School Seeks Peace in Wake of Teen’s Killing

While students at 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 met to discuss 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 possibly naming it after Raul.

Administrators also want to add a diversity-awareness class to 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 Unified 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.

The smell of wax from 102 votive candles arranged in the shape of a cross hung in the air, along with silence.

“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, aged 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 he was not in a gang and was known as a good, hard-working kid has angered many people and raised the prospect of more violence, 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.”

Even though Raul, whose parents emigrated from Mexico, 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.

“The underlying problem we have to deal with now is a gang problem,” Brown said. “But in Glendale, gangs form along ethnic lines.”