Boy’s Family Deserves Answers

Stephan Corson’s family wants--and deserves--answers to how the 13-year-old Palmdale middle school student died in a fistfight with another eighth-grader.

The answers won’t come quickly. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said a cause of death will not be determined for several weeks, and witnesses reported conflicting accounts about whether Stephan died of a blow to the head or because he hit his head on the sidewalk.

And the answers won’t come easily. The family wants to know how the fight started. Getting to the bottom of the teenagers’ brawl is complicated by Stephan’s being black, the other boy, white, which inescapably raises the specter of the Antelope Valley’s history of racial problems. That history was on prominent display with last week’s sentencing of three skinheads for the Thanksgiving 1995 murder of a homeless black man.

Palmdale School District Supt. Nancy Smith was quick to dismiss race as a factor in the fistfight. Perhaps she meant to defuse tensions, to keep heads and hearts clear and calm enough to give this tragedy the scrutiny it deserves.

But until all the details are known, we agree with Antelope Valley College professor John McDonald, a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Committee’s Hate Crime Task Force, that it’s too early to draw a conclusion, one way or the other, about motive. Given the Antelope Valley’s history, too quickly dismissing race can be as detrimental as too quickly insisting it was a factor.

True, knowing the motive doesn’t change the outcome. Hate crime or an eighth-grade scuffle turned nightmare, Stephan Corson is dead. His family is left to mourn a boy who just wanted a house with a yard for a dog, a house his mother and brother thought they’d be able to afford in Palmdale, where they’d moved from the San Fernando Valley only a month ago.

But knowing whether Stephan’s death is a tragic lesson on the pitfalls of settling disagreements with fists or an even darker lesson involving race affects how the community should respond. And sadly, one of the area’s legacies is that such questions will be raised. And once raised, they must be addressed.