LAPD Reacts Swiftly in Wake of Cocaine Overdose Incident at Elementary School

Calling it “a shameful and disastrous situation,” police Tuesday dispatched a team of specially trained officers to a Central Los Angeles elementary school to lecture about the danger of drugs following the hospitalization of two children after a pupil passed around a plastic bag of rock cocaine in a classroom.

Officers of the Los Angeles Police Department’s DARE program, a classroom anti-drug campaign designed with the cooperation of the Los Angeles Unified School District, held a series of assemblies for students at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School to help head off a repeat of Monday’s incident.

Police and school administrators said 13 of of 25 students in one fourth-grade classroom passed the bag of crystallized or “rock” cocaine around while the teacher and teacher’s aide were occupied with other students.

Two children were hospitalized Monday. One boy was treated for a cocaine overdose at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and released Monday night. A girl who had told her mother she ingested some of the cocaine was released Tuesday after doctors at Childrens Hospital discovered no signs of a reaction to the drug.

Meanwhile, Assistant Police Chief Robert L. Vernon said the mother of the 9-year-old-boy who brought the cocaine into the classroom “decided to resign” her job Monday as a custodian at the department’s Police Academy.

Vernon said the boy’s mother, Wilamena Jackson, 36, remained under investigation for her part in the affair, while a man described as her boyfriend, Rory Heidelberg, 22, was being held for investigation of furnishing drugs to a minor.

Jackson’s son, whose name was not released because of his juvenile status, allegedly was given about $500 worth of the cocaine by Heidelberg to “hold” for him, Vernon said.

The boy and his 16-year-old sister remained Tuesday in “protective custody,” Vernon said, while a 16-year-old boy, whose relation to the Jackson family was under investigation, was being held by juvenile authorities after detectives discovered him at Jackson’s house a few blocks from the school.

The 16-year-old boy, whose name was not released, was found in possession of drug paraphernalia and rock cocaine, Vernon said.

Jackson’s son brought the cocaine to school Monday morning and apparently passed it around “discreetly under the desks,” according to the school’s principal, Louvenia Jenkins.

School district spokesman Shel Erlich said it was only a matter of “a few minutes” before the aide noticed the cocaine and brought it to the attention of the teacher, who notified school administrators and police.

Knew It Was Coke

Vernon said, “The youngster who had the drug knew exactly what he had; he knew it was coke.”

The others knew it was cocaine and were “curious,” he said.

“It’s a shameful situation, a disastrous situation,” Vernon said at a news conference at Parker Center. “The drug abuse problem is so severe now it’s even getting at the grammar schools. That’s the horror of it.”

Earlier Tuesday, two DARE officers, responding to a request by school administrators, lectured students to “tell an adult you trust” if they find or are given drugs.

The children, who seemed happily unconcerned with Monday’s incident, responded with enthusiastic “noes” when asked by officers what they would say to older youths and adults pushing drugs on them. When asked individually, the kids promised to “leave it alone,” “flush it down the toilet” or “tell the police” if they ever came into contact with what they thought were illegal drugs.

Sgt. Michael Schaeffer of the Drug Awareness Resistance Education program told reporters who had gathered at the school that the fourth graders had not heard the series of weekly lectures given to sixth graders.

Occasional Visits

He said DARE officers are “pretty much occupied at the sixth-grade level,” although occasional visits are made to lower grades.

“We target the sixth graders. . . . I think that’s the right age; we can’t put officers on every level,” he said.

Schaeffer said Monday’s incident was, to his knowledge, the first of its kind.

“You generally don’t find drug problems in elementary schools,” he said.

Erlich, the district spokesman, called the drug case “an isolated incident.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have a lot of 9-year-olds walking into the classrooms with Baggies of coke,” Erlich said. “It may be indicative of what’s going on in the community, but I don’t think this one incident is going to cause a change in any of our policies.”

He said school administrators would welcome more DARE officers.

“If the Police Department had the money to put more officers into the program, we’d love to have them.”

Staff writer Roxane Arnold contributed to this article.