Super Week Has a Somber Look From Room 218

There had been death in Room 218. And now it was the next morning and there was more than the usual January chill in the air and there stood a solitary girl in a yellow cardigan sweater, “95” embroidered on the shoulder, taping a scrap of cardboard to a campus window. On the sign was written: “Demetrius.”

She was small and slight; the sweater drooped nearly to her knees. Her fists were stuffed into the pockets.

“Did you know him?”

The voice made her jump. Any sudden sound or movement this morning was enough to make anyone on the Fairfax High grounds jumpy, at least among those who dared venture back. Parents kept pupils at home. Some even withdrew them from school. Above all, nobody wanted to go anywhere near Room 218. Merely the thought of what happened there sent chills down spines.

“Know who?” she asked.

But she knew who.

“Demetrius.”

At the sound of his name, the girl shut her eyes and pressed a thumb to the lid, rubbing as though trying to will away a headache. Upon opening them again, she asked, with a terrible sadness: “You a cop?”

“No.”

She was suspicious, and had a right to be. As a parent, one would beg her to be. Strangers meant danger. Young or old. Never was this any truer than today, so there could be no resentment of the wariness in her manner, particularly after the man who startled the girl identified himself with an all too vague: “From the paper.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

That was all she said. That was all she need say. This was no day to be sociable.

“Demetrius,” he said, pointing to the sign. “You knew him?”

It turned out she had not known after all whom the man had meant, the first time he had asked. For she nodded and began to wander, slowly, maybe even aimlessly, away from the school building, back toward Melrose Avenue, fingers clutching at the fabric inside her pockets, speaking softly with a voice that will haunt him for the rest of his life, saying:

“Thought you meant the kid who killed him.”

No. Not him. Nobody is even uttering that kid’s name, at least not publicly, because he is only 15. He was a kid who at 8 a.m. strode into Room 218, Mr. Schwartz’s remedial English class, on an otherwise ordinary Thursday morning, reached into his backpack, apparently for his Walkman stereo headset, but by mistake brushed a .357 Magnum handgun that he was packing and put a bullet into the right side of Eli Kogman, 17, who was seated at his desk.

One bullet. It passed directly through the Kogman boy, who crumpled from his seat to his knees and cried out in pain: “Why? Why?”

And that is when the rest of the screaming students saw Demetrius L. Rice, 16, who was walking from the front of the classroom back toward his desk, collapse in the aisle, clutching his side from the same bullet. With children running terrified from the room, the boy who did the shooting shook his head and said how sorry he was, again and again.

The teacher, Charles Schwartz, comforted the fallen Kogman boy until an ambulance came to carry him to a hospital, where he now remains, out of danger but seriously injured and understandably traumatized.

And later in the day, 2,000 students heard the news over the loudspeaker that Demetrius Rice was dead.

He was a football player for Fairfax who spoke with the softest of voices, turned heads with his looks and hardly ever said a word in class. He was popular with not only his friends but with teachers, such as Schwartz, who gave him A’s, unlike the boy with the gun, whose parents Schwartz had contacted the previous night to warn that their son might flunk.

Coach Terrel Ray appreciated the way Demetrius behaved and thought he had a future as a wide receiver, perhaps in next year’s starting lineup.

“What a good kid,” he said. “Demetrius. He was looking forward to the Super Bowl. He liked football and he liked his friends and his friends liked him.”

But now his friends must attend his funeral. And his mother must find a way to pay for it. While others spend a week in Los Angeles partying, spending thousands on Super Bowl gaiety, Mildred Hilliard, a single mother with no insurance, makes public appeals for donations so she can bury Demetrius, “a very sweet child, a loving child. He was never afraid. A child shouldn’t have to be afraid to go to school.”

The shooting is the first in this school district to take place inside a classroom. It is a dangerous time in a dangerous city in a dangerous world. Terrel Ray knows that. He knows: “It doesn’t matter if you’re some kind of gang-banger or not, and Demetrius definitely was not. It’s society. It’s hard just walking around, living.”

The girl in the yellow sweater walked away, without a wave, without a word.

“Demetrius, he was your friend?” the stranger called after her.

She kept walking.