Classmates Grieve as Police Seek Leads in Slaying on Bus

Students at Centennial High School in Compton tried to find a lesson in needless death and senseless injury Friday, one day after a classmate was killed and another wounded as they rode an MTA bus home from school.

The teenagers participated in campus grief counseling, a macabre rite of passage for schoolchildren in Los Angeles County, where 13 students have suffered violent deaths on or near their campuses in the last five years.

The Compton school district deployed 23 crisis workers and support staff. Teachers-turned-grief counselors taught students about mourning.

Although some students were shocked to learn which innocent teenager had died--17-year-old Corie Williams--they were not shocked that someone had. After all, MTA Route 53, which goes to Compton and South Los Angeles, passes through the boundaries of rival gangs’ territories.

“Even if your ride is waiting for you, they’ll kill you,� said a dazed senior, Nancy Chavez, shaking her head when she found out Friday morning which classmates were shot. “It don’t matter if you’re involved [with a gang] or not. They’ll kill you.�

Detectives from the LAPD’s South Bureau on Friday fanned out through the South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the shooting took place. They were searching for witnesses who watched a suspected gang member spray the bus with an undetermined number of bullets because he identified a rival on board.

The shooter, standing with a group of cronies near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and Imperial Highway, missed his target and instead hit Corie in the neck and her neighborhood friend, Tammi Freeman, 18, in the right shoulder. Freeman remained in serious but stable condition at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center.

“We’re hopeful of a resolution to this matter fairly soon,� said South Bureau Lt. John Dunkin. “Based on the collection of evidence and interviewing of people both inside and outside the bus, we have developed some significant leads.�

At Centennial, instructors tried to teach the grieving process, something many of their students already know. Some classes became open dialogue sessions; in others, teachers encouraged students to write down what they found too difficult to say out loud.

“The tragedy of this is that this happens so frequently in our community, not just on the bus,� said Deputy Supt. George McKenna.

Corie, who was carrying her graduation gown order form in her pocket when she died, had made a significant choice during the past year, her friends said. She once believed she was bound for the Army, but recently decided that she was going to head straight to college and then on to law school.

“I talked to her yesterday about her looking forward to college,� said junior Nathan Long, 16, on his way to talk to a grief counselor. “She said she’d been waiting to get out of high school and be somebody in life.�

Many teens showed up for Donal Kennedy’s English class in tears, Kennedy said. It was so quiet that the classroom was “like a morgue,� he said.

“The students who knew them were pretty speechless,� Kennedy said. “I didn’t try to teach. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t in the mood.�

One of Corie’s close friends, Latrease Jones, read a poem titled “Why Me?� over the school’s public address system.

“I just wanted to go home. I didn’t do anything wrong,� Latrease, 17, read in a quiet voice. “Do you feel my pain? Can you hear the cries coming from my mother as she watched me die? . . . Can you answer me this question: Why me?�

On most afternoons, the 53 bus is standing-room-only because of the crush of about 50 Centennial students who pile on after school. On Friday, 21 people--two of them MTA police officers and only three of them students--rode the bus, which was escorted by Compton Unified School District and MTA police cars.

MTA Lt. James Willis stood guard at the shooting site, where chalk circles still marked the locations of spent shell casings, and promised a continued police presence on the bus.

“We will have undercover officers on the bus,� Willis said. “When they think we are not here, we will be here.�

One passenger spoke loudly as he got off. “They should have had him on board before,� he said.

Among the investigating officers’ tasks Friday were finding witnesses who could identify the shooter so that a picture or composite drawing could be circulated as soon as possible, Dunkin said.

On Thursday in the moments after the shooting, the driver raced to speed out of harm’s way. There was chaos on board, and as soon as the driver came to a halt, Dunkin said, many of the terrified riders jumped out of the vehicle.

Police were tracking them down, Dunkin said, using some witnesses’ statements to lead them to others.

One rider who fled the scene in horror was marched into the LAPD’s Southeast station by a stern parent who insisted that the teenager give a statement to police, Dunkin said. “It’s heartening the amount of information we’re getting and the cooperation from the public,� he said.

Times correspondents Michael Krikorian and Maki Becker and Times researcher Rebecca Andrade contributed to this report.