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The Truth Hurts, but Some Lies Hurt Far More

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The statement is written in a neat, loopy hand, so perky looking that when you get to the ugly part it seems almost too ugly to be true. Today is July 16, 1997, it begins. I was attacked by 4 male students at my site, Dominguez High School. . . .

Dominguez High School is in Compton, a place of--well, we all know how Compton schools are, right? And the statement is from a teacher, or rather an ex-teacher there. If you don’t recognize her name, Shannan Barron, you’ll recall the allegations that made her famous. Got her on the national news. Put her on Sally Jesse Raphael.

As I was leaving my class, G-4, 4 male students run up and dumped feces on the front of my clothing splashing my face & hair. I ran back into my room where I was saturated again with feces from the back from my waist down. . . .

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Remember now? Of course. The young, attractive teacher. The shocked expressions on the faces of the TV crews. Her comparisons to the victimization of slaves, to Jews in the Holocaust. “I don’t know what people felt like back then, but I know what I felt like,” she said at one point to, I believe, Channel 7. “It was persecution. It was horrible.”

Indeed. A horrible, horrible persecution. So horrible, in fact, that it seemed beside the point that no one seemed to have witnessed this attack that allegedly took place in a crowded hallway in broad daylight in the middle of summer school. But we all know how kids these days are, right? Especially kids in Compton. Maybe this was why the cameras were long gone when the really horrible stuff started, when fingers began to be pointed. When the case got to the part that, sadly, was not too ugly to be true.

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Bad news has good legs, the saying goes. It was a matter of hours before Shannan Barron’s story was all over town. According to police reports, she said at first that she did not know the two black and two Latino kids who attacked her. But “Ms. Barron [remaining very calm and reserved] stated that with the help of a student, ------, she could identify all the participants.”

This never happened. The student, who’d been in her classroom just before the incident, was baffled. “Ms. Barron is real cool with me,” he is quoted as saying in court records. “If I’d seen someone do that to her, you wouldn’t have had to come to me--I’d have caught them myself.”

Not the response folks expect from a kid these days in Compton, but no matter. Barron elaborated for the press, saying she’d named a suspect and the district persuaded police to let him go. This was not quite accurate, according to police reports. Actually, investigators wrote, they had chased down a bunch of Latino kids who’d scattered when police approached them. Barron said her attacker wasn’t among them, but said one may have been an accomplice; she wasn’t sure.

But the kid she pointed out scarcely knew Barron, and the boy in the hall denied having seen him. Meanwhile, a couple of politicians from the school board--locked in a bitter fight with the state over the takeover of the district--got into the act. They offered a $10,000 reward, but no one came forward, even as the case was unraveling in the face of the facts: Nothing had splashed on the door frames or puddled on the floors. Forensic examination revealed, pathetically, that the majority of the stains on Barron’s white slacks had come from within. Within weeks, authorities had charged her with a misdemeanor: filing a false police report.

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All this might have been just a cause for pity and pardon were it not for those other victims: the kids. As Barron’s case went to court, she stuck by her increasingly dubious story. Teenager after confused teenager was drawn in.

Reputations were ruined. It was rumored that someone had heard someone confessing. Everyone denied it, but the kids supposedly in the know were subpoenaed, threatened, harassed. Their parents were immigrants; some could hardly speak English. One kid’s mom just assumed that, if the police were involved, her son must have done something, and threw him out of the house.

And all the while, the obvious point went unmentioned: Yes, kids these days might do terrible things, in Compton and elsewhere, but this particular type of terribleness was unheard of for a kid. What did it say about what “we all know” that we couldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, even in a matter as bizarre and suspect as this?

Barron ended up being convicted last month and awaits sentencing. Her lawyers say she plans to appeal. And the kids? No one has mentioned them, though in a better world, someone would be handing them that $10,000 reward. And apologizing to them, their school and their community. Because the persecution was horrible.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com

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