They Went Thataway : Students Learn About the Law in a Classroom Whodunit : Education: A unique program at Jordan High School gives teen-agers hands-on experience in investigations.

Jordan High School, North Long Beach, 9:55 a.m. Teacher Adrienne Mooney unlocks the door to her classroom and observes three males, their faces covered, frantically climbing out of a window.

Mooney calls to the men to stop, but they scramble into the courtyard and run away. Mooney notices that a photo album containing a valuable collection of baseball cards, which she had been planning to use as a teaching prop in her civil law class, is sitting open on a desk. Some of the cards are missing.

Mooney calls the cops.

9:57 a.m. The crime scene swarms with detectives and forensics experts--more than 40 of them in running shoes, baggy sweat shirts and other plainclothes. Some of them string yellow plastic “Sheriff’s Line--Do Not Cross” tape in the hall and outside the window. Others videotape the scene.

This was not an ordinary crime scene, and these were not ordinary cops. In fact, they were students in Jordan High’s criminal investigations class. And the baseball cards weren’t really stolen. The whole caper, including fake blood left at the scene, was set up to test the students’ crime-busting expertise.

And the students do their investigation by the book. They hope their work will lead to the identification, arrest, trial and conviction of the suspects--all part of the class.

They also hope they’ll get good grades.

One forensics expert dusts the windowsill with black fingerprint powder, while another takes a sample of the drop of blood found on the baseball card collection--blood apparently left by one of the burglars who cut himself during the forced entry.

Still others take plaster impressions of the footprints the fleeing burglars left under the window.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Lucia, who is supervising the investigation and helps teach the class, cautions them not to tromp over the footprints.

“Remember, set up one way into the crime scene and one way out,” Lucia says. The footprint team members, grim-faced and serious, nod.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, two detectives are grilling the witness, Mooney, in rapid-fire, “just-the-facts-ma’am” style. Mooney gives vague physical descriptions of the thieves. “It all happened so fast,” she says, in the time-honored tradition of crime witnesses everywhere. She reports that an autographed 1976 Nolan Ryan card and two Joe DiMaggio cards are missing. The detectives take notes and continue pressing for details.

10:25 a.m. Their crime scene work completed, the detectives, forensics experts and other responding officers start wrapping up their paperwork.

“This crime scene exercise gives the kids a chance to use the skills they’re developing in class,” says Jackie Minnis, lead teacher in the criminal investigations class. The class, part of the school’s law-related career magnet program, and the only high school class of its kind on the West Coast, gives students the opportunity to learn some of the basics of police work, from arrest procedures to forensics to crime scene preservation to the often tedious chore of filling out crime reports.

“The kids really enjoy this,” says Minnis, who posed as a murder victim in an exercise earlier last year. “After all, what’s more fun than a whodunit?”

The students seem to agree.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Arlene Taaga, 17, says of the criminal investigations class. “I’m planning to major in law (in college), and I thought this would help.”

“It’s pretty interesting,” says Benjamin Waller, 17. “I’m thinking about going into law enforcement. But I didn’t know there was so much paperwork to it. You never see that on TV.”

“I want to be a journalist,” says Holly Hawkins, 16. “But I wanted to know more about law enforcement, too.”

The criminal investigations class is so popular, in fact, that next year the school plans to expand the number of available classes from two to three.

Lending an air of verisimilitude to the classroom instruction is the presence of Deputy Lucia, who was hired by the Long Beach Unified School District last spring to provide extra security at the 3,200-student Jordan High, which had been experiencing gang-related problems.

In addition to providing extra campus security, Lucia has been bringing his law enforcement experience to the classroom and passing it on to the students in the criminal investigations classes. He also uses his connections to bring in guests, such as a canine unit and a crime lab specialist.

“It’s a lot of fun,” says Lucia, who spends six hours a day on the Jordan campus and two hours on patrol. “It’s a chance to show these kids a little of what law enforcement is all about, from the officer’s perspective. And it gives kids who are interested in law enforcement careers an opportunity to learn some of the basics. We don’t focus just on patrol work, but also on forensics, and the law as it relates to police work.”

Lucia can identify with high school students who want to be officers. Now 26, Lucia was only 17 when he entered a police academy. He spent five years with the Compton Police Department before switching to the Sheriff’s Department four years ago. As he walks through the Jordan campus, dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, a Sheriff’s Department jacket and a gun belt, students call out: “Hey, Tony! How you doin’?”

“Most of the kids look at me as a friend rather than a cop,” Lucia says. “A lot of these kids have had only one kind of experience with law enforcement, and that’s been negative. I get to show them another side. It’s a new experience for me too. I’ve learned that when you treat kids with respect, as adults, they respond.”

Meanwhile, two days after the baseball card caper, the classroom cops identified suspects from the footprints and fingerprints found at the scene. The perpetrators, all of them students in the criminal investigations class, will be “arrested” when they come back to school after the holidays. Later, they will be tried in a mock trial conducted by classes in the law-related career program.

Assuming the suspects are convicted, the entire process from investigation to arrest to trial may help teach the students another lesson, an age-old one:

That crime doesn’t pay.