Name-Calling Escalates Into Fatal Tragedy : School: A 17-year-old is charged with manslaughter after a schoolmate dies of injuries sustained in a fight. Friends of both say neither was a troublemaker.

It was a schoolyard fight that ended in tragedy.

Two youths tangled in a name-calling session during lunch on the Azusa High School campus Jan. 14. They agreed to meet after classes to duke it out.

During the scuffle, sophomore Eric Crabtree, 16, a quiet newcomer from West Virginia whom girls described as “cute” and “a good dresser,” suffered head injuries. He died four days later.

The boy he was fighting, Sergio Godinez, 17, a well-liked senior and football player whose schoolmates dubbed him the “class clown,” was charged Wednesday in Juvenile Court in Pomona with involuntary manslaughter. If convicted, he faces a maximum four-year sentence in a California Youth Authority facility.

The death, and subsequent criminal prosecution, have stunned and angered both boys’ friends and relatives. Neither was a troublemaker, they say.

“I don’t want people to think my brother’s a murderer,” said Noel Godinez, 20. “He’s not a bad kid. . . . The only thing he ever got was a traffic ticket.”

“Eric was always quiet,” said Crabtree’s aunt, Betty Adkins, reached in Genoa, W. Va. “I think girls loved him just because he was so kind.”

School officials said the fatal confrontation appeared to be a personal dispute. Fights are infrequent on the grassy, tree-lined campus with a student population of 1,300, the majority of them Latino, Azusa Unified School District spokeswoman Kathleen Miller said.

The fight arose after a name-calling confrontation during lunch, Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Wooldridge said. The prosecutor said he had no information about the words that were exchanged, but the two youths agreed to meet after school.

About 2:40 p.m., they began fighting outside a classroom, Wooldridge said; Eric was body-slammed onto the concrete by Sergio and lost consciousness. The boy was taken to Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora, where he died Jan. 18 of brain injuries, the prosecutor said.

But attorney Thomas Rabatt, who represented Sergio in court Wednesday, said his client was attacked by Eric and fought back in self-defense. Eric was injured when both youths fell onto the concrete and Eric hit his head, Rabatt said.

Whatever the sequence of events, or reason for the fight, “it was a one-on-one situation,” Miller said. “It could have happened anywhere.”

But those who know the two youths are surprised it happened at all. The two didn’t really know each other and ran in different circles on campus, classmates and family members said.

Eric, a slightly built blond given to wearing cowboy boots, had been enrolled at Azusa High since September.

Born in Cleveland, he was raised with his younger brother, “Little Dale,” in rural Genoa, a town so small it doesn’t even earn a U. S. Census count separate from the surrounding ZIP code in Wayne County.

“He was one that you never had to holler at,” Adkins said. “He minded good.”

Eric’s pleasures were simple, the aunt recalled. He enjoyed hiking in the oak and sycamore woods behind his house, she said.

Once he got his driver’s license, he would often borrow a car from his father, Dale, and join other teen-agers driving up and down Cruise Avenue in nearby Huntington, the county’s biggest city, with 54,000 residents.

Not surprisingly, Eric earned the nickname “Booney” once he got to California, said his cousin, Jennifer Crabtree, 16.

“It was because he was from the boonies,” she said.

The youth came to California over the summer after his mother, Ruthie Worrell, remarried. He helped her drive to Azusa and then simply stayed with her rather than returning to West Virginia, as originally planned.

“I think he just hated (the thought of) leaving her,” Adkins said. “He was going to come home, I know. But one week he wanted to come home and the next week he didn’t.”

He had made new friends, Adkins said, and when the school year began, he enrolled at Azusa so he would not get behind in his schoolwork in West Virginia.

Both of the victim’s parents declined to be interviewed over the phone in Genoa, where the funeral was held Friday.

“We just don’t understand why this happened,” Adkins said, her voice tightening in sadness and anger.

“We can understand if he was struck with illness and we had to lose him. But just over a silly fight?

“What kind of a school is that?” she asked. “They make you send him and then he gets killed.”

For friends and family of Sergio, the pain has been equally intense, Noel Godinez said.

“He’s already suffering,” Godinez said of his brother. “From now on, he’s never going to be the same.”

Born in Los Angeles, Sergio and his brother live in Azusa under the care of an older brother and sister. The arrangement allows Sergio’s Spanish-speaking parents to remain in Tijuana while the boys take advantage of the education system here, Noel said.

Because he played football--he was a tight end for the Azusa Aztecs--and has a sense of humor, Sergio is well known and popular on campus, fellow students said.

“He can walk by you in the hall and make you laugh,” said one friend, senior Cindy Baker, 17.

Yet Sergio the comedian showed a sensitive side when he surprised Baker with six red roses last year shortly before the two were “married” in the school’s mock wedding ceremony, part of a marriage study class.

“He didn’t have to get them,” Baker said, her eyes widening at the recollection.

Sergio was also serious about his future, according to Rabatt. The youth was registered with the Marines and planned to enlist upon graduation, the lawyer said.

The fight, and its outcome, have made the Azusa campus a somber place, where the flag has flown at half-staff for more than a week and knots of students gather to ponder why the fight occurred.

Student body officers created a fund to help Eric’s family meet funeral expenses and a potluck fund-raiser is planned, Miller said.

“It’s a tragic situation for both these boys,” the school’s spokeswoman said. “Our heart goes out to the families of both.”