English Class Banter Gone Deadly: 7th Graders Pick Gun & Knife Fight
Back when we were seventh graders, we battled our enemies with clever name-calling, by stomping our feet on the ground and in rare cases, maybe a little hair-pulling. Students at Samuel Gompers Middle School in South L.A. have lowered their brawls to a darker level, resorting to knives and guns as weapons.
Following a fight at the school on Wednesday afternoon, three students were expelled after a teasing session escalated during English class. Though the cause of the fight is unclear, as 20 students in the class gave "20 different versions" of the incident, Patrick Sinclair, senior director of communications for the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, said, "Apparently two kids got in an argument near the end of the day and one pulled a knife and the other pulled a gun," reports City News Service.
"The verbal argument escalated and one of the students pulled out a knife and the other pulled a gun from a backpack," continued Sinclair. "The rest of the students panicked and fled as fast as they could. Then the two students involved in the fight fled. One student put the knife back in his pocket and the other dropped the backpack with the gun as he was running.''
The backpack belonged to a third student; all three teenagers were turned over to the LAPD.
Located in an impoverished area of the city in the 200 block of East 112th Street, the school does not have metal detectors.
