Healing the Wounds : Fairfax High Strives to Restore Normalcy After Shooting

Warren Steinberg, principal of Fairfax High School, was talking to the school’s Student Council Tuesday, getting the bad news out.

Tony Thompson, a former Fairfax student who was shot and killed Friday by two current students in the first-floor hall of the main building, will be buried Thursday.

And the school’s football field, because of problems with drainage control and over-watering, might be unusable. The team might have to play all its games--even the homecoming game--on opponents’ fields.

The two dozen or so students present seemed to take both pieces of news with equanimity, which is precisely what Steinberg wanted.

“The more I can get us all back to conventional school things, the better off the kids will be,” Steinberg told a visitor later.

And the kids who go to Fairfax seemed to understand that.

“The idea is to get back to normal school life,” said student body President Marion Katz. What happened last week had nothing to do with the way things usually are at Fairfax, she said. “A lot of us can’t believe it happened here, not Fairfax. The atmosphere of school being a secure place was shattered.”

Thompson, 18, was a graduate of Fairfax’s special education program; he had dyslexia, a fairly common learning impairment. He had entered West Los Angeles College last week, and had gone back to Fairfax to talk to a teacher there about his apprehensions over college-level work.

There was an argument in the hallway over use of a pay telephone, police said later. A Fairfax student reached for a gun. Thompson fell to the floor. He died of gunshot wounds in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Police are holding two male students, ages 16 and 17, who will be arraigned today on murder charges. The prosecution plans to ask that the youths be tried as adults.

The slaying was not racially motivated, Steinberg said; Thompson was black, as are the two students arrested.

Nor was it conventional gang violence, he added; although the suspects are believed to be gang members, Thompson was not.

You could only call it “a senseless, dumb thing--an argument over a phone,” Steinberg said.

The students at Fairfax were still talking about the slaying this week.

Julie Armstrong, 17, a senior, said that, at first, “everyone was sitting around stunned; a lot of people were crying. A lot of people were talking about checking out (transferring to another school) . . . but this could have happened at any school. I feel very safe here.”

Another student, a senior who asked to be identified only as “Dwayne,” agreed. “Fairfax is a good school. People don’t get shot here everyday, not at Fairfax. Sure, gang members exist, but security is pretty good here--if you’re not in a gang, you’re OK.”

In fact, students here don’t take gangs very seriously. Julie, Dwayne and others say there are gangs in the Fairfax area--interracial gangs or groups whose level of violence does not begin to compare with those of South-Central or East Los Angeles. They’re more like social clubs, drinking buddies, the young people say.

Steinberg knows his school of 2,500 students is a melting pot--white, black, Latino, Asian-Americans. He thinks it works.

“We have a variety of programs on this campus designed to get kids from different backgrounds working well together,” he said Tuesday. “The truth of the matter is that crime against persons and crime against property was down by one-third last year.”

Steinberg also thinks Fairfax will continue to work, with only short-term modifications.

There are more Los Angeles Unified School District police officers around campus--five, rather than the usual two. And admission to the school at Melrose and Fairfax avenues during school hours is now limited to the the main entrance.

There won’t be many additional security precautions, Steinberg said.

“What happened Friday was an aberration and we don’t expect it to happen again,” the principal said. We’re taking reasonable steps, but we’re not doing radical things that will look good in the press. Can you imagine 2,500 kids lining up to go through a metal detector at 8 in the morning?

“There was a principal in the past who referred to his school, Crenshaw High, as Fort Crenshaw. I’m not going to turn this place into Fort Fairfax with Gen. Steinberg sitting in his office in command. That’s baloney.”

Steinberg pointed to several measures designed to assuage feelings of fear:

--The additional campus police officers and the single entrance, along with with more teachers and teachers’ aides walking the halls.

--A message to students asking them to tell teachers or staff whenever they see someone who looks like he does not belong or who may be carrying a gun or knife.

--The presence of several parents to answer phone calls from other concerned parents who may want to keep their children away from Fairfax, telling them that the school is safe and that there is no reason to fear for their childrens’ safety. (That’s working, Steinberg said; attendance has not dropped below normal levels.)

--The work of a five-member team of school district psychologists, talking to 30 or so students and half a dozen teachers, going over the events of Friday afternoon in what they are calling a form of “psychological first aid.”

“There’s a feeling of fear among the students and a feeling of helplessness and guilt among the staff,” said Howard R. Eichinger Jr., the team’s coordinator.

Talking about the death of Tony Thompson is helping, he said.

“People who were upset yesterday are getting over it today,” Eichinger added.

There has been talk among students of planting a tree in memory of Thompson, Eichinger said. One teacher is taking up a collection for the family. The Student Council will use the money from its candy sales drive as a scholarship fund for the special education program.

And then the students will try to figure out how to have a homecoming on some other school’s field.