Culture of violence

I took this picture in 2004 while working on a story about the culture of violence at an inner city high school in Hartford.

I was a staff photographer for the Hartford Courant working with reporter Rachel Gottlieb at Weaver High.

Here’s some of what Rachael wrote about life in the north end high school:

“Weaver High School's principal, Paul Stringer, is as tough as men come. He was injured twice as a Marine in Vietnam and came home with a Purple Heart. He runs his school with the unsmiling, singular control of a combat officer.

But even Stringer was stunned by his students' quick return to order after a February brawl in a hallway in which three students were stabbed. Within a half-hour, the school was humming as if nothing had happened.

Crisis counselors were called in to speak to students. ``Not one student needed to talk,'' Stringer recalls weeks later. ``I said `For God's sake, you're so hardened.'''

In Hartford's North End, where it takes strategy to pass the corner hangout of rival students from another block, it isn't a bad thing to be hardened.

Violence is so much a part of Weaver students' lives that it permeates such decisions as whether to join an after-school club and risk walking home alone or whether to wear jewelry to school.

``It's the toughest school in the city,'' Stringer says. ``The kids are so used to seeing [violence] in their community. They are so resilient. I had to go to Vietnam to become that hardened.''

Stringer had welcomed us inside the school for about a month where we followed the daily routines in the classrooms and the hallways at the school. The high school building itself is a hard place, cold concrete with windows welcoming very little sunlight.

We had spent the morning inside the school and decided to take a break for lunch, getting take out at

Scotts’ Jamaican Bakery not far from the school. We drove back toward the school and were parked on Tower Avenue when three young men stopped right next to my car. Obviously they didn’t notice us as they put on black face masks and black hooded sweatshirts and began trotting down the street toward a teenager walking toward them on the sidewalk. We must have been a good 75 yards away from them when we saw them attacking the young man, Jerome Paul, a Weaver High School junior who recently moved from Jamaica to be with his father. Jerome was walking home alone from Weaver when three teens jumped him.

One of the young men held a knife to Jerome's throat, cut his chin and beat him. Another pulled a pocket off his jeans to get his wallet. When the muggers took off, they left him bleeding and pleading for them to return his Social Security card and a treasured necklace that belonged to his father.

With Rachel yelling “go, go, go!” I stepped on the gas and the car roared down the street, stopping right in front of the three young thugs who were beating Jerome who was on the ground trying to defend himself. While one of them beat Jerome another went through the kid’s jacket. A third young hood stood guard when I pulled up. I got off maybe eight frames before they were aware that we were there. Then they ran, leaving the young man on the ground. Rachel and I got out and put him in the back seat of the car. Then we tailed the three attackers as they trotted away. I called the police, hoping to keep them in sight. They started throwing bricks at my car, putting one through the back window when we got stuck in traffic. They got away.

After the picture was published in The Courant the paper’s reader representative approached me. Apparently a reader complained that I was taking photos instead of trying to save the young man from injury. My response was that there was no way I was not going to take that picture. Actually, it was the reality of me catching them on film that made them scatter. I don’t think they would have been dissuaded by an unarmed man and woman. They would have just turned on us.