One day a year ago in southeast Texas, Lori Laird got a text from a friend and fellow lawyer with an unusually urgent request for help: He had clients to offload. And fast.
“Do you know any Houston attorneys looking for a high-profile case with unpopular clients set to go to trial in May?” asked the other lawyer, Ron Rodgers.
Unpopular was an understatement. They were the parents of a teenage gunman who had killed eight students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in 2018. Now, they were being sued by the victims’ parents and survivors who wanted to hold them accountable for the killings.
Mr. Rodgers had closed his practice, and he needed someone to take the case off his hands. The problem was that other lawyers in town wanted nothing to do with it. “Wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole,” one told him. Could Ms. Laird recommend anyone?
Instead, Ms. Laird, a family law specialist with seven children who liked to fix people’s problems and enjoyed being so busy there was never enough time for it all, volunteered herself.
“I’m in,” she said. “When can I get the documents?”
What she didn’t say — and what she wouldn’t fully know herself until a few weeks later — was just how much she understood and empathized with the parents of the gunman, perhaps more than any other lawyer could.
She had a stepson, Jonathan, who had developed a form of schizophrenia. Like them, she watched him behave in ways she could not fathom.
She knew that Jonathan, who once loved family board game nights and playing the drums, had been hearing voices. Sometimes he drew pictures of the demons to match the ones in his head.
What she didn’t know, even as she began meeting her new clients and filing paperwork to take over the biggest case of her career, was that Jonathan had been figuring out how to use his new 3-D printer to print a gun.
***
Ms. Laird had grown up in the working class community of Pasadena, Texas, just outside of Houston, and got married before graduating high school.
Short on money and raising two children, she took a job as a police officer at the age of 23, an unexpected choice at the time for a woman who measured barely five feet tall, when the Gulf Coast humidity didn’t flatten her hair.
After about a decade as a police officer, she hurt her hand wrestling with a suspect and decided to become a lawyer. By the early 2000s she had built a thriving civil law practice. But her home life was challenging, with her first two marriages ending in divorce.
In 2009, Craig Schweitzer, an old friend from high school orchestra, reached out to her on Facebook. Divorced and the father of three boys, he suggested they get together. Always eager to just get something done, Ms. Laird replied immediately: Let’s meet right now. They married the following year.
Adjusting to their combined families — her four children, and his three — took time.
Mr. Schweitzer, whose work is in clinical brain mapping for surgeries, watched his sons closely for signs of mental illness. His former wife had suffered from schizophrenia, and he knew that family history was a risk factor.
He took both Jonathan and his older brothers, Nathan and Micah, to a neurologist when they were in their midteens. But there were no red flags.
Sure, Jonathan was quiet and had few friends. But he could be disarmingly funny. Like his parents, he played music. The family home was a bustling place teeming with instruments. His adult siblings regularly stopped by for game nights and sometimes played Dungeons & Dragons.
Ms. Laird, who loved board games so much she began to design her own, bonded with Jonathan over science fiction and comic book conventions.
“He was very much like me in that he was a huge sci-fi nerd,” Ms. Laird said. “Every ‘Star Wars’ movie that came out was like a life event for us.”
Then Jonathan decided to join the Marines.
Nearly everyone in the family tried to talk him out of it. But he was determined, and he deployed in late 2018. He received good-conduct medals and specialized as a kind of weather equipment technician.
But he seemed to be struggling with something other than just the demands of military life. He told a friend he believed there was an evil spirit in his room. He became convinced he had heavy metal poisoning. Military doctors ran tests but came up with nothing. Eventually they delivered the diagnosis that Mr. Schweitzer and Ms. Laird had hoped to avoid: schizophrenia. He was discharged with disability benefits, including monthly pay and paid visits from a therapist.
He came back home and then briefly rented his own apartment. At times, he disappeared, and they reported him missing. He once turned up walking barefoot in a bathrobe on a highway near Denver. Another time, he was arrested outside Salt Lake City on charges of breaking into a home and stealing a robe, a pair of slippers and a car, which he crashed on a canyon road.
“Found Jonathan,” Mr. Schweitzer texted Ms. Laird. “He was in a car wreck.”
“Found him!? How? Where?” she replied.
A nurse in Utah had called, he explained. “He’s now in the psychiatric unit.”
Back at home again, but still facing court dates in Utah, Jonathan, who was now 25, left his bedroom only at night, or with headphones on, hardly speaking.
