Mother Urges D.A. to Review Decision on Son’s Death

Mary Corson, distraught that no charges were filed against the boy who killed her son in a school fight in Palmdale, urged the district attorney’s office Tuesday to reconsider its decision and asked federal authorities to launch their own investigation into the incident.

Corson said a teacher had already broken up the fight and the other boy was the aggressor when he felled her 13-year-old son, Stephan, with a fatal blow on the chin.

Corson’s lawyer, Melanie Lomax, sent a letter to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti asking him to review last week’s decision that the other boy acted in self-defense.

Community activist Najee Ali wrote to U.S. Atty. Alejandro N. Mayorkas, also on behalf of Mary Corson, asking him to launch a civil rights investigation.

“We’ll take a look at it and familiarize ourselves with the facts of the case,” Mayorkas said.

The district attorney’s office concluded Friday that Stephan had started the fight Nov. 19 at Juniper Intermediate School. The other boy, a 14-year-old whose name is being withheld because of his age, was acting in self-defense, prosecutors said.

But Corson and Lomax say they have statements from several witnesses that paint a different picture of the fight than prosecutors’ version. According to one classmate interviewed by a private investigator hired by Lomax, Stephan was trying to walk away when he was killed.

“After being pulled from atop of [the other boy], Stephan walked away with his back to [the other boy]” who “ran up behind Stephan and kicked him and then hit him,” the classmate said in a statement. “Stephan fell to the sidewalk like a log.”

At a news conference Tuesday in her Miracle Mile law office, Lomax said the case boils down to whether the other boy was being attacked when he threw the fatal punch. Lomax conceded that Stephan had started the fight but said he was provoked by a racial slur. However, school administrators and sheriff’s detectives both say no slurs were made.

Lomax also said that because a teacher had arrived to break up the fight, the other boy was not in a self-defense situation when he threw the punch that knocked Stephan to the ground, where he died of an acute spinal cord injury.

“For this to be true self-defense, there had to be an immediate threat of harm, which there wasn’t,” said Lomax, who is also representing Mary Corson in a $10-million wrongful death suit against the Palmdale School District. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detectives have said the pair were trading punches even after the teacher stepped between them. Detectives relied on accounts from the teacher, a bus driver who was nearby, and more than 10 student witnesses.

At the news conference, Corson said she doesn’t want the other boy to go to jail but feels he should be held accountable.

“Just because my boy started the fight,” Corson said in front of a circle of TV cameras, her hands and voice trembling, “doesn’t mean he deserved to die.”