Delay Served No One

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office left one family relieved, the other devastated, when it decided not to file charges against the 14-year-old Palmdale boy who struck and killed 13-year-old Stephan Corson. There is no way to soften that decision for Stephan’s grieving mother, who wants someone held accountable. But the announcement, coming five months after Stephan’s Nov. 19 death, seemed all the harsher because of the agonizing wait.

Such a decision requires diligence, to be sure. The district attorney’s office had to sift through sometimes conflicting interviews and a lengthy autopsy report. But sheriff’s investigators finished their interviews four months ago, and the coroner’s report has been in a prosecutor’s office since mid-February. The district attorney’s office offered only excuses for the delay. Days before the decision was announced April 21, the head juvenile prosecutor for north Los Angeles County told a Times reporter that he had spent “just 10 minutes” on the case because he was busy with others.

Meanwhile, the community’s wounds festered, complicated by Stephan’s being black, the other boy, white. The fight occurred the same week three Antelope Valley skinheads were sentenced for the 1995 murder of a black man. Tensions mounted in an already emotional case.

The Corsons’ lives have been irreparably changed. They are left to mourn a boy so popular a baseball field in the West San Fernando Valley, where the family lived until just three weeks before Stephan died, was named to honor his loss. The other family has also been marked by this tragedy and ill-served by the district attorney’s delay. The 14-year-old, whose name has not been released because of his age, suffers nightmares about accidentally killing friends, his father said, and being sent to prison.

The district attorney’s office concluded from witness reports that Stephan started the schoolyard fight and that “it cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt” that the 14-year-old did more than defend himself.

Mary Corson, who filed a wrongful death suit against the Palmdale School District, has asked the district attorney’s office to reconsider its decision. Her son, she said, didn’t deserve to die.

She’s right, of course, regardless of last week’s decision. For a country that lives in fear of the next school shooting rampage, a couple of boys getting into a fistfight over tossed spitballs seems a throwback to a more innocent time. Part of the shock of Stephan’s death is its sheer unexpectedness. The wait for answers should not have been prolonged.