Texas lawyer Lori Laird agreed to defend parents of a teenage gunman who had killed eight students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in 2018. They were sued by the victims’ parents and survivors who wanted to hold them accountable for the killings. Laird had a stepson, Jonathan, who had developed a form of schizophrenia. Like them, she watched him behave in ways she could not fathom. In Santa Fe, students were gathered in their classes when a 17-year-old senior at the school, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, burst into an art room and began shooting a handgun that belonged to his parents. He had no record of mental illness before the shooting, but he was diagnosd afterward with schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and confined to a state mental hospital. He was deemed by a court to be unfit for trial.
Several of the victims’ parents and wounded survivors sued the gunman’s parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, in part because it had been their weapons used in the attack. Laird's son committed suicide while she prepared for the trial. In the case, the plaintiffs succeeded in getting the district attorney to release some evidence gathered by investigators after the shooting, including violent things Dimitrios had written, and the items he had purchased, in the months before his shooting spree. In closing arguments of the trial, Laird told jurors, “That could be me sitting right there,” she said of her clients. “My son died five months ago. He had schizophrenia.” A plaintiffs' lawyer objected, and the judge ordered Laird to refrain from mentioning her son any further. Her message to the jury: They needed to find empathy in their hearts for the gunman’s parents as well as for his victims. She said, “Mental illness is an unseen, unknown tidal wave." After a day of deliberation, the jury found the parents not liable.
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