A Painful Lesson : Students Are Saddened by Vandals’ Torture and Killing of Classroom Animals

A pall of grief hung over an elementary school Monday afternoon as dozens of children gathered to mourn the death of a school turtle who was beaten with a hammer during what their teacher described as “an orgy of cruelty.”

It was not merely the death of Toby the turtle that shocked the children at Western Avenue Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. It was the four fish tanks that were broken open in the fifth-grade classroom and the 15 fish and reptiles that were tortured and killed. And it was the vicious vandalism that 10 other classrooms sustained in the Oct. 22 attack.

On Monday, saddened, angry youngsters wearing turtle-shaped goodby cards crowded around a small grave dug under a campus oak tree to hear teachers, custodians and fellow students eulogize Toby.

It was Toby’s room, the classroom of teacher David Whitelaw, that sustained the worst. Left alive were Myrtle, Toby’s female counterpart, a salamander that lost a foot and a tadpole.

“This place was a virtual slaughter,” Whitelaw said.

Los Angeles Unified School District police arrested two teen-agers who were found in a hallway outside the classroom the day of the attack.

Toby and Myrtle, new to Whitelaw’s classroom this year, roamed the room freely throughout the day, walking on desks and basking in students’ attention.

“When we had reading groups,” said Cesar Contreras, 11, “Toby would sit with us on the floor and listen.”

“Why would they want to kill a life?” asked 10-year-old Genice Brown, one of Whitelaw’s students. “It was just like they killed one of us.”

At the memorial service, students jostled to see the small black plastic box containing Toby lowered into the ground. A first-grader named Kenneth, scheduled to read a eulogy of the turtle, began to wail on his way to the grave site and ran into the arms of his teacher. Cesar hung his head after it was over, saying that he felt “very sad.”

Vandalism in other classrooms included broken cabinet locks, stolen electronics equipment and scrawled gang insignias on the walls. One room was coated with toxic chemicals from a fire extinguisher.

Making the experience even more painful was the fact that students held a two-day vigil last week while Toby fought for his life, wearing “Go, Toby, Go!” pins. When he died last Tuesday, they took them off.

Later in the week, one first-grade class made a turtle-shaped book for Whitelaw’s class, inviting students to visit their turtle, which was unharmed.

Whitelaw’s class spent a few days writing letters to the judge who will try the suspects and to the principal of Crenshaw High School, where the suspects attend school. They discussed new vocabulary words such as eulogy and sadism . On some days, a few children could not return to the classroom where Toby had been killed.

According to district officials, vandalism happens every day on a Los Angeles school campus, but rarely does it include the torture or killing of animals.

Elementary schools are vandalized more frequently than middle or high schools, probably because there are more of them and because they are rarely used on weekends, said Shell Erlich , a district representative.

The morning after the vandalism, school custodians told Whitelaw they thought Toby might be dead. But, seeing his head poke slowly out of his shell, the teacher sped him to the nearest veterinarian.

Dr. Jack Ciganek spent more than two hours working on the turtle, administering antibiotics and wiring together the shattered pieces of his shell. He glued the broken pieces to the intact shell with dental cement and kept Toby overnight for observation.

The next day, Toby ate a meal and seemed alert. Ciganek predicted that he would recover and called Whitelaw to pick him up. But when the teacher arrived an hour later, Toby had died, possibly from an internal infection brought on when his organs were exposed, said Ciganek.

After a week of grief and sadness in his classroom, and a fear that something like this could happen again, Whitelaw decided not to replace Toby with another turtle.

But over the weekend, one student’s family bought another male turtle to live with Myrtle in the small glass tank.

His name: Toby II.

“We’re going to call him T2,” said one fifth-grader. He was smiling.