Mothers of children killed in a school shooting brought their ashes to court — but justice was still denied
The shooter’s parents ‘created a little monster,’ according to the mom of one student shot dead at her high school in Santa Fe, Texas, but a jury let them off the hook anyway
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For days the families of those killed in the Santa Fe High School shooting had sat in a Texas courtroom and heard how the shooter’s parents had ignored the warning signs that their son needed psychiatric intervention and didn’t secure the guns he then used to massacre 10 people.
So, on the day of closing arguments of the civil suit, some of the moms brought in their children’s cremated remains. They sat the urns on a ledge within view of Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, the shooter’s parents, who were being sued by the victims’ families. When Pagourtzis and Kosmetatos saw the urns, they cried, according to Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was shot and killed in the 2018 attack.
“But I was glad that we did it and we got on their nerves, because they’re just bad people, as far as I’m concerned,” Hart told The Independent. “They created a little monster, and they felt no responsibility for that, so I feel like we got our little dig in.”
The pump-action shotgun and .38-caliber revolver 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis used to fatally gun down eight classmates and two teachers at his Santa Fe, Texas high school in fact belonged to his parents, who had legally purchased both weapons.
However, Pagourtzis and Kosmetatos have since refused to accept any blame for their son’s actions. And now, they have formally been found blameless by a jury of their peers in Galveston County Court.
The shooter, who is severely mentally ill and sang Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” as he pumped multiple rounds into his victims, should never have been allowed access to the firearms, according to trucker Christopher Stone and wife Rosie Yanas Stone. Their 17-year-old son Chris was shot dead in the terrifying massacre on May 18, 2018 during art class. A deeply committed Dallas Cowboys fan, Chris was buried in a Cowboys casket emblazoned with the dates of each of the team’s Super Bowl wins.
“I guess it’s just the hand we were dealt,” Stone told The Independent. “And it can be dealt to anybody.”
Although the shooter, who is now 23, confessed to the crime and was charged with capital murder, he was found incompetent to stand trial and has not yet been prosecuted.
They created a little monster, and they felt no responsibility for that
In the meantime, the Stones filed a civil lawsuit against his parents: Pagourtzis, who owned the shotgun, and Kosmetatos, who owned the handgun he used to kill 10 and wound 13 others.
They had not properly stored their weapons, giving their underage son the tools needed to carry out his deadly plan, the Stones’ suit contended, which also named Lucky Gunner, the Tennessee-based online retailer that sold the shooter his ammunition.
The pair also ignored a multitude of red flags that their teenager was in desperate need of psychiatric intervention, the suit alleged, as they believed his increasingly disturbing behavior – an affinity for Nazis, an obsession with guns, a Facebook posting of a T-shirt reading, “Born to Kill” – was something he’d eventually grow out of.
“The Murderer pulled the pistol’s and sawed-off shotgun’s triggers, but also upon them, pressed just as firmly, were the fingers of his parents, who utterly failed to teach their son any respect for life whatsoever and who negligently and grossly negligently failed to secure their weapons in a reasonable and prudent way and put them directly and proximately into use as authors of a community-wide tragedy and incomprehensible loss,” the lawsuit states.
The kids are going to have to monitor themselves, because grown-ups don’t want to take responsibility.
Those who made it out alive are now living with the unshakable memories of the bloodshed. A police officer who nearly died that day “lost as much blood as a person can lose and still survive,” according to the trauma surgeon who saved his life. At least one Santa Fe High School shooting survivor has suffered lead poisoning thanks to the shotgun pellets that remain in her body, her mother told The Independent.
Sarah Salazar, who was 16 when she was shot at Santa Fe HS, not only found herself with severely elevated lead levels, she also found herself partially disabled from a gunshot wound that required a total shoulder replacement, according to Sonia Lopez, Sarah’s mom. And although Lopez said Sarah is unable to work due to the depression and PTSD she still has from the shooting, she was still denied Social Security benefits, putting additional financial strain on her and her family.
