Coming up. And these are young kids. I mean, bottom line, these are young kids. Nobody deserve to die. Nobody, you know, as the relatives said, none of these people should have been there and none of this should have happened.

For Vault Studios, I'm Will Johnson. You're listening to The Daily Crime.

A Fairfax County jury found 19-year-old Zachary Burkard guilty, not of murder, but of manslaughter, in the deaths of two high school classmates.

Last week in Virginia, a panel of jurors recommended a 20-year-year-old convicted in the deaths of two of his high school classmates,

10 years for each of the teenagers killed. The jury deliberated for nearly three days before finding Zachary Burkhard guilty of two counts of manslaughter shooting and killing two of his teenage

classmates back in April of 2021. The mother of one of the victims collapsed after her son's killer was found guilty, not of

murder, but of manslaughter, weeping, gasping, shaking for long minutes before medics took her to the

hospital.

I'm joined now by WUSA-9 reporter Bruce Lishan.

Bruce, this is essentially a really tragic story about some teenagers

and alleged rival drug gangs in a high school.

Is that right?

Yeah, and the thing that has been so shocking to me

is that you would have so many kids in high school

struggling so much and that it would turn so violent so quickly. And some of the things

that are alleged about the defendant in this case are just crazy.

And the ability to go out and buy ghost guns and to arm himself, there's a piece of video

that was posted to Snapchat that is just particularly shocking.

So as you say, there was just kind of this back and forth between people who were trying to sell pot, allegedly, according to the defense, at South County High School in in Lorton, Virginia, and Fairfax County.

And it got pretty heated and pretty competitive. And the defendant apparently was not a very good salesperson. And he was

angry, according to his lawyer, about the success that his victims were having in selling. And so

he started threatening them, and they threatened back all this on social media on Snapchat.

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