Death’s Lesson : Officials Scramble to Shield Youngsters From Body Found at School--but Students Take It in Stride

They found Felita Jeter on Wednesday at 7 a.m. She was lying dead in the breezeway of Marvin Avenue Elementary School. In just half an hour, the first bell was due to sound and 1,087 children would begin filing in to class.

“We were very upset and nervous, but we went right into action,” said teacher Kevin Hanks, a bespectacled young man whose first reaction was to dial 911 and lock all the gates. Parents were detoured to the back entrance. Children were herded out to the playground. A 45-minute morning assembly was stretched to two hours. Without elaboration, the principal--who had rushed over without even taking the curlers from her hair--announced that there had been an unspecified incident and that the police swarming onto the campus were “helpers from the community.”

All this to shield 1,087 children from the specter of death.

But in a segment of Los Angeles that has averaged six murders a month this year, that specter has become all too common. Wedged into one of the rougher pockets of the Wilshire district, near Washington and La Cienega boulevards, Marvin Avenue Elementary fronts on the Santa Monica Freeway and sits around the corner from a liquor store. Despite the efforts to keep the news from the children, word spread like wildfire that the body of a single 36-year-old neighborhood woman had been found outside the library, that it was unclear whether she had been murdered or died of an overdose.

And that news--which in some neighborhoods might have thrown the entire block into trauma--was taken as a matter of course at Marvin Avenue.

“Somebody got killed,” reported 10-year-old Romanita McGraw, looking up from her lunch box, when asked why she had spent the entire morning on the playground.

“I heard they got shot,” chimed in a playmate between bites of a peanut butter sandwich.

“No, they didn’t,” contradicted a third. Their tone was matter-of-fact. A first-grade teacher later said that the disruption had caused only one of her children to cry. The principal said fewer than 100 students were pulled out of school.

The notion of inner-city children seeing dead bodies on their way to school has become a threadbare urban cliche. But it is still an invasion when death crosses the line into an elementary schoolyard--a place that most parents continue to look to as an oasis, even in the most troubled neighborhoods.

“Things happen,” said Fenella Lewis, whose grandchildren attend Marvin Avenue, “but you don’t expect to find dead bodies at school. I have lived in this neighborhood 43 years, and the only really dramatic thing to ever have happened at the school was when a little girl came up missing 15 years ago.”

Police, too, were saddened at the incident, even as they emphasized that there was no sign of trauma to Jeter’s body, and it is still unclear whether her death was a homicide.

Neighbors speculated that the woman--who they said hung out in the parking lot of the local liquor store--may have died elsewhere and been carried into the schoolyard through a hole in the chain-link fence. But police said they will not know until after an autopsy whether she died of natural causes or foul play. They said it was unclear why she would have voluntarily gone onto the campus after hours, since she neither worked at the school nor had children there.

And they called the death a tragedy, both for the victim’s family and for the neighborhood.

“As a parent and a detective, this is something I don’t like to see kids experience,” LAPD Wilshire Division Detective L.J. Jones said. “No one should have to go through something like this at school.”

For this reason, said Marvin Avenue Principal Anna McLinn, she felt it was imperative that the children be made to feel secure, and that she and her staff not overreact.

“This is an inner-city school. We do have problems, and its painful and we’re concerned, but we see it every day,” McLinn said. “We have problems in society. But our schools are safe. I have a youngster whose mother was murdered two days ago, but he came to school anyway because school is a refuge.”

McLinn said she followed a pre-existing emergency plan that she has applied to crises ranging from earthquakes to threatened teacher strikes. She called in the school district office, drafted a letter to send home to the parents, put school counselors on alert. By afternoon, the coroner’s office had removed the body and classes were back in session.

And from the reaction of the children, it appeared McLinn’s emergency plan had come through once again.

“Scared?” said a smiling McGraw, a fifth-grader, as she worked her way through her lunch. “I’m here with a whole school full of people. Why should I be scared?”