2025-02-09
21 分钟Lori Laird was defending a couple whose son shot 23 people at his school, while engaged in a desperate struggle with her own son’s mental illness. When are parents to blame?
Hi, I'm J. David Goodman.
I'm the Houston bureau chief for the New York Times.
Late last summer, I traveled to Galveston, which is just south of Houston, where I live,
to cover a trial that had to do with a mass shooting that took place in Santa Fe,
Texas, at a high school in 2018.
I was really interested in this trial
because the gunman's parents were actually getting blamed for what their son had done.
The gunman in this case was a 17 year old senior at the high school, Demetrios Pagatris.
He came into school one day with a shotgun and a handgun
and killed eight of his classmates and two teachers.
After the shooting, Demetrios was arrested, and while he was in custody,
he was diagnosed with a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
And this is something that had not been diagnosed in him before the massacre.
He was deemed so mentally ill that he was detained in a mental hospital and could not face trial.
The families of the victims and some of the survivors who had filed suit here.
The reason why these plaintiffs thought
that the parents could be held responsible for this shooting was in large part
because Demetrios had used his parents weapons to carry out the slaying,
but also because they felt they could show that the parents should have been aware
that their son had been growing increasingly violent in his thoughts