Security at Rio Mesa High Increases After Attack

EL RIO —  In the wake of a bloody melee at Rio Mesa High School that sent two students to the hospital with stab wounds, school district officials scrambled Tuesday to beef up security and assure parents that the campus is a safe place to send their children.

While still trying to piece together the events leading up to Monday’s noontime assault, educators set out to review safety measures at the El Rio campus, including a look at whether a sheriff’s deputy should be assigned to the campus full time.

Currently, a deputy splits his time between the high school and nearby Rio Del Valle Middle School under a program launched last school year. Each of the other four campuses in the Oxnard Union High School District has full-time law enforcement supervision.

“I would venture to say that there is as much security on the campuses in the Oxnard district as there is on any campus in the state,” said school district Supt. Bill Studt, who joined a small army of administrators and lawmen in a show of force Tuesday at the 2,400-student high school.

“I don’t think there was a whole lot more we could have done about this situation,” Studt added. “We can’t guarantee complete safety. These issues between gangs occur on weekends and at night, and unfortunately they occasionally spill over onto our campuses.”

In the latest in a string of increasingly brazen gang-related attacks, an 18-year-old former Rio Mesa student is suspected of sneaking onto the campus and confronting two current students, one 16 years old and the other 14.

What followed was a violent and bloody clash viewed by a large group of students during the lunch hour. The fight ended when the two victims were stabbed. Both were treated Monday for stab wounds and released from St. John’s Regional Medical Center.

Moments after the attack, sheriff’s deputies arrested Eric Padilla of Oxnard on suspicion of stabbing the two boys. Padilla is being held in Ventura County Jail on $20,000 bail and is scheduled for arraignment today.

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Sheriff’s deputies were still searching late Tuesday for a second assailant, perhaps a Rio Mesa student who aided in the attack and later ran from the scene.

Although careful not to identify any of the participants as gang members, Sheriff’s Department officials said the incident stemmed from long-simmering tensions between a gang in El Rio and one in the La Colonia neighborhood of Oxnard. School officials say the two victims have no apparent gang ties.

“We’re still trying to piece it all together,” said Sheriff’s Capt. Keith Parks. “What I can say about Rio Mesa High School is you’ve got a campus where kids are coming from a diverse number of communities.”

Worried that tensions might still be on the rise, school officials set out Tuesday to keep the peace.

Five Sheriff’s Department squad cars patrolled the campus, in some cases escorting school buses to and from the high school. Uniformed officers joined district administrators at the school, maintaining a high profile throughout the day.

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During the lunch hour, students gathered near the fight site, recounting the events of the previous day.

“It was just a fight that got out of control,” said 15-year-old freshman Josh Stamps, adding that the fortified police presence Tuesday was a bit hard to take. “It’s all over now, it’s not like there are going to be any more gang fights for a while.”

School officials offered counseling to students disturbed by the assault. And they spent a good part of the day trying to ease parents’ concerns about the safety of their children.

In addition to being told about the regular presence of a sheriff’s deputy and the school district’s long-standing zero tolerance policy toward gangs, parents learned about random metal detector searches conducted on the Rio Mesa campus.

Moreover, parents were told that Rio Mesa is a closed campus, one where access is tightly controlled.

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“I think school campuses are among the safest places for kids to be,” Studt said. “Unfortunately, a lot of these kids come from communities that aren’t safe places and I think we’re seeing that spill over into our schools.”

The spillover seems to be flooding Ventura County schools these days.

Monday’s assault follows a series of violent incidents on or near school campuses in recent weeks, including last month’s gang attack on a Ventura school bus.

That incident was followed less than a week later by an attack by suspected gang members on a 16-year-old boy in a Pacific High School continuing education classroom.

“There’s definitely an escalation--you can just count the incidents,” said Ventura County Supt. of Schools Charles Weis.

In fact, the incidents have become so prevalent in recent weeks that the subject came up Tuesday during an annual review of his office by the Ventura County Grand Jury. Jurors wanted to know what he had in mind for curbing campus violence. He said he wished he had ready-made solutions to offer.

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“This is a systemic community issue and we have to attack it on a variety of levels,” said Weis, who will host a school safety summit early next month. “Our first step is finding out what works and then implementing that.”

In the wake of these incidents, Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Center has been called to lend his expertise to the problem.

As executive director of the Westlake Village-based center, Stephens said there is a need for a new set of strategies to deal with a generation of school kids, increasingly brazen and defiant of authority.

“The bottom line is we have a much more difficult group of young people to deal with than ever before,” he said. “We have transitioned from fistfights to gunfights, and we have gone from fire drills to crisis drills. Incidents like these remind us of the urgency to move forward: We can no longer assume that violence will not come to our schools.”

About 70 worried parents showed up Tuesday night at Rio Mesa High for a special meeting called by school officials to discuss the recent spate of campus violence. Many parents urged school officials to take a tougher stance toward gang activity.

Christina Zarate, whose daughter will be a freshman at the school this year, said the school’s policy of random weapons searches isn’t good enough. She suggested that each student be searched at the door every morning.

“I think these kids are going to have weapons. . . . To think you’re going to [search randomly] and find them, that’s not good enough in this day and age,” Zarate said.

Times staff writer Chris Chi contributed to this story.