Students of Room 218 Share Bond of Tragedy : Aftermath: Youths band together to cope emotionally with classmate’s death, and with feeling that they too are vulnerable.

For the students in Room 218 at Fairfax High, the past week has been almost as difficult as the moment they saw classmate Demetrius Rice fall dead of a gunshot wound.

Their close-up view of the shocking classroom shooting has brought them a kind of celebrity status on campus. They are subjected to an endless stream of questions from curious students, worried parents, concerned teachers and insensitive reporters.

Elsewhere around the sprawling campus, things seemed back to normal Thursday, on the day Rice was buried across town, a week after the accidental shooting.

For many of the 2,000 teenagers attending winter break classes at Fairfax High, the shooting that also wounded another student has been reduced to yesterday’s news, rating barely a mention in lunch table conversation.

“For the first two or three days after it happened, everybody was talking about it,” said Isaac Martinez, a junior at Bravo Medical Magnet School in East Los Angeles who is attending Fairfax during winter classes. “Now, only the teachers bring it up.”

Oddly, Fairfax’s notoriety as the site of the shooting has paid a strange sort of dividend, netting offers from alumni and concerned neighbors to contribute money to beef up security and build better ties with a disaffected student body.

Calls have been pouring into the office of Principal Michael O’Sullivan, he said, “a few from parents who are quite upset, others who just want to know what will happen when their child comes back (to school), and a few from crackpots saying take the kid who did the shooting and execute him on the quad to teach a lesson.”

Around the city, the unprecedented classroom killing thrust center stage the problem of weapons on campus. Egged on by politicians, parents and radio call-in shows, the Los Angeles Unified School District reversed a longstanding policy and agreed to use metal detectors to screen students for guns at school entrances.

The shooting occurred Jan. 21, when a gun carried in the backpack of a 15-year-old student discharged during English class. The single bullet wounded Eli Kogman, 17, and killed Rice, a popular 16-year-old football player.

On Thursday, hours before they would watch his casket lowered into the ground, the young people from Room 218 who had witnessed Rice’s death gathered in a circle on the floor in class, held hands and talked about everything but the death that had drawn them together.

The circle has been a daily ritual since the shooting, a way for the students to build a relationship with one another, to find a safe place to talk about their feelings, to begin the painful process of recovery.

“They’re recovering, but it’s a long process,” said psychologist Steven Rude, who spends each morning meeting with the students, who have moved to a different room on the Beverly-Fairfax area campus. “They’ve gotten past the denial and the anger, and now they’re realizing how vulnerable they are and how this has affected them.”

Because the students were drawn from several campuses for the winter break class, most did not know each other well before the shooting. Now, they cling to one another before and after class, providing a kind of emotional safety net.

“You’ve got kids from 20 different schools, from several different ethnic backgrounds, but they’ve been joined by this in a way that only they can understand,” Rude said. “This incident has caused a bond for these kids that’ll be there for the rest of their lives.”

Racial and ethnic differences have seemed to evaporate in the class as they work through their feelings over their classmate’s death, the students say.

“It’s like nobody else understands what we’ve been through,” said Nelson Gamio, a student from El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills who is attending Fairfax only for the winter break. “For everybody else, life has gone back, it’s exactly the way it was before. But for us. . . .”

For many of Room 218’s immigrant students, the killing has confirmed their worst fears about the United States. And for all, there is a new sense of vulnerability: a realization that the bullet accidentally fired could just as easily have struck them as it did Kogman and Rice.

“It is very scary,” said Ilya Koshkin, a 16-year-old from Russia. “I feel very sorry for the guy, but for myself, I feel just so helpless . . . kind of guilty, even though I know there was nothing I could have done. You ask yourself: ‘Could I have stopped it? Could it have been me?’ ”

Koshkin said he and his classmates get “really annoyed” at the curiosity they face. “They all want to ask for the details,” he said. “ ‘Did you see it? What happened?’ It’s like they don’t really care that a 16-year-old boy was shot.”

Since the shooting, a team of crisis counselors has been stationed at the school every day, counseling everyone from the custodian who was called upon to wipe up the blood where Rice’s body had lain to students struggling with guilt because they had known the suspect had a gun and failed to report it.

And they have talked with Rice’s football teammates, strapping young men who served as pallbearers Thursday at the funeral of a boy who seemed the least likely among them to die by gunfire.

“For most of these kids, this is the first time something like that has happened to someone of their age, their peer group,” said football coach Terrel Ray. “They don’t express it with words, but you see it in their gaze, their mood, their slowness when they move. It makes them think about how vulnerable they are.”

The fact that it was an accident has left many Fairfax students pondering the possibility that it could happen to them.

“Before, I felt safe here, but not now because of what happened,” said 17-year-old Sandra Reyes, who expects many of her friends to change schools next semester because they are afraid.

“I feel sorry for the guy that died because he was too young, but I feel sorry for the other guy, the guy with the gun, because he didn’t know what to do. It’s like there’s so much to be scared about, that it’s easy to think maybe you’d better have a gun.”