Graduate Returns to Campus, Killed

A recent Fairfax High School graduate was fatally wounded in a hallway shooting Friday afternoon when he returned to campus to tell a teacher who had helped him overcome an educational handicap that he had been accepted to college, school officials said.

Antoine Thompson, 18, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center shortly after he was taken there from the school at Melrose and Fairfax avenues in the Hollywood area.

A hospital spokeswoman said that he had been shot in the back and that the bullet pierced his heart.

Hollywood detective Russell Custer said that the shooting is believed to have been gang-related and that two teen-age youths are being sought. He said it is being investigated by officers of the West Bureau CRASH (Community Resources Against Hoodlums) unit.

Carol Lee Bogue, in-house dean at Fairfax, said she is certain that young Thompson did not belong to a gang.

She said Thompson had been classified as educationally handicapped but that he was actually gifted and that a particular teacher--whom she did not identify--had helped him erase the stigma and become a good student. He graduated last June.

“I just know he was coming to visit the people who had helped,” Bogue said. “He wanted to tell her (the teacher who had helped him the most) that he had been accepted to college.”

Marty Estrin, Los Angeles Unified School District spokesman, said Thompson was in the hallway in the southeast corner of the main school building about 2:15 p.m. with a group of students. ‘

‘There was an argument,” Estrin said. “One of the students pulled out a gun and shot. . . .”

A doctor and a school nurse tried to save Thompson but could not.