable for the deaths of the 10 people who were killed.
The lawsuit, filed by the families of the 10 victims, is seeking to hold the alleged shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, as well as his parents Rose Marie and Antonios Pagourtzis financially liable for the shooting.
On May 18 in 2018, Dimitrios is alleged to have carried out the shooting at Santa Fe High School near Houston. The plaintiffs in the case are seeking damages of at least $1 million.
The attorneys for the victims have argued in court that the parents didn’t provide the mental health support that their son needed, while also not doing enough to prevent him from gaining access to their guns.
Clint McGuire, who’s representing some of the school shooting victims, said during his closing statements:
“It was their son, under their roof, with their guns who went and committed this mass shooting.”
This trial is a civil proceeding, seeking to hold the Pagourtzis family financially liable for the deaths of two teachers and eight students.
When Pagourtzis carried out the shooting in 2018, he was 17 years old. He was initially charged with capital murder, but his criminal case was put on pause in November of 2019 after he was declared incompetent to stand trial.
Since that time, he’s been held at a Texas state mental health facility.
In response to the plaintiffs’ claims, the parents’ lawyer, Lori Laird, has argued that it wasn’t foreseeable that their son would have a mental breakdown, and that he hid his plans to carry out the shooting from them.
Laird also argued that Pagourtzis’ parents kept their guns locked up in their home. As she said:
“The parents didn’t pull the trigger. The parents didn’t give him a gun.”
Back in April, another set of parents were held criminally liable for their son shooting up a school in Michigan.
James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of Ethan Crumbley, were sentenced to spend 10 years in jail for their role in the shooting at Oxford High School, which resulted in four students being killed in 2021.
They became the first parents convicted for their role in a mass school shooting in the U.S.
The Crumbleys were originally accused of not securing a gun they had recently purchased at their home, and also of acting indifferently to multiple signs that their son’s mental health was deteriorating.
The parents were ultimately convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
The plaintiffs in the civil case against the Pagourtzis parents are hoping the jury rules in the same way as in the Crumbley case.
This lawsuit was filed by relatives of seven of the people who were killed in 2018, as well as four of the 13 people who were wounded in that attack.
