Silence Over Coach Turns to Roar : Education: Susanville parents say that for years they ignored alleged physical and verbal abuse of students by Ed Murin. Finally some spoke out, unleashing a controversy.

In this isolated, mountainous community, high school sports can take on the intensity of a religion. This is a town of about 7,300 people where football games generally draw more than 1,000. Football and basketball stars, their parents and their coaches are among its elite.

So for many youngsters and their families, playing for the Lassen High School Grizzlies seemed far more important than protesting the actions of Ed Murin.

And that, townsfolk say, explains how Edward Frank Murin, well-known teacher and coach, has been able to stay on the job for nearly 20 years despite repeated accusations that he physically abused his players and students and showered them with four-letter words and racial epithets.

“It was understood that if you came forward, either your son wouldn’t play or he’d be made a whipping boy,” said Penny Sweet, whose son, Joe, played basketball for Lassen High in the mid-1980s.

Murin, 46, has been teaching seventh- and eighth-grade science and physical education in a Susanville elementary school since 1972. Until earlier this year, he also coached varsity basketball at Lassen High School and was an assistant football coach there.

Many parents of boys who played on Murin’s teams said they were appalled by the coach’s behavior but did not protest.

As even his defenders concede, Murin has hurled racial epithets at black players and called American Indian students “wagon burners” and other names.

Penny and Jim Sweet said Murin often grabbed and shoved their son, swore at him and accused the boy of being under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Although the Sweets worried about the way their son was being treated, they did little about it until he had graduated.

Eventually, the Sweets joined a dozen other Susanville families in lodging complaints that led trustees of the high school district to remove Murin from coaching.

Now the state Department of Education, acting on similar complaints, is trying to force trustees of the Susanville elementary school district to discipline Murin. If they refuse--and so far they have--the district, which serves 1,350 students, could lose about $3 million in annual state support. That is roughly two-thirds of its budget.

The dispute has divided this tiny Northern California community, wedged between two mountain ranges 65 miles west of the Nevada state line. There are strong Murin allies and equally vociferous opponents, with few remaining neutral.

In a lengthy document submitted in 1988 to the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, Murin denied most of the accusations but, on the advice of his lawyer, has not spoken to reporters for about two years. The California Teachers Assn. has hired a lawyer to defend him.

Murin’s friends and supporters believe him to be an effective, well-organized teacher and a tough, “in your face” coach who has gotten the best out of the sometimes-modest athletic talent available at the high school.

“He is an outstanding teacher,” said Jennifer Cesarin, librarian at Diamond View Middle School, where Murin teaches science and physical education. “He is a teacher with high expectations. Sometimes parents blame the teacher when their children don’t reach those expectations.”

Critics say Murin is a sadistic bully who delights in shoving students and players around and knocking them down--although he is only about 5 feet, 6 inches tall--and screaming foul language and racial epithets at them.

“He’s a bully,” said dentist T. (Ted) Pratt, whose complaints and those of his wife, Janice, led to the state action against the school district. “He spots a weakness in a kid and goes after it. He finds the one who’ll be hurt the worst and humiliates him.”

Stacey Miller, a quiet American Indian who is now 22, first encountered Murin in seventh grade, where, Miller said, “he called me ‘Tonto’ and ‘wagon burner,’ kicked my chair out, threw erasers at me and did a lot of ornery things.”

At Lassen High School, Miller was potentially the football team’s best receiver, some in town contend, but he said that because of Murin he never played for the Grizzlies.

“He jerked me around by the face mask, called me names and criticized me the whole time,” Miller recalled. “I got fed up and quit after the first week of practice.”

Interviews, signed affidavits and testimony in recent Sacramento legal proceedings indicate there were many such instances, but for years Murin’s actions went unchallenged. The Sweets were not the only family in Susanville to tolerate his behavior so that their sons could play football or basketball.

Linda Turner accompanied the basketball team, for which her older son, Chad, played guard, to Hawaii several years ago and watched in dismay as Murin “flew into a rage” at the game officials, “went on a rampage and was literally kicked out of the gym,” she said recently.

Turner said the coach was charged with six technical fouls, costing Lassen High the game, then “returned to the gym, grabbed the mike from the announcer and proceeded to rake the officials over the coals.”

Linda and Bob Turner came to the conclusion that Murin “shouldn’t be around children,” she said, “but we kept our mouths shut about the whole thing” until both Chad and his younger brother, Craig, had graduated from Lassen High and the family had moved to Klamath Falls, Ore. “We didn’t want to cause any more problems for our kids,” she explained.

Many of the complaints about Murin focus on his elementary school teaching, not his high school coaching. Many have come from American Indians, who comprise the largest minority in Susanville and often seem to have been Murin’s targets.

Frank Cady, president of the Susanville elementary school district’s board, said that although Murin sometimes calls blacks “niggers,” he is not necessarily a racial bigot.

“There are still individuals in this neck of the woods that refer to blacks as ‘niggers,’ ” said Cady, a lawyer whose family has lived in the Susanville area for five generations. “Some do it in a biased, racist fashion and others do it because that’s just their culture, that’s just the way they were brought up. They use it with no disrespect.”

