Shootings Shatter Program for Safety at Dorsey High

When Los Angeles school officials were trying to make the neighborhoods around inner-city high schools safer for students, their first target was Dorsey High, which had suffered several shootings near the campus in past years.

Extra school police and Los Angeles Police Department officers were deployed around Dorsey before and after class in the hopes of discouraging attacks on students. Eventually the school became a model for the district.

But Monday, despite those precautions, the Southwest Los Angeles school became a model of the district’s frustration.

Shortly before 8 a.m. around the corner from the front of the school, a gunman wounded two Dorsey students and shot a third teenager. The suspect then jumped into a car with three companions and sped off, police said.

A school police officer who was part of the special off-campus patrol had come on duty minutes before the shooting. But he was several blocks away when the attack occurred.

The Dorsey students, Eddie Gamez, 14, and Aldo Dominguez, 16, were in guarded and serious condition, respectively, at UCLA Medical Center. Alberto Ruiz, 14, who school district officials said does not attend Dorsey, was treated for a minor gunshot wound to his arm at Midway Hospital and released.

Detectives noted that because the victims were Latino and the suspects black, it was possible that the attack was in retaliation for a recent shooting of black gang members by Latino suspects two miles away. However, they said there were no indications that the victims were gang members.

“They were just walking to school. They were innocent victims,” Det. Paul Mize said.

As word of the shooting spread, parents began coming to the high school.

“I heard about the shooting on the news and came right over to take my daughter out. I’m scared she might get hurt if someone decides to retaliate,” said Luz Loya, a preschool teacher with a 15-year-old child at Dorsey.

Efforts to make the streets outside the school safer began in 1993 after two shootings near Dorsey and two others on the campuses of Fairfax and Reseda high schools.

The Reseda and Fairfax shootings--the latter of which occurred in a classroom--prompted school officials to begin installing metal detectors on some campuses. The Dorsey shooting that same year raised a thornier question of school district accountability for off-campus crime.

Previously, in an effort to distance itself from the issue, the district had maintained that school officials should not be held accountable for problems outside their doors.

But after two youths were shot on their way to Dorsey--one as he stepped off the bus, another as he bought food from a catering truck--Supt. Sid Thompson formed the Dorsey Safe School Project.

“The district felt it could not fight this . . . violence alone,” said Wesley Mitchell, the school district police chief.

The resulting liaison among school police, the LAPD’s Southwest Division and various community groups began with high-level meetings of bureaucrats and politicians downtown. More valuable, Mitchell said, were subsequent school-based meetings, where Dorsey students talked openly about gang and drug hot spots along their routes to school.

“The kids talked about passing through gang hangouts; we detailed officers to make those less desirable,” Mitchell said. “They told us about crack houses and drug-dealing locations. With information from those kids and narcotics officers, we all began to focus in on those areas, clear out the traffic.”

The plan of attack included erecting wrought-iron fences around three sides of the school to keep students in and nonstudents out. It also called for increasing LAPD patrols in nearby neighborhoods before and after school and moving a school police officer from on-campus patrol to a car in the neighborhood during those periods.

As a result, officials said, crimes against students at and around Dorsey dropped from 19 in 1993 to one in 1994. By last spring, the district was requiring all 50 high schools and 600 other campuses to adopt at least a part of the Dorsey strategy for off-campus peace.

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Monday’s shooting once again cast a negative spotlight on Dorsey, where 1,800 students combine a regular high school curriculum with two magnets, one specializing in law, another in math and science. About three-quarters of the students are African American, and a quarter are Latino.

For some, the shooting was eerily reminiscent of the 1993 incident in which a 15-year-old Dorsey student--an innocent bystander to an argument--was shot and critically wounded as classes were resuming for the new school year.

Parents expressed resentment to reporters about the massive presence of TV news crews and early incorrect reports that Monday’s shooting had taken place on campus.

“Here we go again with more negative publicity!” complained Rosalyn Gant, the mother of a 16-year-old, standing outside the school entrance. “This is a safe campus. The school is doing positive things and it has a fine curriculum, but no one wants to talk about that.”

Only last week, the California Interscholastic Federation’s rules committee banned the Dorsey boys basketball team from this season’s playoffs and handed out sanctions that will run through 1999. Officials said the school allowed an ineligible athlete to compete.

For many on the campus Monday, however, it was business as usual. Students were hurrying off to new classes with little sense of the distraction going on outside, where police had taped off the crime scene and were busy gathering evidence.

A school crisis team was offering counseling to Dorsey students. Some students, upset about the tragic disruption, sought help.

Times correspondent Michael Krikorian contributed to this story.

Shooting Near Campus

Three teenagers were shot near Exposition Boulevard, across from Dorsey High School, in the Crenshaw district Monday morning.