More Talk, More Action Needed

On the day before they were to celebrate first their son’s 18th birthday and then Mother’s Day, Raul and Leticia Aguirre instead buried their boy.

There are no words to describe such heartbreak, none that can ease such pain. But in the week since a Marine Corps color guard and nearly 1,000 mourners gave young Raul Aguirre a hero’s funeral, Glendale has not stopped talking. And it must not stop now.

The Hoover High School senior had been waiting to catch a bus when two Armenian American boys and a Latino boy flashed gang signs and started fighting.

Raul was not in a gang. He had an after-school job and plans to join the Marines when he graduated next month. Police, school officials and family described him as a hard worker, a good kid, the kind who would--and did--try to stop a fight.

For trying to stop this one, he was chased across a street, clubbed in the face with a tire iron and stabbed through the heart in front of 40 middle school and high school students.

Two Armenian American boys and a girl have been arrested and charged with Raul’s murder. But that is not the end of it. Behind Glendale’s gangs is a long-simmering ethnic divide between Armenian Americans and Latinos.

Talk, in the form of a school club and a community-based group that hold diversity workshops, has so far failed to bridge the divide. But the brutality of Raul’s death has shocked the community, and it has responded with grief and self-examination. The time is ripe to talk--and act.

School security and police patrols should be stepped up, not just until the end of the school year, as promised, but beyond at this school where now two students have been killed in two years. But extra security does not get to the ethnic tensions behind the unrest.

Such tensions are not unique to Hoover High or to Glendale. At Grant High School in Valley Glen, resentment between Latinos and Armenian Americans exploded last fall into a lunchtime brawl involving 200 students. The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and community leaders stepped forward to work with the school. In January, the students signed a peace treaty promising to talk out differences and resolve disputes through trained student mediators.

Grant High has a long way to go, but Hoover High could learn from its experience. The two schools could help each other.

Talk--and action--have to go beyond the schools. Glendale City Councilmen Rafi Manoukian, who is Armenian American, and Gus Gomez, a Latino, went on a call-in TV show together to talk about the killing and the ethnic divisions behind it. Such community leadership is key to bridging the divide. It sets an example worthy of Raul Aguirre.