[TLLK]

Ms. Taylor receives her sentence today.


https://www.pilotonline.com/2023/12/...ution-request/

NEWPORT NEWS — The mother of the 6-year-old student who shot his first-grade teacher at Richneck Elementary School was sentenced Friday to two years behind bars on a state child neglect charge — on top of the 21 month federal sentence she already received.
Judge Christopher Papile handed down the sentence against Deja Nicole Taylor after an hour-long sentencing hearing in Newport News Circuit Court, greatly exceeding the six months that prosecutors had requested under Taylor’s plea agreement.
Though prosecutors followed through on their promise to ask for no more than six months — the high end of sentencing guidelines in the case — Papile said that wasn’t enough for the crime and the “egregious” facts of this case.
“A parent’s ultimate and overarching and primary and paramount — however you want to say it — responsibility is to keep a child safe,” Papile said. “To protect the child, to keep them from bad influences, to keep them from dangerous situations, to keep them healthy and nurtured. Ms. Taylor has abdicated most if not all of these responsibilities.”
“The results of that (neglect) are egregious,” Papile said, noting not only the physical and psychological harm done to the teacher, Abigail Zwerner, but also other children in the classroom who had to witness the shooting.