More Students Are Suspended in Wake of Leuzinger Brawl

More than 35 Leuzinger High School students, who officials feared were planning a pay-back confrontation over last week’s schoolyard brawl, were sent home from school Wednesday and suspended pending conferences with their parents.

The students began acting combative, flashing hand signals and jeering at each other, shortly after the Lawndale school opened Wednesday, according to sheriff’s deputies and school officials.

Sheriff’s deputies noticed that a group of Latino youths, most of them Leuzinger students, had gathered in a shopping center parking lot at the corner of Rosecrans Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard between 8 and 9 a.m., said Tom Barkelew, superintendent of the Centinela Valley Union High School District. The deputies “rounded them up and brought them back to school,” where they were suspended by Leuzinger officials, he said.

Barkelew said he did not know the exact number of students who were suspended, and Leuzinger school officials did not return phone calls Thursday.

Sheriff’s deputies and Hawthorne police have stepped up patrols at Leuzinger and Hawthorne high schools since April 18, when a fight between two Leuzinger students erupted into a widespread brawl among black and Latino students. It was finally quelled by more than 50 police and sheriff’s deputies, and 25 students were suspended for a week.