DALLAS (AP) — Victims' attorneys asked jurors Friday to hold accountable the parents of a student accused of killing 10 people in a 2018 school shooting
Rose Marie Kosmetatos, left, and her husband, Antonios Pagourtzis, parents of accused Santa Fe High School shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis, talk before the start of the civil trial against them Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, in Galveston County Court No. 3 Judge Jack Ewing's courtroom at the Galveston County Courthouse in Galveston, Texas.
“It was their son, under their roof, with their guns who went and committed this mass shooting,” Clint McGuire, representing some of the victims, told jurors during closing statements in the Galveston courtroom. Pagourtzis, now 23, has been charged with capital murder but the criminal case has been on hold since November 2019, when he was declared incompetent to stand trial. He is being held at a state mental health facility.
But McGuire in closing statements asked jurors to hold Pagourtzis accountable, saying there is ample evidence that he intended to do what he did. McGuire said Pagourtzis decided to open fire in the art room so that students would be trapped and it would be hard for police to reach him. He said Pagourtzis wrote in his journal that he found “exhilarating” the idea of shooting his classmates and watching them “writhe on the ground in agony.
Kosmetatos told jurors that while her son became more introverted as he grew older, he was a bright and normal child with no significant issues. She acknowledged that he “wasn’t himself” in the months leading up to the shooting but she had hoped it would pass. In 2022, a jury awarded over $200 million to the mother of one of four people killed in a shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee. The lawsuit was filed against the shooter and his father, who was accused of returning a rifle to his son before the shooting despite the son’s mental health issues.
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