Cleveland High Student Shot in After-School Brawl

A gang brawl erupted into gunfire Thursday afternoon outside Cleveland High School, leaving two 11th-graders injured in the street in front of students whose classes had ended just 15 minutes earlier.

One student was shot in the pelvis and the forearm, Los Angeles Unified School District officials said. The other was beaten in the head with a blunt object, possibly a pistol butt, said Det. Dave Szabo of the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Valley homicide bureau.

A third student drove the injured boys, both 17, to nearby Northridge Hospital Medical Center, Cleveland Principal Al Weiner said. The victims were expected to make a full recovery, hospital spokeswoman Lisa Barry said.

Police said they had arrested three men in their early 20s and were searching for two more suspects.

The suspects and the injured teens appeared to be gang members, said Officer Jason Lee, an LAPD spokesman.

One student walking home from school watched the violence unfold.

“I thought they were joking at first,” said the witness, Cleveland student Caitlin Long, 15. “When he pulled out the gun, I thought it was a fake gun.”

The shooting occurred about 3:15 p.m., when most of the school’s 2,700 students already had left campus, Weiner said.

A van carrying five men stopped near a fence across Vanalden Avenue from the school, Weiner said. They got out and began a fistfight with another group of males.

As the fight escalated, one of the men took out a gun and fired five to seven shots, Weiner said.

After the shooting, police cordoned off a two-block area near the 8000 block of Vanalden at the campus’ western edge. A dark blue Ford Thunderbird belonging to one of those arrested was impounded. No weapon was recovered, police said.

Caitlin said she and a friend watched the attack from across the street. Amid six or seven young men, two pairs were fist fighting on Vanalden, which was crowded with students, she said.

“One kid had the other in a headlock, and was punching him in the stomach,” she said. “He was spitting up blood. But I didn’t think it would get to the point of shooting.”

Then, three or four of the young men ganged up on one of the rivals, striking him 15 to 20 times, Caitlin said. Another fighter watched for a moment, stunned, then ran down the street.

One of the attackers chased him, pulled out a pistol and fired five or six shots, Caitlin said. The victim lay on the ground bleeding, she said.

School district police ran to the scene when they saw the group pummeling the young man, she said. “The cops were screaming, ‘He’s got a gun!’ ” Caitlin said.

When students return today, extra police will be deployed around the campus, Weiner said, adding, “We will reassure our parents that this was very isolated.”

He praised the restraint shown by school district police.

“The fact that the police officer did not pull his gun and shoot is commendable,” Weiner said.

Felix Cantrell, 14, a cadet in the school’s Junior ROTC, said the incident did not disrupt an after-school soccer game or corps practice.

“We didn’t hear a shooting. There was no panic or nothing,” he said. “I feel it’s a safe school. We really don’t have much problems.”

Frank Perez, 14, a ninth-grader who was on campus when the shooting began, said he hadn’t noticed any tension throughout the school day. “It’s crazy,” he said. “This is the first time. There’s no gang violence here.”

Gang graffiti was visible near the school, on a fence and light post, but Weiner said parents usually remove such markings within a couple of days. “We were hoping to get rid of it today,” he said, pointing to a local gang’s tag on the fence.

Students said gang members in their classes don’t usually cause trouble. “They are not looking for fights,” said Manuel Treto, 16.

But Jennifer LaSalle, 20, a former student who lives a few blocks away, said problems around the school have been escalating.

“This neighborhood is usually quiet, but it’s getting worse and worse because of gangs and younger and younger kids who do ridiculous things, like shooting people,” said LaSalle, who had gone to the campus to pick up her 13-year-old cousin.

When LaSalle was a student at Cleveland, she said, she witnessed a stabbing and a shooting.

Thursday’s shooting marked the fourth serious act of violence near the Cleveland High campus since 1993. The most serious was a 1993 gang-related shooting in which a 16-year-old girl was killed and two other students were injured.

In 1996, a 16-year-old boy was stabbed more than a dozen times in an attack near the campus. Two years later, an 18-year-old was shot in the face during a fistfight at a campus track.

Cleveland High opened in 1958 and has been home to a popular humanities magnet program since 1981.

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Julie Korenstein, the Los Angeles Unified School District board member who represents the area, said she was “very alarmed” by the shooting.

“It’s a quiet campus,” she said. “Once in a while there will be an altercation on campus, but it’s rare.”

Korenstein said she had not heard of any ongoing gang problems at Cleveland.

Nevertheless, she said, the district would send a “youth relations” team specializing in dealing with gang activity to work with Cleveland students today.

“There are gangs throughout Los Angeles, but major activity at schools? Very rarely,” she said. “I can’t remember when there was an altercation of this kind at school.”

Times staff writers Roberto J. Manzano, Andrew Blankstein, Thuy-Doan Le, Carol Chambers, Dalondo Moultrie and Jean Guccione contributed to this story.