In a scenario where the shooter couldn’t have gotten his hands on a gun, the lawsuit says his “hidden black rage might well have continued to simmer within, but, the life’s blood of his teacher and peers, including decedent Christopher Jake Stone, would not have been so horribly, callously and needlessly spilled.”
On Monday, a Houston jury let the shooter’s parents entirely off the hook, finding them not legally liable for their son’s crime. Instead, jurors laid the blame entirely on the shooter himself and Lucky Gunner, where the teen bought his ammo.
“It’s shameful that our whole country has to deal with this,” Stone told The Independent. “The kids are going to have to monitor themselves, because grown-ups don’t want to take responsibility.”
The verdict came roughly four months after James and Jennifer Crumbley were sentenced to at least a decade behind bars for having gifted their son Ethan as a Christmas present the gun he used in his deadly November 2021 rampage. (Pagourtzis and Kosmetatos were never charged with a crime.)
Although the jury did not find the Santa Fe shooter’s parents liable, the court awarded the Stones and other affected families more than $300 million in damages for pain and mental anguish.
Still, Stone said he is “disappointed” in the jurors, who he believes “had their minds made up before they walked in there.”
His wife said she found the jury’s decision “truly heartbreaking, disappointing.”.
“In my heart, I just never felt that [there] was going to be zero accountability,” Yanas Stone told The Independent. “We all saw the same evidence. On top of the irresponsible gun ownership, the neglect of him, his health issues. I can’t believe they just ignored it all.”
Yanas Stone, who was in court with her husband throughout the proceedings, said she cared not a whit about “the money part.”
“I just wanted guilty or not guilty,” she said. “You know, accountability or not accountability. And so after [the parents were found not liable], I left.”
It was difficult being “in the same room with the people that’s responsible for my son not being here,” Yanas Stone went on. And although the verdict did not go her way, Yanas Stone said “judgment has already been passed by us, and we’re really the only ones that matter.”
Hart, Kimberly Vaughan’s mother, said she also wishes the jury had assigned a portion of the blame to the parents.
They either “didn’t want to see” their son’s obvious issues, or “they just didn’t care,” Hart told The Independent.
“So, yeah, I’m disappointed but I’m ultimately not surprised… Texas loves its guns more than its children,” she said. Hart, who signed onto the Stones’ lawsuit as a plaintiff, said she doesn’t think the shooter will ever be tried criminally, so “we should take this [civil court win] and be happy with it.”
At the same time, Hart, a US Army veteran, said she was particularly incensed by Pagourtzis’ testimony, during which he refused to accept any responsibility at all for his son having gotten his hands on his shotgun. Neither of the parents had reached out to apologize for their son’s actions, or even acknowledged their presence in the courtroom, according to Hart, until they brought in the urns carrying their children.
Hart said she and some of the other moms joked that it was “Take Your Kids to Work Day,” explaining that gallows humor was all they had left at this point.
Life since the shooting “has been torture,” for Yanas Stone. But, she insisted, the civil case, for all of its various shortcomings in the end, has undoubtedly helped her in other ways.
“Every single bit of information, we have had to fight for it, and it’s an inhumane way to live,” Yanas Stone said. “Like, you wake up every single day and you’re just lost, and you have more questions and more questions. What’s true, what’s not true. And this trial has brought a lot of closure to that. I can speak for myself, that this has brought me a lot of peace, knowing that I have some real, concrete answers.”
Yanas Stone thinks stricter gun laws would “absolutely” help to slow down the seemingly unceasing rate of school shootings, which occur again and again in the United States but rarely anywhere else in the world. Yet, she argues, “We can’t fool ourselves to think that we can put something in place that’s going to eliminate it.”
“Victims and survivors, I think that we’re going to be the ones to make those changes,” Yanas Stone said. “We’ve been through the trenches. We’ve been dragged through the dirt. We’ve done it. So we’re just going to continue pushing forward and see what we can do for the future.”
To Christopher Stone, the answer, such as it is, is simple.
“Raise good kids,” he said. “It don’t take much, honestly. Love your children. Teach them love. Seems impossible to some. But, you know, it came pretty easy to me.”