Why Punish the Good Samaritan? : Student Didn’t Follow Rules in Helping an Injured Pal, but the School Overreacted

Well, what would the holiday season be without a Grinch story? This year’s nominee is Crescenta Valley High School in Glendale, for the overkill punishment it has meted out to student Alex Ghazalpour.

It seems that the 16-year-old Ghazalpour has a sincere interest in the medical profession. Since the age of 14, he has served as a volunteer in the emergency room of Glendale Adventist Medical Center, working about 16 to 20 hours a week there.

Ghazalpour is “an exceptional volunteer. He’s really a role model--and very well-liked,” the hospital’s coordinator of volunteers told The Times’ Jeff Prugh last week. Ghazalpour is trained in basic first aid, has learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and has a basic life support instructor training certificate from the hospital. He knows how to resuscitate those who have stopped breathing or whose hearts have stopped. He knows how to treat choking victims, but that’s not the problem.

Following a football game against Glendale High this season, Ghazalpour arranged for an injured teammate to be driven to the hospital by a friend, where the player’s strained left thumb was placed in a cast. We add here that the injured player told Ghazalpour: “This is killing me. You’ve got to take me to a hospital.” Ghazalpour and the injured buddy--Jesse Daggett--even went to Daggett’s parents first. The parents were working the booster club booth for the varsity game that was about to start and could not leave, but they granted their permission in writing for the trip to the hospital.

Alas, this did not follow to the letter the school’s policy on transportation safety and liability, a serious matter with which Crescenta Valley High officials were justifiably concerned.

But the school went overboard, even if the principal considered Ghazalpour’s latest effort to help injured teammates “the final straw.” Ghazalpour was kicked off the football team and denied a team letter, even though he played in half of the games before being sidelined with an injury. And he wasn’t even invited to the school’s annual football awards dinner.

Forgive us, but we have written, this past week, about a teen-ager shooting another youth over a knapsack, and about another teen-ager who thought that a little spilled beer on his shoes warranted his firing of four pistol shots at a party, one of which struck and killed another teen-ager. We wrote about teen-age taggers who have so little respect for private property that they even deface their parents’ homes.

We suspect that folks who are fed up with that kind of behavior would like a few dozen more Alex Ghazalpours around the neighborhood. His obviously avid interest in helping others is something to be encouraged and guided , not punished so severely.