Fighting between white, black and Latino students at Hart High School resulted in the arrests of four teens

Sue Doyle:

Students were arrested on suspicion of failure to disperse, said sheriff's Sgt. Cortland Myers, adding that the fight appeared racially motivated. There were no injuries.

Witnesses said black and Latino classmates teamed up together and fought white students during lunch in retaliation for a fight between two teens at the school on Thursday when racial names were called.

William S. Hart Union High School District officials said it was not known what started the fighting or whether it was racially based.

Students on campus had other impressions.

"It was racial. All the Mexican and blacks gathered up and fought the whites," said Agustin Chavez, 15. "It was a rumble."

The freshman was off campus when fighting broke out about 12:35 p.m. and watched from the street as sheriff's deputies swarmed the school to intervene.

Friday's fight involved an estimated 20 students, who had first formed a large circle on the school's quad. At first, the teens stood in the circle, posturing and staring one another down. Then a group splintered off and fought, Myers said.

Principal Gary Fuller and other school officials were in the middle of that circle, trying to calm students when the fighting began and did not see where it started.

"They were in a circle looking at one another, and we were in the middle," he said. "Something happened off the circle."

Fuller said the school got word earlier in the day about the possibility of unrest on campus, and that he and others spread through the school to quell any uneasiness. He said it was not known whether Thursday's fight spilled over to the altercations on Friday.

After the fights, the school went into lockdown. Gates were snapped shut, and school staff monitored entrances. Even a garbage truck was turned away.

Students were told to go to their sixth-period classes. Between 50 and 75 students resisted and were then confronted by sheriff's deputies.

Some teens fled the campus and called parents and friends on their cell phones for rides home. Meanwhile, a helicopter flew overhead and broadcast an order for students to return to class.

"I busted out of there," said Bethany Barwell, 16, as she ran past a fleet of squad cars.

The commotion drew residents across the street from the school, who craned their necks from the windows of their apartments to see what was happening.

Deputies escorted students off campus classroom by classroom. About 75 parents waited for them on auditorium steps, underneath trees and across the school's front lawn.

With one son by her side, Robin Simons of Valencia scanned the crowd, looking for her other boy to come out of the school.

When she first learned of the lockdown, she said she immediately flashed back to a race riot she witnessed as a student in the 1970s at Granada Hills High School. She was saddened at the thought of students today experiencing the same tension again.

"Nothing has changed over time. It just moved one valley over," she said. "It's so scary."

In February, nine students from Golden Valley High School were arrested and booked on suspicion of battery after a campus brawl fought along racial lines.

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