Deliberations have begun after attorneys presented their closing arguments Friday in the civil trial of the parents of a Texas high school shooter, more than six years after their son killed eight students and two teachers.
Survivors and family members of those who were gunned down at Santa Fe High School in May 2018 sued Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, accusing them of failing to act on their son’s declining mental state leading up to the shooting and failing to properly secure their guns. The parents testified they didn’t see any warning signs ahead of the shooting and they had locked up their firearms.
A jury in Galveston, Texas, will determine if the parents are liable for negligence in connection with their son’s actions. Deliberations will resume at 9 a.m. Monday, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Clint McGuire, told CNN.
The parents have not been charged with any crime, and the criminal trial of Dimitrios Pagourtzis – who was 17 at the time he fatally shot 10 and wounded 13 at the school, about 20 miles southeast of Houston – was delayed indefinitely after a judge found him mentally incompetent. He has been held at the North Texas State Hospital in Vernon since December 2019.
The trial included emotional testimony from victims and their families, as well as Pagourtzis’ family members.
The case has had echoes of the historic criminal trial of James and Jennifer Crumbley, whose son Ethan Crumbley killed four students and wounded six others and a teacher at his Michigan high school in 2021. His parents were convicted of manslaughter and each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
Speaking during closing arguments Friday, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, McGuire, highlighted signs Dimitrios Pagourtzis’ parents knew he was having mental health problems — and that they improperly secured their guns.
“What we can agree upon is that if parents know a child has a mental illness, whether it’s depression, anxiety, whatever kind of mental illness it is, it’s that parent’s job to get that child help,” he said.
McGuire pointed to emails in which the parents discussed their son’s struggling health, as well as their own testimony.
They said “that they knew something was wrong, but they did not know how to fix it,” McGuire said. “They did nothing.”
The parents’ lawyer, alternately, emphasized Dimitrios Pagourtzis’s mental illness and sought to refocus the blame on the shooter himself.
“Their son got a mental illness. Their son is robbed of who he was,” Lori Laird said in her closing argument. “He is no longer the son that they raised.”
“The parents didn’t pull the trigger,” she said. “The parents didn’t give him a gun.”
Laird called Kosmetatos a “very proactive” mother who was heavily involved in her son’s life — not the negligent parent she was characterized as by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
McGuire in his closing said the shooter had incurred 57 absences at school, was failing courses, and was seen by classmates to be unhygienic and clearly struggling to take care of himself. And 18 days before the shooting, he publicly posted a picture of himself in a “Born to Kill” t-shirt.
“And after all of this, they didn’t safely store their guns,” he said. “They did not get him help.”
Dimitrios Pagourtzis has said he took a total of nine guns from his parents’ gun display cabinet four months before the massacre, specifically so “they would notice,” according to McGuire. The keys to the gun cabinet were left on top, so he could easily access them, McGuire said.
He also contested the shooter’s claims of insanity, arguing he was competent enough to know his actions were wrong. He pointed to writings in which he expressed his desire to “rape and kill” women “before he was caught.” These and other writings suggest he knew what he was planning was wrong, said McGuire.
He called for “complete compensation” for the families of the victims. “Anything less than complete compensation is incomplete and it’s unjust,” he said.
Other lawyers representing survivors of the shooting also presented narratives of lives forever altered. One survivor, Chase Yarborough, still has parts of a projectile stuck in his heart, as well as a bullet in his head doctors said was unsafe to remove, according to his attorney, Sherry Scott Chandler.
Another victim, 17-year-old Sabika Sheikh, had traveled to Santa Fe, Texas, as an exchange student from Pakistan, said her family’s lawyer. “Sabika came to America full of hopes and dreams and ambitions, and she came home in a casket,” he said.
Laird in her closing placed blame on Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer which sold the shooter more than 100 rounds of ammunition without verifying he was old enough to buy it. Lucky Gunner was a defendant in the lawsuit until last year, when it reached a settlement with the families.
She also said the school was at fault for lapses including not notifying the shooter’s parents about his absences from school and about his habit of wearing a trench coat — what the plaintiffs’ lawyer characterized as a red flag signaling his admiration of school killers like the shooters at Columbine High School in Colorado.
She disputed McGuire’s account of the location of the keys to the gun cabinet, saying the keys were on top of a cabinet in the parents’ bedroom, not in a shared space. “They did more than their duty required of them, and they did it willingly to try to safely store their guns,” she said.
The shooter worked to hide his violent plans from his family and presented almost no signs of the crisis brewing underneath the surface, she argued.
“If he had been breaking the law, if he had been violent, if he had been using drugs, if he had been abusing animals or setting fires or holding a magnifying glass on ants, anything, then maybe you’d go hmm, we need to look at that,” she said. “He had slipping grades, but he never failed. He started to want to spend a little bit more time alone. These were the two main things that you saw.”
“There was no indication of any depression or deep, serious mental illness, or any mental illness at all,” she said.
