A Day After a School Brawl, a Town Asks, Why?

November 14, 2007

By KAREEM FAHIM
LAKEWOOD, N.J., Nov. 13 — It began as fisticuffs on Monday morning, but it quickly mushroomed into an hourlong brawl involving 150 students, more than four dozen police officers, pepper spray, and flying tables and chairs.

To Jose Garcia, 18, a senior, it seemed as if his school had briefly and violently “bugged out.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Garcia said.
On Tuesday, students, parents, teachers and law enforcement officers here spent the day trying to figure out what led to the near-riot at Lakewood High School and, more important, what it meant. School administrators held assemblies. More than 500 of the 1,370 students stayed home or were kept home by their parents.

“They’re supposed to be learning,” said Toni Crooks, a cashier at ShopRite who said she received a frantic call from her 14-year-old daughter about noon on Monday.

“She’s not going back to school till I know it’s safe,” Ms. Crooks said.
The fighting, which began in the school parking lot and then erupted in the cafeteria during a freshman lunch period, ended with the arrests of 11 students and one adult, assorted cuts and bruises on both sides and at least one student receiving stitches in the head. Police departments from four neighboring towns were called to the scene.

School administrators refused on Tuesday to speculate about the cause of the melee. But the police, saying they were still investigating, raised the possibility that gang activity was involved or that an old grievance lay behind the brawling.

As often happens in such situations, different accounts emerged. The police said they had to fend off students who threw themselves at officers and struck them with chairs. Students, in turn, said that officers, some in riot gear, used pepper spray, brought in dogs and struck one student with a walkie-talkie.

There had been fights in the past at the school, students and officials said, but nothing so extreme. And although the fight may turn out to be an isolated event, some here saw it as one more nervous turn for this town of 74,000, the scene of rapid population shifts in recent decades.

Tensions have surfaced more often between the town’s shrinking black population and growing numbers of Hispanic and Orthodox Jewish residents. The police have also raised concerns about an increasing presence of criminal gangs.

As classes ended on Tuesday, the block around the school was locked down by police officers and security guards. Hiddekel Velez, 17, met his mother, Margarita Velez, across the street.

“I was very worried about him,” said Ms. Velez, who works in the teachers’ cafeteria.
Mr. Velez said that there were small fights “every few months” at the school, rooted in tension between groups of students, some of whom had formed their own gangs. “It matters who your friends are here,” he said.

Geraldine Barragan, a 15-year-old freshman, said that she had taken her pizza and French fries outside to eat with her friends on Monday when a fight started in the school’s parking lot, involving two teenagers who did not attend the school.

She said she remembered some interactions between members of gangs with a variety of names, a combatant quickly changing out of his torn T-shirt and everyone yelling, “Fight!”

“Then they brought in the dogs,” she said.
Jasmine Spruill, 17, and Yasmin Gonzalez, 18, said the talk of gangs and racial tension was overblown. Ms. Spruill said that “people get along” at the diverse school.

Ms. Gonzalez said: “It was a fight. People just got crazy.”
A number of students said the police made matters worse, by ordering the teenagers to stay in the cafeteria and then by treating some roughly, including using pepper spray on some of them.

Deputy Chief Charles H. Smith said his officers came under a withering attack. One police officer, Capt. Gregory Miick, he said, was brought to the ground by students. “He’s a street cop all the way,” Chief Smith said. “It takes a lot to bring him down.”

The deputy chief said that the only weapon found by the police was a knife, on the floor. He said that one of the officers had used pepper spray, but he dismissed reports that the police had mistreated students.

“Our people demonstrated a great deal of restraint,” he said.
Lorraine Franklin, who lives across the street from the school and taught business classes there for almost 35 years, said she could not remember a fight that large. “They all got along,” she said.

She added, “They say the kids have changed."