A trial related to the shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018 ended on Monday, when a jury found that the gunman’s parents were not responsible for his actions.
The shooter killed eight students during the attack at the school – a tragedy that many victims say is forgotten in comparison to other mass shootings.
The trial about his parents’ responsibility lasted three weeks. J. David Goodman, Houston bureau chief for the New York Times, spoke to Texas Standard about the verdict. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Who brought this case against the parents of the Santa Fe High School shooter?
J. David Goodman: The plaintiffs in this case were a group of families of the teenage victims who were killed in the shooting, and then some of those who were wounded as well. Those included some of the staff, employees and teachers, and also other students.
What sort of evidence did the plaintiffs in this case bring forward against the parents?
So the trial was interesting in the sense that the defendants included the parents, but also the gunman himself and then an ammunition company.
Much of the evidence, though, focused on the parents and really asked this question of what responsibility they bore for the actions of their son. And the evidence was around the negligence of the parents in storing or securing the weapons that they had in the household.
They had about a dozen firearms, rifles, shotguns, and at least one handgun that they kept in the home. And the question was, did they properly secure those weapons to try and keep them out of the hands of their children? And then what did they know about the mental state of their son?
There’s a lot of evidence and a lot of discussion about the behavior of the gunman in this case, in the months and years leading up to the shooting and how much the parents really were aware of the kinds of things that he was writing in private journals and online postings. And the defense argued – convincingly, it turns out, to the jury – that the parents really didn’t have a lot of knowledge about what was going on in their son’s mind, at least not enough to hold them responsible for not intervening and trying to help him.
Well, who did the jury find was responsible for the shooting? And I imagine it was a very emotional three weeks.
Yeah, it was a very difficult trial at times. At various points throughout the three weeks, there were tears – both the parents who are on trial, and then the parents, who are sitting just yards away, of the victims in that courtroom.
And, you know, even during the closing arguments, the lawyers who were involved became teary as they talked about the lives of the students who were lost. So it was really one of the things that everyone could agree on, was that this was an incredible tragedy that never should have happened.
To answer your question, the jury, in the end, found that the bulk of the responsibility – they said 80% of it – laid with the gunman, and that the remainder of that responsibility could be put on an ammunition company that sold him ammunition before the shooting when he was 17 and not allowed to buy it. And so that company, Lucky Gunner, actually had already settled before the trial. And so while the jury found them responsible, they’d already sort of settled and paid what they were going to to the plaintiffs.
So, in the end, it was really the gunman who bore the responsibility for the shooting.
Is this the end of the road, judicially speaking, for this case?
Well, the gunman has still never stood trial in criminal court. And that was one of the issues that’s really plagued this community and the victims in this shooting – that, you know, after the school shooting, the gunman was deemed to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. And so he’s been in a state facility ever since and has been routinely looked at again and he’s still not able to stand trial.
And so there’s never really been a full airing of the evidence and through the circumstances of what happened here. So he’s never been held to account in criminal court. That could still happen, conceivably, one day.
