Jury finds parents of accused Texas gunman not liable in 2018 school shooting rampage

The parents of a former student accused of killing 10 people and wounding several others when he opened fire in Texas at Santa Fe High School in 2018 are not responsible for their son's alleged actions, a Texas jury decided.

In a three-week civil trial, survivors and family members of the shooting victims claimed the accused shooter's parents should be held financially liable . Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos were accused of being negligent in storing their weapons and ignoring signs their son would commit a violent act.

In 2018, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who was 17 at the time, fatally shot eight students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School near Houston , according to police. Thirteen others were injured. Pagourtzis was charged with capital murder but was found incompetent to stand trial. He was also a defendant in the civil case but did not appear in court.

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Instead of finding the parents negligent, the jury Monday found Pagourtzis himself, along with online retailer Lucky Gunner, liable. Pagourtzis allegedly purchased the ammunition used in the shooting from Lucky Gunner. The jury awarded $330 million in damages.

In a statement, Jake Felde, Lucky Gunner's CEO, said his company "isn't responsible for paying any monetary damages awarded by the jury" as it already reached a separate settlement last year and was not a party to the Texas trial.

The civil trial comes at a critical time as the nation grapples with gun violence. More parents and other adults are starting to be held accountable for overlooking the red flags of their children and students that led to mass shootings.

Defense: 'The parents didn't pull the trigger'

Lori Laird, the attorney representing Pagourtzis' parents, said their son's mental break could not have been predicted and that he had kept his plans for the shooting a secret. The defense also argues the family's guns were kept locked up.

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

The defense also said Pagourtzis' parents saw no indications of what their son planned to do on that May day in 2018. In the courtroom, Laird projected photos of Pagourtzis days before the shooting, in which he appeared "normal."

"The reality is they are trying to make a case out of nothing," Laird said of the prosecution. "They are looking at little things that an ordinary person would not see as problematic and turn it into something that it's not."

Laird emphasized how Pagourtzis had hidden his intentions from his parents.

"He was sneaky, he was sly, he didn't want to get caught," Laird said.

Prosecution: 'It was their son, under their roof'

The lawsuit, filed in 2018, was brought by families of the Santa Fe High School shooting victims and sought more than $1 million in damages. The families claimed in the suit that the accused shooter's parents "knew that their son was at risk of harming himself or others but still irresponsibly and negligently stored their firearms, so that their son could access them," according to court documents viewed by USA TODAY .

"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 County courtroom.

McGuire presented the courtroom with the shirt Pagourtzis had worn on the day of the shooting, which said: "Born to kill." He also showed excerpts from Pagourtzis' journal that allegedly refer directly to his plans. One such entry reads: "What I do will both have an immeasurable impact and be incredibly miniscule. I will have destroyed bloodlines spanning thousands of years."

"We can't send our kids to school and bring them home in body bags," McGuire said.

Jurors heard testimony from families of victims, survivors

The civil trial was initiated by family members of seven of the deceased victims, as well as four of the 13 wounded. Attorneys for each victim spent their 80-minute closing arguments speaking about the lives lost and the permanent trauma the survivors now live with.

“They’re seeing the signs and the symptoms of their son, I don’t want to say deteriorating, but not being the normal kid that he is. I can say, if that was my parents, they’d be asking are you OK, what’s going on, how are you, let’s talk," said Trenton Beazley, a survivor who was 15 at the time of the shooting, according to KHOU .

Sabika Aziz Sheikh was a 17-year-old exchange student from Pakistan who was killed in the shooting. Her mother, Farah Naz, said in court that she and her family saw there was a school shooting in Texas on the news, and tried to call their daughter, who didn't answer. They immediately feared the worst and later learned she had been killed.

“She was my oldest child. She was my friend. She had a lot of dreams. Not a day passes I don’t miss her. Whenever I think about my other children’s dreams I just think about her,” Naz said, KPRC-TV reported .

Flo Rice, who was a substitute teacher on the day of the shooting, was shot six times and survived. She said she had to relearn to walk after the shooting, according to KTRK .

“I realized someone was hunting me like an animal," Rice said of her experience during the shooting, KPRC-TV reported . “I am not the same person I was before. Can’t tolerate loud noises, or busy places, crowds, always looking for exits, can’t have back to the door, memory issues."

Parents of Michigan school shooter to serve time in prison

While the Texas parents were never charged with crimes, the trial resembles another case that ended with two Michigan parents sentenced to at least a decade each in prison in connection with a mass shooting committed by their son.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were both convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year after prosecutors said they ignored troubling signs that their 15-year-old son was struggling with mental illness and bought him the gun he used to kill four classmates in 2021.

Legal experts told USA TODAY the Crumbley case, which drew national attention, could influence how society views parents' culpability when their children access guns and cause harm with them.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Jury finds parents of accused Texas gunman not liable in 2018 school shooting rampage