But the state Department of Education has charged that Murin violated state anti-discrimination laws when he used racial slurs and that Cady and his fellow school trustees knew about Murin’s conduct and did nothing about it.

Marshall S. Leve, superintendent of the elementary school district, offered an unusual defense of Murin’s coaching methods.

Leve said Lassen High is one of the smallest schools in its league and that Murin was trying to “teach players to compete against teams that were bigger, stronger and faster than our athletes were, which meant our teams had to reach a high degree of emotionalism.”

But one of Murin’s former players said, “That’s a lousy excuse. You don’t have to abuse people in order to motivate them. In fact, you can motivate them much better with a positive approach. All Murin did was motivate kids to quit the team.”

Another part of the explanation for this long-simmering, bitter dispute may be found in the fact that Susanville is still an isolated, conservative community that is controlled by a handful of people, most of them white males.

This is true even though the town has grown in recent years and has become more racially mixed as the American Indian population has increased and blacks have come to work at a nearby state prison.

“The ‘good old boy’ network is alive and well here,” said Marina Oliver, a Pit River Indian who teaches at Lassen College, the local community college. “The sons and daughters of the people who own the land now run the town.”

Cady, the school board president, denied that such a network exists in Susanville but acknowledged that “only a small, select number of people get out and get involved--run for office, get on boards, do this, do that.”

A longtime observer of the Susanville feud who did not want to be identified said he believed “Cady, Leve and the other ‘old boys’ thought they could control this, that it would all go away.” But after the dispute was publicized, including on “60 Minutes” in December, “they decided to circle the wagons--they’d be damned if they’d let outsiders tell them what to do,” the observer said.

Cady said the district has spent about $50,000 so far to fight the state’s discrimination charges. Many people in town believe the cost is at least twice that. Even so, that is much less than the $200,000 to $400,000 the district might be forced to pay to fight the lawsuit that likely would be filed if Murin, a tenured teacher, were fired.

The silence about Murin ended with Janice Pratt, a “flat-lander” in the parlance of longtime residents, who apply the term to new arrivals from the Sacramento Valley and elsewhere. She moved to Susanville with her dentist husband, Ted, in 1978.

In 1985, the Pratts became concerned because they thought their 16-year-old son, Tad, was the best of three boys trying out for quarterback on the high school football team, but he ended up playing the less glamorous position of linebacker.

Their concern turned to anger, Janice Pratt said, when they learned that Murin, who coached the quarterbacks, dragged Tad around the field by his face mask and repeatedly called himan “idiot,” “stupid” and other insults, all laced with gross obscenities.

When Tad’s parents learned that many other students had been subjected to the same treatment, they decided to do something about it.

They complained to local school officials, the police, the district attorney, county child-protective services, the state attorney general and the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, among others, and got nowhere.

“Nobody wanted to deal with it,” Janice Pratt said.

But the Pratts were persistent, and their voluminous documentation of Murin’s alleged misdeeds finally led to a hearing by the Assembly Education Committee a year ago. That, in turn, seems to have triggered the state Department of Education investigation that has led to discrimination charges against the Susanville elementary school district.

Department of Education lawyers say they have no jurisdiction over physical abuse by a teacher or coach but that they can remove part or all of Susanville’s state support if it can be shown that the school district knew about Murin’s racial slurs and discriminatory behavior but took no corrective action.

That is what the department is trying to prove in hearings set to resume in July before anadministrative law judge in Sacramento.

Some Susanville residents believe that the Pratts’ single-minded pursuit of the matter for six years amounts to a personal vendetta against Murin because their son did not get to play quarterback for Lassen High.

“I think that’s what started it,” Frank Cady said, “although it has taken on a life of its own since then, obviously.”

The effort has been costly for the Pratts. They say they have spent more than $30,000 on the case.

Ted Pratt said he has lost “quite a few patients” since he and his wife began their protests. The couple dropped out of the Parent Teacher Assn., because Murin’s teacher friends would not participate as long as the Pratts belonged.

Pratt also charged that Murin has made threats against him.

“He called me and said, ‘Doc, I’m not going to get a gun and shoot you’ or ‘It’s none of my business, Doc, if you have girlfriends or if you cheat insurance companies’--that’s the kind of thing he does,” the dentist said.

Janice Pratt is not sure the family--which includes two teen-agers still in local schools--can remain in Susanville, whatever the outcome.

Since the recent hearings in Sacramento, “several friends have expressed real concern about our safety,” she said. “I definitely feel the level of anger and anxiety is rising. A lot of people are blaming us, especially me. I’m not sure what we’ll do.”

Nor is the town likely to recover soon from the bitter divisions caused by the controversy.

“It’s given the town a real black eye,” said Sue Ide, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.

Only Mayor John McCann, a high school teacher, saw a possible silver lining.

“Maybe this will help us grow up and realize we’re part of California,” McCann said. “We’re isolated geographically but we don’t have to be isolated culturally. Maybe this will help us realize that.”