His oldest brother bought him an easel for Christmas. Jonathan used it to draw the demons he heard and saw.
Ms. Laird discovered that he was secretly trying to poison himself by making his own ricin in his room on the second floor, just a few steps from the family game area, with its “Star Wars” posters and board games stacked so high they blocked the windows.
He told her he had tried to buy a gun but had been rejected, presumably because of his history of mental illness. He was hospitalized again.
Ms. Laird and Mr. Schweitzer talked about going to court to seek guardianship, in part to compel him to take his medications. She pressed for it, worried he might try to harm himself, but her husband feared that doing so would drive Jonathan away again.
“I had this conversation with the psychiatrists that, you know, ‘He’s getting packages delivered here, he has money. I’m concerned,’” Ms. Laird said. “No, you don’t need to do that,” she recalled a doctor saying. “He’s going to be fine.”
Sometimes when Jonathan stepped out of his room at night, Ms. Laird furtively stuck her phone through the cracked door to take pictures to try to learn what he had been doing in there.
About that time, Ms. Laird got the text asking her to represent the parents of the Santa Fe High School shooter.
***
The case in Santa Fe had its beginnings on a Friday morning in May 2018. 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.
Dressed in a trench coat and armed with a shotgun and a handgun that belonged to his parents, he shot certain students while seeming to spare others. He moved through the art room, firing into a supply closet and a kiln room where some students had huddled for safety.
As word spread of the shooting, students’ abandoned cellphones began ringing. Dimitrios taunted those hiding from him, asking if they wanted to come answer the calls. He fired down a hallway at those fleeing, and at responding officers.
“I didn’t think I could do it,” he told the officer who handcuffed him.
Eight students and two teachers were killed and 13 others were wounded. It was among the nation’s worst school massacres but was soon eclipsed by others and largely forgotten outside of Texas.
Dimitrios had no record of mental illness before the shooting. But he was diagnosed 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, most recently in January.
Soon after the shooting, 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.
In a nation struggling with an unending succession of school shootings, the Santa Fe suit was part of an expanding effort to hold the parents of the perpetrators responsible.
The gunman’s parents would not be tried criminally, as other parents had been. Instead, they were facing one of the first cases seeking to hold parents liable in civil court for the actions of their child in a school shooting.
And it was now up to Ms. Laird to explain how they could have let that happen.
***
She had taken the case in the middle of February, with the trial set for May. Ms. Laird was beginning to see parallels between her family’s experience with mental illness and that of her new clients, but she had not yet told them about Jonathan.
Then, on a Thursday morning in the middle of March as she was driving back to her office along a Houston highway, her husband called.
“I just went into Jonathan’s room,” he said. “He’s dead.”
Mr. Schweitzer had found their son lying on a deflated air mattress. He had used the 3-D printer to make a homemade gun, assembled from metal parts and white printed plastic. On the wall hung several of his recent drawings of demons. Mr. Schweitzer shook with sorrow.
Ms. Laird sped home, as she had learned to do from her police days. A police cruiser flew past her, lights and sirens blaring. She and the officer reached the front door almost at the same time. With the police inside, the family gathered outside, sobbing together.
After the police left the house and Jonathan’s body was taken away, Ms. Laird went with two of her sons into his bedroom at the top of the stairs and started cleaning. Her paralegal messaged her clients to tell them Ms. Laird would need more time, and they offered condolences. “We pray for your family’s healing,” Mr. Pagourtzis wrote in an email.
The trial date was pushed back to late July.
Ms. Laird struggled to go on. But she tried to hold in her emotions, and to be strong for Mr. Schweitzer. He saw a grief counselor. She seemed to cope best by staying busy, in control, the one who fixed everyone else’s problems. She threw herself back into trial preparation.
Then came a critical development in the case: The plaintiffs succeeded in getting the local district attorney to release some evidence gathered by investigators after the shooting, including the violent things Dimitrios had written, and the items he had purchased, in the months before his shooting spree.
No one had previously seen the material, and Ms. Laird invited her clients to review it with her at her second-floor office, a place decorated with the things she held dear: her collection of Sherlock Holmes-style pipes and magnifying glasses, her police badges, framed flags and slogans like, “God bless America, land that I love.”
It was the first time they had met since Jonathan’s death. Ms. Kosmetatos walked over and gave Ms. Laird a hug. Then they sat down, and with the documents on a screen, she opened a window into their son they had never looked through before.
