The Jan. 6 school day seemed normal to Abigail Zwerner, a first grade teacher in Newport News, Virginia, until she heard rumblings that one of her students had a gun. Fear consumed her as the day dragged on and school officials didn’t act, she said.
Then, just before 2 p.m., while perched at a small table where she was reading to her students, she fixed her eyes on a 6-year-old boy sitting several feet away. His tiny fingers were wrapped around the trigger of a 9 mm handgun.
“I just will never forget the look on his face that he gave me while he pointed the gun directly at me,” Zwerner, 25, said, recounting the harrowing moment at Richneck Elementary School in an interview that aired Tuesday on NBC’s “TODAY” show.
A bullet ripped through her left hand, rupturing bones before it lodged in her upper chest, where it remains. Although she was seriously wounded, she sprang into action to quickly collect the other children and usher them to safety. Frightened screams echoed in the class of about 20 students.
“That was pretty shocking itself,” she said of getting shot without warning. “But I just wanted to get my babies out of there.”
The events that followed were a blur, she said, speaking publicly for the first time Monday with “TODAY” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. And, Zwerner said, she’s still coming to grips with the trauma and her recovery journey in an incident that grabbed national headlines and exposed what other teachers and parents described as failures by school administrators.
Zwerner wasn’t even sure she would survive. After she fled her classroom, she went to the school office, and her breathing grew heavy and her vision dimmed. She lay on the floor as two co-workers applied pressure to stem the bleeding before an ambulance arrived.
More on the Virginia teacher who was shot
She didn’t know at the time that one of her lungs had collapsed. She said the fact that the bullet struck her hand first before it entered her chest most likely saved her life, because her…
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