From The Associated Press:
A fight at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campuswide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police officers in riot gear.
The melee, which students said was between rival black and Hispanic gangs and started around noon on Friday, forced the authorities to shut down the school, Locke High, and keep students in their classrooms.
After restoring order, they rounded up those involved and separated them, holding Hispanic students in the gymnasium and black students in another room. Four people were arrested, three students for fighting and one non student on suspicion of possessing a knife, said Susan Cox, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district.
Several students were injured and treated at the scene, officials said. A music teacher, Reggie Smith, told the Los Angeles Times that it was a chaotic scene and difficult to distinguish between those fighting and those trying to avoid the mayhem.
“The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids,” Smith said. “Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”
Victor Wong, an 18-year-old senior, told the Times that the brawl grew out of a fight two days earlier between two graffiti gangs. He said Hispanic students who were friends of his asked him to participate in a fight planned for Friday that was to pit 10 Hispanic students against 10 black students.
The two groups met as planned at the handball courts, Wong said, but the fight quickly spread throughout the campus. “Security didn’t know where to go,” he said. “They’d concentrate in one spot, and something would happen somewhere else.”
School district police called about 60 officers to the scene, while the Los Angeles Police Department sent about 50 officers and more than a dozen patrol cars.
Ronald White, a 17-year-old senior, said that when the police arrived, some of the students began fighting the officers, who responded with their batons. Another student said he saw the police use pepper spray.
Joseph Sherlock, a senior, said it was his “first actual encounter with a riot.”
About 65 percent of the 2,600 students at Locke are Hispanic, and 35 percent are black. The school has been marred by almost daily fights during much of the academic year.
-Patrick M. Walker
