CHARLOTTESVILLE (Virginia, US), June 14 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The US mother whose six-year-old child in January shot and severely wounded his teacher pleaded guilty Monday to illegally obtaining the firearm, federal prosecutors said.
Deja Taylor’s son brought her gun to school in the southern US state of Virginia on Jan 6 and fired on his elementary school teacher in the attack.
The teacher was hospitalized for two weeks with injuries to her hand and chest.
Federal prosecutors said in a statement Monday that Taylor had pleaded guilty to “illegally obtaining and possessing a firearm and making a false statement” on a government agency form required to purchase the weapon, carrying a possible sentence of up to 25 years in prison.
Taylor had testified on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) form that she did not consume illegal drugs.
But searches by federal agents of her home and her mother’s house, where Taylor was residing at the time, as well as of her phone, revealed the “pervasive scope of Taylor’s marijuana use,” the statement said.
The agents found “approximately 24.5 grams of marijuana, marijuana edible packaging, and marijuana paraphernalia,” at her mother’s home.
Virginia has legalized personal cultivation and possession of small amounts of marijuana, but the drug remains illegal at the federal level.
Local prosecutors in April also brought charges at the state level against Taylor, charging her with felony child neglect and a misdemeanor.
Taylor’s family said in a statement shortly after the shooting that her son “suffers from an acute disability,” and that the gun had been “secured” at home.
But the federal prosecutors’ statement on Monday cast doubt on that characterization, saying that during the searches of the two homes, a “lockbox was not found in either of the residences, nor was a trigger lock or key to a trigger lock ever found.”
A “black firearm barrel lock” was found at Taylor’s home.
The United States, where nearly 400 million guns are in circulation, is regularly plagued by school shootings. The latest tragedy occurred in late March, when three nine-year-old students and three adults were killed at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.
While accidents involving young children accessing unsecured firearms in their homes are common in the United States, school shootings perpetrated by those under 10 years old are rare. A database compiled by US researcher David Riedman has only registered about 15 such incidents since the 1970s. — NNN-AGENCIES