Dimitrios wrote about rape and murder and his fascination with mass shooters. He ordered zip ties and bear spray online. He bought ammunition online and tried to make homemade bombs.
He reflected on what his claim to fame would be. “Killing a bunch of people,” he wrote.
Shortly before the trial began, Ms. Laird toured her clients’ house. She wanted to see for herself where their guns had been stored, and how their son had been able to hide the ones he had taken, along with his disturbing purchases, in his room.
“The plaintiffs were saying, ‘They’re right there in the house, he’s doing this right under their noses, and they don’t see it,’” she said. “Well, my son was making ricin poisoning in his bedroom, and I didn’t see it. So, you know, I wanted to see. I wanted to go see.”
Standing in the gunman’s bedroom, she thought of Jonathan. The room was just steps from where her clients still slept. They had been so close to one another, and still he had hidden so many things, she thought. Just like Jonathan.
Days later, when it came time to select the jury, Ms. Laird moved her final trial preparations from her home office to the table in Jonathan’s room. She couldn’t fully explain why. She just wanted to feel near him.
The plans for the gun were still loaded in the 3-D printer.
***
The trial opened on a punishingly humid morning in late July. A line of reporters formed outside the small county courtroom alongside relatives of the victims.
It had been six years since the shooting, and yet the case still kindled grief and outrage. As a precaution, the sheriff’s deputies had Ms. Laird meet with her clients each day before trial in a jury room on a different floor from where the trial was taking place.
As the trial got underway, her clients sat ashen at the defense table. At times, Ms. Kosmetatos wept.
Clint McGuire, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, went to the heart of the matter in his opening statement. “They failed in their job as parents,” he said.
The trial focused not only on whether the gunman’s parents had noticed their son’s emerging mental illness or plans for violence. It also turned on how well Ms. Kosmetatos and Mr. Pagourtzis had locked up the numerous firearms they kept in the house.
On the day Mr. Pagourtzis testified, he helped Ms. Laird wheel in a large wooden cabinet and a metal safe in which the family’s guns had been stored, positioning them in front of the jury.
“Did you have all of your weapons locked up?” Ms. Laird asked him.
“All of them,” he said, his Greek accent still pronounced even after decades of living in Texas.
The plaintiffs pointed to a statement from the gunman suggesting he had found the keys to the guns on top of the wooden cabinet.
Leaving the keys on the cabinet would be negligent, wouldn’t it? Mr. McGuire asked.
But he didn’t put them on top of the cabinet, Mr. Pagourtzis testified. He had hidden the keys elsewhere in the home, he said, but his son had found them.
The jury saw photos of Dimitrios with his parents. Lawyers argued over whether he looked as if he had “lost his smile” and whether his parents should have seen that change.
The jury also saw pictures of the young victims, and heard about how their promising lives had been cut short.
The night before closing arguments, Ms. Laird checked into a hotel near the courthouse. But by 1 a.m., she was still struggling to write a word. She decided to focus on the core of the plaintiffs’ argument: that the parents should have known.
She felt strongly that she had shown that was an unreasonable assumption. The plaintiffs kept talking about the numerous Amazon packages that Dimitrios had received in preparation for his shooting spree. But Jonathan had also ordered many things from Amazon, often furtively, Ms. Laird knew. How could she have known that they contained something sinister?
“Two thirds of this stuff happened to me,” she thought, but she and her husband never imagined their son would use his printer to make a gun.
Ms. Laird decided she had to tell the jury about Jonathan.
The next day, in court, she began to tell her story.
“That could be me sitting right there,” she saidof her clients. “My son died five months ago. He had schizophrenia.”
The statement sent shock waves through the courtroom.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs jumped up to object. A victim’s parent rushed from the courtroom with a look of disgust. The judge ordered Ms. Laird to refrain from mentioning her son any further.
She resumed her argument, this time not mentioning Jonathan, but still thinking of him, thinking of her husband and her other children and of the empty bedroom upstairs.
Her message to the jury was simple: They needed to find empathy in their hearts for the gunman’s parents as well as for his victims.
“Mental illness is an unseen, unknown tidal wave,” Ms. Laird said in her closing. Their son “is no longer the son they raised.”
After a full day of deliberation, the verdict came back.
Not liable.
For Ms. Laird, the result was more of a relief than a triumph. She had told the jurors something else before they began their deliberations, something she felt deeply herself.
“Nobody wins in this case,” she told them. “Everyone has lost.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.