A makeshift memorial outside Santa Fe High School in 2018. The case is among the first in which those victimised by a school shooting are trying to hold the gunman’s parents liable in civil court. Photo / Michael Stravato, The New York Times
The case, against the parents of a gunman who killed 10 people in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018, is among the first in which school shooting victims are trying to hold parents liable in civil court.
As the United States has struggled to respond to mass shootings, often carried out by teenagers still living at home, focus has turned to the parents of the assailants and whether they bear responsibility for the horrific acts of their children.
That has been the question at the centre of a civil trial now taking place in a small county courtroom in Galveston, along the Gulf Coast of Texas. The defendants are the parents of a 17-year-old assailant who killed eight of his classmates and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in 2018.
The trial is the first such case since a jury in Michigan found the parents of a 15-year-old assailant guilty this year of involuntary manslaughter in a mass shooting that their son committed at Oxford High School outside Detroit in 2021. Prosecutors presented evidence that the parents had ignored warning signs and failed to lock up the handgun that they purchased for their son, which he used in the shooting.
The difference in Texas is that the parents of the shooter, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, have not been accused of any crime. Instead, the case is among the first in which those victimised by a school shooting are trying to hold the assailant’s parents liable in civil court.
For nearly two weeks now, Pagourtzis, a Greek immigrant, and his wife, Kosmetatos, have sat in court just a few yards from the parents of the children who were killed in the massacre.
Photos of the victims as they appeared before the shooting have been shown to the jury, as have those of the assailant cuddling with his father and performing in a Greek dance troupe at his church just a few days before the attack.
“I’m Christian. I believe in God. I no believe in shooting,” Pagourtzis said during questioning by the plaintiffs’ lawyer last week. “You try to tell me I’m bad. I say, I tried my best.”
At issue is whether the assailant’s parents were negligent in how they stored the firearms at home – about a dozen rifles and shotguns and at least one handgun – and whether they could have taken steps to help their son, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who since the shooting has been declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.
“There were red flags,” Clint McGuire, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in his opening statement. “If they did not know that he was depressed, like they’re claiming, it’s because they failed in their job as parents, and they should have known.” (The suit also names Dimitrios Pagourtzis as a defendant.)
On Tuesday, Kosmetatos told the jury that she saw no signs of her son’s distress before the shooting. “I would have done everything in my power to prevent it, if I had known,” she said.
The family’s guns were kept in a black metal gun safe in the garage and in a glass-and-wood display cabinet in the living room, which, the assailant’s sister testified, could be seen when entering the house. Dimitrios Pagourtzis took several of his parents’ weapons, including the shotgun and handgun that were used in the shooting.
On Monday, the safe and cabinet were wheeled into the courtroom, with Antonios Pagourtzis helping his lawyer, Lori Laird, manoeuvre one of them into place. The father then took the witness stand in his own defence.
Antonios Pagourtzis said that both had been locked, with the keys hidden in the house, but that his son must have searched until he found them. “If somebody wants to find something, he’ll find it,” he said.
Under Texas law, criminal charges can be brought against parents if a child who is 16 or younger gains access to a loaded gun that was not properly stored. Dimitrios Pagourtzis was 17 at the time of the shooting.
Last week, under questioning by McGuire, the elder Pagourtzis said he was not aware of the kinds of things that his son had been buying online, including ammunition used in the shooting, nor did he know about the apparent dark turn in his son’s interests.
When asked if he knew that his son’s favourite song was titled Angel of Death, Pagourtzis said he did not know the song. He said he did not know that his son appeared, in online searches, to be fascinated with school shootings, nor had he seen his son’s disturbing journal entries on the computer, including some that described an abusive home.
“Because he writes something, it does not mean that he wrote down the truth,” Pagourtzis said when asked about the homicidal fantasies in the entries.
His son had been a good student, he testified, who played clarinet, ran track and then played football in high school. He said he had not been aware of his son’s increasing absences during his junior year nor the declining grades that began to appear on his report card.
“The parents never searched Dimitrios’ personal home computer,” Laird, the defence lawyer, said in her opening statement. “Why would they? Dimitri was almost 18 years old.”
Laird said that the assailant’s mother did contact the school after her son was accused of plagiarism on a school assignment, and that she had talked to him and his sister about mental health and school shootings, particularly after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which took place in early 2018.
But the assailant’s troubles were kept hidden, Laird said. “She had no idea what was going on in her son’s mind,” she said of his mother. “He was deeply disturbed and deeply suffering. But he didn’t tell anybody.”
Because there has been no criminal trial against Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who remains in a state hospital for mental health treatment, the civil trial has also represented the first effort at public accountability in the six years since the shooting.
In the crowded history of mass shootings in recent years, the Santa Fe massacre has often been overlooked, eclipsed by subsequent tragedies and the desire among many in the community south of Houston to move on. The trial, which began July 31 and could stretch into next week, has attracted only a handful of local reporters.
But it has shed light on a community where guns are prevalent and the pain of the shooting is still present for many.
Parents and survivors who were wounded talked of being haunted and heartbroken, their lives upended by the shooting. Some witnesses cited Bible passages on the stand, while others talked in detail about proper firearm storage or the bravery of the students who died protecting classmates.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers showed the jury photos of victims before the shooting posing with the American flag, dressed in cowboy hats and Western wear, and with football teammates.
Testimony from students who survived the shooting revealed previously unknown details about the May 18, 2018, attack.
Trenton Beazley, a 15-year-old sophomore at the time of the attack, described hiding from the assailant. He told jurors how he watched a fatally wounded student “take his last breaths” and another student profusely bleed.
Beazley said that he could smell gun smoke and hear the shooter’s footsteps crunching on broken glass as he taunted the barricaded students, singing lyrics from the Queen song Another One Bites the Dust.
When some of the cellphones abandoned by students started to ring, the assailant said, “Do you want to come answer this? Oh, wait, you can’t. You’re dead.”
Chase Yarbrough, a 17-year-old junior at the time, recalled that during the shooting, a fellow student told him, “Hey man, I think you got hit.” He touched his nose and found “blood everywhere”. Yarbrough called his father and told him that a shooting had taken place at the school. His father told him to run.
Yarbrough jumped over an outside wall, twisted his ankle and started to run through a field, mistakenly believing that the assailant was chasing him. His ankle failed him, and he frantically crawled on the ground until his father and a police officer found him.
As word of the shooting spread through the community, Antonios Pagourtzis and his wife were, like any of the other parents, scared for their children and rushing to the school.
Pagourtzis testified that he went straight to the high school, parked his truck and began walking around the building with other panicked parents. Soon, he learned his son was the shooter.
Brent Cooley, the former Galveston County sheriff’s deputy who eventually handcuffed Dimitrios Pagourtzis, testified that he and other officers entered the area where the assailant had opened fire, and that he eventually surrendered to them.
But before the officers moved in, Antonios Pagourtzis testified that he had wanted to confront his son himself.
“I said, ‘Let me go in. If something happens, let him kill me,’” Pagourtzis said. “‘Don’t kill any more.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: J. David Goodman and Patrick McGee
Photographs by: Loren Elliot and Michael Stravato
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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