Code of Silence Allows Guns on Campus : Schools: When a student has a weapon, classmates often know. But they may keep quiet because of peer pressure, fear of retaliation and alienation from adults.

Not long after Demetrius Rice was killed by a bullet fired accidentally by a classmate at Fairfax High School, several students quietly told school officials they had known for days that the 15-year-old boy accused of shooting shot Demetrius had been carrying a gun for protection.

Despite the danger, no one stepped forward to report what they knew. No one wanted to snitch on a fellow student.

They held to a code of silence.

Los Angeles school officials are convinced that the key to solving the problem of weapons on campuses lies more in cracking this code of silence than in using metal detectors. Students, they say, must be encouraged to take a stronger role in making sure their schools are free of weapons.

Unfortunately, the code is strong, forged by a combination of peer pressure, fear of retaliation and alienation from adults. Some see it as the only way to survive in an increasingly violent society.

“I keep my mouth shut,” Fairfax student Lorai Harris, 17, said at a memorial service for Demetrius. “If you don’t, then someone will come after you. Yes, you could save a life, but you could also cause someone to lose theirs if you tell. I don’t want to be in that predicament.”

Over the years other tragedies illustrate the problem:

Last year, a Dorsey High School student, who classmates knew carried a gun, killed himself playing Russian roulette on the school baseball team bus.

In 1989, a distraught Fairfax High School student committed suicide in a school restroom using a gun he told classmates he needed for protection.

In 1987, a student at Los Angeles High School ended his life with a gun supplied by a fellow teen-ager.

Officials were never alerted to the dangers even though in all three cases classmates were aware that weapons were being brought to school.

The problem is often seen as an age-old conflict between adults and teen-agers--only now it is more deadly. School psychologist Alnita Dunn said that students often find it difficult to confide in adult authority at a stage in their lives when they are pulling away to establish their independence.

“They are pulling away from the caretakers, mainly their parents, and forming their own new relationships with peers, new friendships,” she said. “And in making these new friends they form a society of youth where they share loyalties and confidences.”

Leticia Avila, 18, a student at Metropolitan High School, turned to her mother for help after a group of girls began threatening her at school. Officials tried to defuse the tension through counseling, but it made matters worse. “That’s when they started threatening me more,” Avila said. “I told my mom: ‘Next time, don’t you get involved!’ ”

Avila decided that it was time to take matters in her own hands. She brought a .380-caliber handgun to school. “My brother knew about the gun, and his homegirls knew,” she said. “They were going to get the girls too if I didn’t get them first.”

But before Avila could confront the girls she was caught by school officials who found the gun. Someone told.

Carmen DeAnda, 17, a classmate at Metropolitan, said parents do not understand the depths of turmoil children face today.

“They are always telling you that they know best, that they went through what you are going through,” she said. “But times have changed. They haven’t experienced all this, the killings and all. They don’t understand and there is not a lot they can do about it.”

In an effort to break through the code at Fairfax High, Mildred Hillard, Demetrius Rice’s mother, made a dramatic appearance at a special meeting before her son’s Fairfax football squad the day after her son was killed.

“If you ever hear of anyone with a gun at school and you don’t want to tell the appropriate authorities, call me and I’ll do it,” she told the gathering.

Since the Jan. 21 morning when Demetrius was killed and another student was wounded from a bullet allegedly fired by a classmate handling a .357 magnum in his backpack, the Los Angeles Unified School District has embarked on an effort to make schools safe from guns.

Warning signs have been posted, a hot line (800 954-HELP) has been set up for students to anonymously report guns on campus, and metal detectors are being rotated throughout the district to nab students with guns. A new policy makes expulsion mandatory for anyone caught bringing a gun on campus. Celebrities have been asked to spread the word, teachers have begun incorporating the anti-gun message into their curriculum and a video has been discussed.

But any effort to persuade students to speak out is expected to clash with peer pressure that encourages them to keep quiet.

“I would never give up a homie,” said Derric Grey, 17, a student at Metropolitan High School, a continuation school. “I would tell on an enemy, but it would be hard to rat on a friend.”

At Dorsey High, it was peer pressure that stopped classmates from telling officials that Wilford Wright III, a 17-year-old baseball player, was bringing a gun to school.

