All Student Wanted Was to Say ‘Thanks,’ and He Dies

A recent Fairfax High School graduate was fatally wounded in a hallway shooting Friday when he returned to campus to visit the teacher who helped him overcome an educational handicap so he could enter college.

Antoine (Tony) Thompson, 18, died in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center shortly after he was taken there from the school at Melrose and Fairfax Avenues in the Fairfax district.

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

Although school officials and Thompson’s family said he was not in a gang, police said they believed the shooting was by a gang member. It was being investigated by officers of the West Bureau CRASH (Community Resources Against Hoodlums) unit.

They were seeking at least two and perhaps three teen-age boys who, witnesses said, had been among a group of students in a hallway of the main building when an argument erupted about 2:15 p.m.

“One of the students pulled out a gun and shot,” said Marty Estrin, Los Angeles Unified School District spokesman. It was not immediately learned what triggered the argument.

At the victim’s home in South-Central Los Angeles, his distraught mother and grandparents said he had graduated from Fairfax last June despite having been classified as dyslexic--with a speech and reading impairment.

Young Thompson’s grandmother, Albirtha Anderson, said the youth had been aided by Linda Brooks, a special education teacher at Fairfax who “had worked with Tony very intensively and had taken a great interest in him.”

He began attending West Los Angeles College during the past week and went back to the high school Friday, his grandmother said, to talk to Brooks. “Tony was very proud he had entered college,” she said, “but he was a little apprehensive about some of the classes.” He wanted to discuss them with his former teacher.

Anderson said her grandson checked in with Principal Warren Steinberg, visited Brooks in her classroom and apparently was on his way to a telephone booth to call home when the shooting occurred.

“He would always call me when he was going to be even slightly late coming home,” his grandmother said.

Carolee Bogue, in-house dean at Fairfax, said that although Thompson had been classified as educationally handicapped, he was actually gifted. “I know he was coming to thank the people who had helped him,” she said.

Tony had considered going into the Army, his grandmother said, but then decided on college. “He told me he needed to get an education so he could make a decent living.”

The victim’s mother, LaTricia Thompson, said her son had worked as a teacher’s aide for the Foundation for the Junior Blind during the past three years. “He loved kids,” she said. “He loved working with disabled children.”

Brooks, the teacher of whom Tony Thompson had been so fond, telephoned the home late Friday afternoon, Anderson said, to say that perhaps if she had not agreed to help him, he would not have been at the high school and would not have died.

“She’s devastated,” Anderson said of the teacher. “She’s crushed. I’m crushed. We’re all crushed. “I don’t know when this kind of thing is going to end,” she said softly. “Gangs shooting innocent victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Times staff writer Jack Jones contributed to this article.