NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Abigail Zwerner said she thought she was going to die.

Zwerner recalled on the witness stand Thursday the moment a 6-year-old boy pulled out a handgun out of his front hoodie pocket and pointed it at her during a reading class at Richneck Elementary School.

It was just before 2 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2023.

Zwerner, then 25, was sitting at a teacher’s table, with the boy at his desk about 10 feet away in the first grade class, with about 18 other students in the class.

What’s searing in her mind, Zwerner said, was the way the boy looked at her before he fired. “It was a blank look — but wasn’t a blank look at all — in his face,” Zwerner said.

“Is that why you lifted your hand?” asked one of her attorneys, Diane Toscano. “Did you know what was about to happen?”

“Yes,” Zwerner replied.

The boy fired one round from his mother’s 9mm handgun, which he took from her purse and carried to school in his bookbag that morning. The bullet shattered Zwerner’s left hand. A large fragment ended up in her chest, causing a collapsed lung.

Zwerner ran down the hallway and collapsed in the school’s office.

“I thought I was dying,” she said. “I thought I would die. That I was on my way to heaven or was in heaven.”

“But then it got all black,” Zwerner added, and “then I thought that I wasn’t going to go there.”

She came to, she said, and noticed two co-workers helping her as she lay on the office floor. “I began to process that I’m hurt, and they’re putting pressure on where I’m hurt,” she said.

Former Richneck Elementary School teacher Abby Zwerner gestures as she testifies on Thursday in Newport News during her civil lawsuit against the former assistant principal of the school where Zwerner was shot. (Stephen M. Katz / The Virginian-Pilot) Zwerner is now suing Richneck’s former assistant principal, Ebony J. Parker, in a civil trial being held in Newport News Circuit Court.

Zwerner’s lawsuit, which asks for $40 million in damages, was filed within months of the 2023 shooting. She accuses Parker of “gross negligence,” contending the assistant principal failed to act on several credible concerns that the boy was armed.

The former Richneck teacher was the last plaintiff’s witness in the case, with the defense presenting their case beginning Monday.

Since the shooting, Zwerner said, she has kept emotionally distant from a lot of people.

Though she used to enjoy hanging out with friends, she said, now she mostly just stays in the house.

“The best I can explain it is that I still feel connected and close, but it’s also that feeling of distance,” Zwerner said. “A little numbness. It’s like I know I trust the person … I love them, but there’s something that’s just just different.”

She described the time her family planned to see the movie “Hamilton.” When she couldn’t go through with going to the movie, her family said they would come over to her home. But she didn’t want that either.

“I just didn’t want to go anywhere,” she said. “Like no, just leave me alone. I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to see anyone. No.”

Zwerner’s mother and sister, and the former teacher herself, said that was unlike her more naturally outgoing and friendly personality in the past.

A forensic psychologist, Dr. Clarence Watson, said Zwerner suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

She had a good upbringing and family, Watson said. And though she faced some depression and anxiety during college, that was managed with medication and she led a productive life.

But after the shooting, he said, she has had a much harder time dealing with things.

“It’s classic trauma,” he said. “She’s lost the sense of being safe. She’s become socially withdrawn and isolated.”

“I’m concerned as a clinician that despite significant efforts in terms of treatment, the symptoms will persist.”

Zwerner also described her difficulty in using her left hand. Even during this trial, she said, she was having a difficult time opening a water bottle and bag of chips that her lawyers had catered in.

“I tried multiple different ways of trying to hold it, and I eventually asked you to open it,” she told one of her lawyers.

Also on Thursday, Zwerner testified that the same student who shot her grabbed her cellphone two days earlier and “slammed” it into the ground, breaking the screen protector. The boy was suspended for a day.

Zwerner said to Parker’s attorney, Sandra Douglas, that after the cellphone slamming incident, she took the boy and brought him across the hall, asking a teacher to call the student’s guidance counselor to come get him.

Douglas pressed why she didn’t take such concrete steps when two of Zwerner’s students told another teacher, Amy Kovac, that the boy had a gun in school.

“Did you ask Mrs. Kovac who the two students were who reported this?” Douglas asked.

“I don’t remember if I did or not,” Zwerner replied.

“Did you take measures to speak with the two students who had reported this?”

“I knew Mrs. Kovac had spoken to them, and I trusted Mrs. Kovac.”

Earlier in the trial, Douglas grilled Kovac for why she didn’t confiscate the boy’s bag that two students said had a gun inside.

The bag, Douglas noted, was sitting on the floor of a classroom while both Kovac and Zwerner were there. But Kovac had testified that it was Parker’s role to have ordered the boy searched after the matter was reported to her.

On Thursday, Douglas suggested that Zwerner could have led the boy out of her classroom like she did two days earlier after he threw her cellphone.

“Did you remove his backpack from the classroom?” Douglas asked. “Did you search his backpack? Did you go get the security officer in the lunchroom?”

Zwerner said no to each question, one by one.

Douglas also questioned why Zwerner did not act when the shooter and another boy were going behind a rock wall at recess, with that boy later saying the 6-year-old showed him the gun.

“I knew that Amy had told an administrator, Dr. Parker, and I didn’t honestly think twice,” Zwerner said. “And it was my understanding that the administration wouldn’t think twice as well when alerted about a potential gun in school.”

Both sides contended that the student handbook was in their favor.

The handbook listed several possible problems in school, to include someone having a gun in school. On the other side of the page was a list of what teachers are supposed to do in such situations.

The first item on the list was to secure the child, while the second was to contact the administrator, and the third was to write a detailed email about the incident.

Toscano contended that the first item on the list — securing the child — was Parker’s job as administrator. Douglas asserted that the policy tasks teachers with that responsibility even before they call the administrator.

Zwerner also said that she took training to work as a hairdresser, even as the job requires manual dexterity. It wasn’t clear whether she landed the one salon job that she had applied for.

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