Victims' families react after parents of Santa Fe High School shooting suspect found not liable

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- It's now been nearly 24 hours since a jury found the parents of the accused Santa Fe High School shooter not financially liable in the mass shooting that killed 10 people and injured 13 in 2018.

Families of those victims have gone home, reflected, and grieved. Now, they're sharing their pain.

"I lived on hope for many years, and it wasn't until this trial that I've come to terms with that we're just never going to hold the person accountable who pulled the trigger," Rosie Yanas, whose 17-year-old son, Chris Stone, was shot and killed, said.

For six years, families have searched for accountability.

They'll likely never get a criminal trial because the accused shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, has been found incompetent to stand trial.

Now, they know his parents won't be held liable.

After a day of deliberation, jurors in the civil trial placed 80% of the blame on the then 17-year-old accused shooter and 20% on the online retailer where he bought ammunition.

The jury awarded the families of the victims hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, the ammunition company won't have to pay due to a civil settlement, and the accused shooter, who is in a mental health facility, has no money, according to his attorney.

"The money was never anything that I had signed up for; that wasn't anything," Gail McLeod, whose 15-year-old son Kyle was killed, said. "That wasn't important to me. I wanted the parents to be held responsible."

McLeod, like so many other parents and relatives, saw this trial as a way to ensure other parents would see and act upon warning signs of mental illness and make sure their children had no access to guns.

A juror told Eyewitness News most jurors felt the accused shooter's parents had done all they could reasonably do.

"It's crazy for me to even think these kinds of thoughts because I feel like I'm making excuses for my son's killer's family and stuff like that, so it's hard for me," Yanas said. "But, at first, I did put myself in their shoes as a parent. And I did put myself in their shoes as far as, 'Did I miss something as a mom? Could I have missed something?' But I keep going back to, 'I know my children.'"

This case was one of the first attempts in the country to hold parents financially liable for their child's actions in a school shooting.

"At the end of the day, I believe now the jury has blood on their hands if another school shooting happens," Yanas said. "Just like everybody else, they had a chance to make a big change in this world for other teachers and students. Because the school shooter is already out there, it's already planned, it's already journaled. It's all a matter of when it's going to happen."

For the three-week-long trial, victims and their relatives relived the shooting, testifying and seeing for the first time police interviews and journal entries from the accused shooter.

The jury's verdict feels like a final blow.

"I want to hold each and every person accountable for my son's death," Yanas said. "I'm not going to hold the person accountable that actually laid the guns in his hand. That's my opinion. Then you have the school district. They have that sovereign immunity, so you can't do anything to them. Then you have the police department. You have questions about them. You can't do anything about them. So, what can I do?"

Still, they acknowledged that a different verdict wouldn't take away their pain.

"I just miss him every day. Yeah, I miss him every day," McLeod said. "It's a never-ending process, I would say. You're never going to get over it. You're never going to get to where you're OK with it."

"He was a hero that day, and I don't know what my plan is, but maybe here on earth, I'm supposed to be somebody else's hero and change more laws for the future," Yanas said.

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