School in a State of Shock After Yet Another Tragedy : Death: Family and friends are at a loss after Dorsey High athlete dies from a self-inflicted gunshot.

The Dorsey High School varsity baseball team was on the school bus returning home after losing a game when shortstop Wilfred Wright III, the unofficial senior class clown, pulled a gun out of his athletic bag.

Wilfred, 17, slipped a bullet into the chamber, friends would later recall. Then he put the gun to his head.

“You think I’m really gonna kill myself?” he said to teammates at the back of the bus. “Do you think anyone really wants to see me die?”

The players were not sure the gun was real. Wilfred was a prankster, a college-bound honors student who had never been involved with guns.

Wilfred pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

Wilfred put in a second bullet, put the gun to his head and squeezed the trigger again just as the bus pulled off the Harbor Freeway near USC. This time the .22-caliber pistol emitted a little pop and blood blew across the back of the bus.

The bus pulled to a stop, and coach Derrel Thomas, a former Los Angeles Dodger, sprinted to the nearest phone to call paramedics. As the bus sat on the shoulder, red lights flashing, a van drove up behind and parked. Inside were the team’s “official mom”--Wilfred’s mother--and its newly named “official photographer”--his father.

By then, Thomas was sitting on the side of the road with his head in his hands. “I didn’t know how to tell them,” Thomas said Wednesday. But Wilfred’s mother, Grace, will never forget his words: “Will’s in the back of the bus. He shot himself in the head.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen to Will,” she said at home Wednesday, crying as she was surrounded by friends, family and memories. “He was doing so great.”

The gun, she said, was her own. Three weeks before, she said, her son had been threatened by a gang member at school and taunted frequently since then. He had never told her, she said, he was taking the gun to school.

As she spoke, her husband, a photo lab technician at Cal State Dominguez Hills, could only utter self-recriminations under his breath. “I should have known,” he kept saying, “I should have been there.”

But he had been there. He and his wife had both been there for their three children, as were Wilfred’s supportive teachers and caring friends. Recently, his classmates had voted him “most athletic,” “most talented,” and “best buddies” in the Dorsey Class of ’92.

Why, everyone who knew him was asking Wednesday, should a happy-go-lucky guy with devoted parents and a scholarship to the University of La Verne take life so carelessly? And why, asked students and faculty Wednesday, does Dorsey High continue to be singled out by tragedy and tumult?

In the past three years, Dorsey has won two city championships in football and one in track. It has also won academic honors. But for every recent title for the Dorsey Dons, a misfortune has brought the school twice the media attention.

In 1984, honor student Earnest Pickett Jr. was killed in cross-fire between rival gangs. In 1989, football player Kevin Copeland suffered a heart attack during a game and died an hour later. Then, in the past three years, gunfire has stopped two home football games against Crenshaw High. Last year, Banning High School forfeited a game against Dorsey, saying its students were fearful of violence.

“It’s like a black cloud has just been floating over the school,” said Vice Principal Willard Love on Wednesday.

Tuesday, the day Wilfred died, happened to be Kevin Copeland’s birthday, and several students visited his grave. Later that night, more than a hundred students gathered at Dorsey again after hearing of Wilfred’s death.

Iris Lopez, student body president and a close friend of Wilfred, was at a loss. “He was the last person who could have done something like this,” she said. “But death doesn’t call out names. It just happens. I can’t see any explanation at all.”

Thomas, a utility player for the Dodgers from 1979-83, said he was just getting to know his players after starting the job last month. Will’s death, he said, hit him hard because the senior standout played shortstop and was the team’s best pitcher--the same positions Thomas played when he went to Dorsey in the late 1960s.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Dorsey was a baseball powerhouse. The city championship series was called the “Dorsey Tournament.” By the late 1960s, when Thomas arrived, baseball was, in his terms, “a passing sport.”

But life on campus was easier than it is now.

“When I went to Dorsey it wasn’t like this,” he said. “Back then, kids were afraid to get in trouble. . . . There is a lot more peer pressure nowadays and the presence of gangbangers.”

He decided to go back to Dorsey as a coach this spring, in part to bring baseball back to prominence at his alma mater.

Like everyone else, Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Arthur Holmes puzzled over the death.

“It’s being classified as an accidental shooting,” he said. “It’s just a tragedy. An accident. A misadventure. If he was class clown, he carried this joke too far.”

Then, in a rare personal comment for a spokesman in his position, he added that he had attended Dorsey in the mid-1970s, and had been present at one of the shooting incidents at a game with Crenshaw as well.

“Dorsey’s a good school,” he said. “ . . . The area around it isn’t even that bad. A lot of it’s a bad rap. Dorsey’s in the news a lot for all the wrong reasons.”

Among the hardest hit was the high school quarterback, Damon Williams, Wilfred’s best friend, who had just been kicked off the baseball team that week because he had missed practice.

“I knew that Will had had a gun because he had been harassed by gang members,” he said. “I probably would have had one also.”

But, he added, letting the sentence drift off, “If I’d only been on the bus. . . .”

Ava Shah, president of the Dorsey booster club, who was close to the Wrights, added:

“I’m still muddled in the mind. . . . For the first time in years, I’ve been lost for words. I don’t know what I can liken it to. I’m really trying to come to grips with this myself. It’s like, what’s next?”