“He was such an outstanding student and person they never believed any ill would come to him,” said Marleen Wong, a school psychiatric social worker.

Psychiatrists say that many young adults have taken matters in their own hands because they lack confidence in the ability of adults to keep them safe from the problems caused by drugs and gang violence.

“Some kids feel that no one cares about what is happening to them,” said Ivan Walks, a private psychiatrist who has studied children who have grown up amid inner-city violence. “We have examples of kids trying to report problems, crying out for help, and no one listens. Then we are surprised when they don’t come to us.”

To some, the district’s solutions seem cosmetic when compared to the problems outside the school doors. School officials say they are reacting to violence that has become all too common on the streets and occasionally flows into the schools.

“It’s not just something for the schools to resolve, it’s everybody’s problem,” said Myra Booker, who coordinates secondary psychological services for the district.

Dr. Louis Simpson, a psychiatrist, agreed. “It’s not only a code of silence, it’s a code of fear and kids are scared to death,” he said. “This is a case of the chicken coming home to roost. Guns have become an extension of one’s manhood, the new Air Jordan (sneakers). It’s a badge of how bad you are, and an indication that life has been devalued.”

Derric said that before attending Metropolitan, he carried a gun to school for protection when he traveled through rival gang turfs.

“That’s the way it was,” he said. “There was nothing anyone else could do to protect me. . . . But when you have a gun, you have power. When you pull out a strap, you be superior. You can imagine how many people will bow all the way down when you have one.”

Most of the 765 weapons--including 153 guns--confiscated from students in the Los Angeles Unified School District during the 1991-92 school year were seized after students tipped off officials to their presence.

Still, Los Angeles School Police Chief Wesley Mitchell said there have been far too many instances when weapons have not been reported, including some cases when parents have known that their children were bringing guns to school.

“The reality is that not all kids believe that it is wrong to carry a weapon to school,” he said. “There is a feeling that everyone has to have a gun. We hear this all the time. Students say they carry the gun for protection. Not for school, but to get them to and from school through tough neighborhoods.”

At Fairfax, Eric Poindexter told friends he needed a gun for protection, but ended up using it to commit suicide in a restroom in 1989.

“The news devastated his friend who knew he had a gun and for a long time felt guilty because he never told anyone,” said Carolee Bogue, coordinator of a program for high risk students. “For a long time the student would carry his junior high school yearbook to school showing everyone the pictures of the two of them together.”

The strength of the code of silence extends beyond weapons.

Bogue said she counseled a 16-year-old who called her friends for help before taking an overdose of sleeping pills in her bedroom while her parents were downstairs in the living room watching television. When the two girls arrived, the parents waved them up to the girl’s bedroom where they found their friend unconscious. They sneaked her out of the house and to the hospital.

“After the daughter was revived, the hospital called her parents to report the incident,” Bogue said. “They couldn’t believe it. They swore their daughter was still upstairs sleeping.”

When Bogue asked the girls why they did not want to tell their friend’s parents, they said they did not want to break her confidence.

School psychologists who interviewed students after the recent Fairfax shooting had to struggle to revive a sense of hope among those who had seen death up close.

“Many of them said they felt that you could be dead in a flash,” Dunn said. “They said it could happen anytime, when they are walking home from school or coming from a party.

“These are not normal responses from adolescents,” she said. “Normally, they believe they will live forever. Death is the last thing on their minds in normal times, but these are not normal times.”

Dunn said a student who witnessed the Fairfax shooting said he wished he could have done more to help Demetrius. “Then he said: ‘Demetrius should be happy. He doesn’t have to wait for the bullet to get him. I don’t know where the bullet is that is going to get me.’ I asked him if he was involved in fights or gangs and he said: ‘No, but there is probably a bullet out there somewhere for me.’ ”

Mildred Hillard, Demetrius’ mother, has kept in touch with her son’s friends to assure them that there is a need to continue to have hope.

“There is something to look forward to,” she said. “It’s OK to cry and weep for a while but as time goes by it will get easier. We (as adults) have a responsibility to children. They grow up so fast, sometimes we push them to be adults. They need to be allowed to be children.”

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