Freakish Punch in Teenagers’ School Fight Shatters 2 Families

Shaun Martin was 17, a rangy 6-foot-1, a kid who loved snowboarding and mountain biking, rock music and girls.

Justin Dexter was 16, a new kid at Concord High School. He played chess and drums and intended to go to college.

On Feb. 21, these two lives intersected in a fistfight behind their school. Moments later, Shaun was mortally wounded--a victim of a freakish punch, thrown in a fracas everyone agrees was folly from the start.

The human wreckage was astounding: One teenager dead, another branded a killer, for no good reason. One family in mourning, another tormented, for no good reason.

“The tragedy is that it never should have happened in the first place,” says Mike Garrett, assistant principal of Concord High.

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Justin Dexter had his share of problems. This was his fourth school in three years. The first was a boarding school; he was unhappy, and he drank.

Drinking has been a real problem--he twice was arrested for drunken driving, and once drank himself into an intensive care unit, says his father, Donn Dexter.

He was kicked out of his next school when beer cans were found in his room. Then, at a Manchester, N.H., public school, he locked horns with a teacher over homework, skipped class and was suspended.

But at Concord High, the father says, “things were assumed to be going along fine. He wasn’t having any problems. His teachers liked him. He was doing pretty well, and he’s a bright kid.” He described his son as a “sweetheart” who had never had a fight.

That’s not the way three of the dead boy’s friends--Lisa Stanley, Emily Amrol and Shannan Davis--remember it.

“In his first week at Concord High, he was involved in at least 10 fights, which he started after and before school, off school grounds,” they claimed, in a letter to the editors to three newspapers after the fight.

Justin’s biggest mistake, it seems, was going out with a girl who had recently ended another relationship.

The ex-boyfriend got mad and wanted to scare him, says Justin, and began threatening him on the telephone.

Over the course of about a month, Justin says, the boy’s friends bullied, threatened and beat him up three or four times.

Justin insists Shaun was among them. Days before the fight, “He was yelling names at me when I was walking through the hallways, and once he said he was going to kill me or have someone else kill me. His exact words were that he was going to jump me till I was dead.”

Dexter received a call from his son asking that he pick him up from school early because “he was going to get jumped by about 10 kids.”

There had been an incident in the cafeteria. When Justin walked by, the father says, Shaun and other kids “started saying things to him, so he stopped, and he said, ‘What’s your problem? I haven’t got a problem with you. I’ll fight each of you one on one if you want.’ ”

That day, Donn Dexter talked to Garrett, the assistant principal, and Garrett in turn talked to some of the youths.

He told them “that we were aware that the harassment was taking place, and that if it continued, each individual could expect a prolonged suspension. In previous instances, that has worked to defuse hostility between kids.”

But not this time.

On Feb. 21, Justin says, Shaun Martin and another boy invited him outside. A friend of Justin’s intervened; Justin had never done anything to them, he said. One combatant was deterred, but not Shaun.

“I don’t even really remember anymore how it ended up being Shaun Martin,” says Justin, “but at some point Shaun Martin was, like, ‘I’m going to fight with you.’ And so I was like, ‘OK,’ and he started walking out the door and I just followed him.”

What followed was what Donn Dexter calls a “hockey fight,” with each boy grabbing the other’s shirt.

“He hit me three times across the face before I even took a swing at him. I just grabbed him by the shirt and started hitting him back. I think I hit him like three or four times,” Justin says.

“He just bent over and he stopped kind of, like, moving, but he was still on his feet and he was still holding on to me. I just let go of him when he stopped fighting. He fell over and I turned around and walked away.”

Says his father: “Shaun apparently went to duck a blow and he bent his neck and it got taut, and he got caught right behind the ear. His neck was taut at the time and the blow landed behind his ear. And it severed the artery that goes up.”

He never regained consciousness and died less than a day later. The cause, according to the medical examiner, was laceration of the right vertebral artery, with brain hemorrhage due to blunt-force trauma.

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Justin was held in a juvenile detention center for 14 days before being released to his parents under house arrest.

At first, prosecutors wanted to charge him as an adult. But then the harassment he’d suffered was revealed, and in June, a juvenile court judge sentenced him to a six-month suspended sentence and a year’s probation on a charge of possession of deadly weapons--two rolls of pennies.

He acknowledges having the pennies, which could pack a wallop in a fist. But he says they were in his locker at the time of the fight.

He also was ordered into alcohol rehab--he’s spending most of the summer in a Montana facility. But he says his drinking “really has nothing to do with this case at all. . . . A lot of kids are drinking.”

Now 17, he is a B-plus, A-minus student who hopes to get a graduate degree, and he is most upset at having to repeat 11th grade in a new school.

He insists he is not to blame for what happened to Shaun.

“I feel some empathy for his parents, mostly, and his family, but it wasn’t exactly a position that I feel I really put myself into so much as they kind of forced me into it,” Justin says of his tormentors.

“I think a good majority of the blame should rest on their shoulders because I told them 3 billion times I didn’t want to fight.”

Shaun’s father, Steve Martin, holds no grudge against Justin.

“It sounds like, unfortunately, it was a very fluke thing that happened, so it’s hard to hold anything against him right now,” he says. “I’m dealing with Shaun being gone more than anything else.

“You just think about it constantly. There’s always the constant pain there, just realizing that he’s not around anymore.”

He will not discuss a Concord Monitor report that Shaun had cocaine and marijuana in his system when he died.

He prefers to remember his son, the former member of the track and football teams; his son, the kid he used to play volleyball with; his son, who was “getting ready to go out on his own, graduate high school and go out and live with some friends, I guess.”

As painful as it is to think about Shaun, it would be more painful to forget him, the father says.

Shaun’s friends Lisa, Emily and Shannan--in their letter to the editor--insisted there was no chance of that.

“For those of you who still think Shaun was such a bully, this was his first fight and he lost everything except his family and friends’ love, memories and prayers,” they wrote. “His face is engraved in our minds and his laughter will ring in our ears for all time to come.”