Student Stabbed During Fight at Buena Park High

A 15-year-old student at Buena Park High School was stabbed on campus with an unknown weapon Tuesday morning after getting into a fight with five teens, police and the principal said.

The sophomore was taken to Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim, where he received stitches in his arm for two stab wounds, Buena Park Police Sgt. Lloyd Schwengel said.

Witnesses described the weapon as a pencil, but the victim said it was a knife. Schwengel said police have not recovered any weapon and do not know what it was.

Police detained three of the five juveniles suspected of involvement in the dispute shortly after the 10:25 a.m. incident.

A 16-year-old Anaheim boy was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and was taken to Juvenile Hall.

A 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl, both of Fullerton, were released to their parents Tuesday afternoon, Schwengel said. The girls were present during the assault, he said, but police were considering them witnesses, not suspects.

Schwengel said one of the Fullerton girls takes part in an independent study program at the school. She and her friends came to campus to drop off some homework, when several students--including the 15-year-old victim--approached them and asked them “Where ya from,” Schwengel said.

When one replied with the name of a local neighborhood, an argument began, he said.

“That’s about it,” Schwengel said. “They’re yelling out a local neighborhood and the other kids apparently don’t like them. Who knows about that kind of mentality?”

The injured youth received stitches to his left arm, police said. He was given disinfectant and a bandage for a second puncture wound to the chest.

Buena Park High School Principal G. Thomas Triggs said the stabbing is still under investigation. It marks the first stabbing on the campus, he said.

Triggs said the five teens came onto the campus during a morning break, and the fight unfolded very quickly near the front of the school, at Magnolia Avenue and Academy Drive.

“It was very fast and quick and they were gone,” he said.

School security personnel patrol the front of the campus, but it is not gated, Triggs said.

The stabbing appears to be the first violent injury on an Orange County campus since a student was stabbed in the back at La Quinta High School in Westminster in a racial brawl last October.