Texas jury to decide whether parents are liable in fatal 2018 shooting – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

On Monday, jurors in Texas resumed deliberations on whether the parents of a Texas student accused of killing 10 people in a 2018 school shooting near Houston should be held accountable.

The victims' lawsuit seeks to hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, financially liable for the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018. They are demanding at least one million dollars in damages.

The victims' lawyers say the parents failed to provide necessary mental health support for their son and did not do enough to prevent him from accessing their weapons.

“It was their son, under their roof, with their guns, who went out and committed this mass murder,” Clint McGuire, who represented some of the victims, told jurors during his closing argument in the civil trial Friday in Galveston.

According to authorities, Pagourtzis shot eight students and two teachers. He was 17 years old at the time.

Pagourtzis, now 23, was charged with capital crimes, but the criminal case has been on hold since November 2019, when he was declared incompetent to stand trial. He is being held in a state psychiatric hospital.

Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis' parents, said her son's mental breakdown was not foreseeable and that he had kept his plans for the shooting secret from them. She also said the parents had locked away their firearms.

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

In April, Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison by a Michigan judge after becoming the first parents to be convicted in connection with a U.S. school shooting. Pagourtzi's parents are not accused of any crime.

The lawsuit was filed by the relatives of seven of those killed and four of the 13 injured in the attack in Santa Fe. Lawyers for some of the survivors spoke about the trauma they are still suffering.