The parents of a gunman who was 17 when he killed eight students and two teachers at his high school in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018 are not financially liable for his heinous actions, a jury found on Monday.
The verdict, reached after a day of deliberations, followed an emotional three-week trial that was among the first attempts to hold parents accountable in civil court for the actions of their child in a school shooting.
But instead of finding that the parents bore responsibility for the shooting, the jury decided that blame rested with the gunman and with the company that sold him ammunition used in the shooting. The jury awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to the plaintiffs, who included the relatives of several of those killed and others who were wounded.
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