Trial in Texas School Shooting Asks: Could the Gunman’s Parents Have Stopped It?

As the nation has struggled to respond to mass shootings, often carried out by teenagers still living at home, focus has turned to the parents of the gunmen and whether they bear responsibility for the horrific acts of their children.

That has been the question at the center of a civil trial now taking place in a small county courtroom in Galveston, along the Gulf Coast of Texas. The defendants are the parents of a 17-year-old gunman who killed eight of his classmates and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in 2018.

The trial is the first such case since a jury in Michigan found the parents of a 15-year-old gunman guilty this year of involuntary manslaughter in a mass shooting that their son committed at Oxford High School outside of Detroit in 2021. Prosecutors presented evidence that the parents had ignored warning signs andfailed to lock up the handgun that they purchased for their son, which he used in the shooting.

The difference in Texas is that the parents of the gunman, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, have not been accused of any crime. Instead, the case is among the first in which those victimized by a school shooting are trying to hold the gunman’s parents liable in civil court.

For nearly two weeks now, Mr. Pagourtzis, a Greek immigrant, and his wife, Ms. Kosmetatos, have sat in court just a few yards from the parents of the children who were killed in the massacre.

Photos of the victims as they appeared before the shooting have been shown to the jury, as have those of the gunman cuddling with his father and performing in a Greek dance troupe at his church just a few days before the attack.