Glendale Students Mourn Slain Classmate

While students at Glendale’s Hoover High School poured out of classrooms Monday to grieve at a sidewalk memorial for Raul Aguirre, a senior stabbed to death in front of the school, authorities discussed ways to increase campus safety and defuse ethnic tensions.

Officials said they are considering installing surveillance cameras around Hoover and hiring off-duty police to patrol the campus, as well as closing off the street in front of the school and naming it after Raul.

Administrators also want to add a special diversity awareness class to the school curriculum to deal with the tensions between Latinos and Armenian Americans that authorities say fueled the gang-related fight that claimed Raul’s life.

“The attack on Raul was an attack on the community,” said Jim Brown, superintendent of the Glendale School District. “There’s no question that tensions exist here and that we have to redouble our efforts to defuse them.”

On Monday, the scene in front of Hoover High was one of a community bowled over by grief. Hundreds of students left classes to visit the enormous sidewalk memorial across the street from the school. Fifteen-year-old boys with shaved heads and little mustaches cried on the curb. Teachers handed out white ribbons and tied bows around trees.

Amid silence, the smell of wax from 102 votive candles, arranged in the shape of a cross in front of pictures of Raul, hung in the air.

“Nobody ever thought we’d have to deal with this now,” said Raffi Djihanian, Hoover’s student body president. “We’re thinking about prom, about getting out of school, about going off to college, not about the possibility of somebody getting killed in front of the school.”

Seventeen-year-old Raul was clubbed in the face with a tire iron and stabbed in the heart in front of a large crowd of students Friday after school as he tried to break up a fight between two Armenian American boys and a Latino boy. The three started fighting after flashing gang signs, said Glendale Police Sgt. Rick Young. When Raul tried to intervene, he was chased across the street to a sidewalk in front of Toll Middle School, where one boy felled him with the tire iron and the other stabbed him.

The boys, ages 15 and 17, were later arrested, along with a 14-year-old girl who drove them to the school. All three are being held on suspicion of murder.

The brutality of Raul’s death and the fact that he was not in a gang but was known to be a good, hard-working youth has angered many people and raised the prospects of retaliation, Young said.

“There’s a lot of anger out there right now,” he said. “We’re beefing up patrols, but retaliation is a real threat.”

Though Raul wasn’t in a gang, some of the Mexican American street gangs in Glendale may seek to avenge his death, Young said. For years, ethnic tensions between Latinos and Armenian Americans have fueled clashes between the gangs of the two groups.

Few who work or go to school at Hoover deny that there is tension between the groups. But administrators say the 2,800-student school, which is about half Armenian American and a quarter Latino, has taken a number of steps to address cultural differences.

Three years ago, the school started SPIRIT Council, a student club that holds diversity workshops and puts on skits that parody ethnic stereotypes.

At a news conference Monday morning, administrators talked of increasing those efforts. Later in the day, administrators met with police and city officials to discuss greater security measures on campus, such as permanently closing Glenwood Road in front of the school to traffic.

Also on Monday, several leaders in both the Latino and Armenian American communities stopped by the sidewalk memorial to pay respects for Raul. Glendale Councilman Rafi Manoukian said he is planning a call-in TV show between him and a Latino City Council member, Gus Gomez, to discuss ethnic diversity issues.

“We all can do a better job of bridging the divide,” Manoukian said.

The three teenagers being held on suspicion of murder will appear today in Glendale Municipal Court. Authorities have not yet decided whether they will be tried as adults or juveniles.