Texas jury considers holding parents liable for Santa Fe school shooting

A jury in Texas is deliberating whether the parents of the gunman who killed ten people at Santa Fe High School in 2018 should be held accountable.

After a three-week civil trial, the jury resumed deliberations on Monday. The aim of the trial is to hold Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos financially liable for the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018. According to the Associated Press, the victims are demanding at least $1 million in damages.

The victims' lawyers claim that the parents did not provide their son, Antonios Pagourtzis, with the necessary support and that they failed to prevent him from accessing their weapons.

Dimitrios reportedly used firearms legally owned by his father to shoot eight students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School. He was 17 years old at the time of the shooting.

“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 on Friday.

According to Click 2 Houson, the lawsuit was filed by the relatives of seven of the people killed in the shooting and four of the 13 injured.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis has been charged with capital crimes, but his trial has been suspended since November 2019, when he was declared incompetent to stand trial due to mental health issues. Since then, Pagourtzis has been declared incompetent to stand trial two more times, once on February 1, 2024, and most recently on January 26, 2024. He is being held in a state mental health facility.

Lori Laird, a lawyer for Pagourtzis' parents, argued that her son's mental health problems were not foreseeable and that he had kept his plans secret from them.

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

“He was sneaky, he was clever, he didn't want to get caught.”