BISD campus quarrels permeate, endanger community

Violence and belligerence are burgeoning in Beaumont’s high schools, and it’s beginning to boil over into the surrounding community.

That’s not just according to store representatives near West Brook High School – who told The Examiner on Oct. 4 that teens are fighting in business parking lots and robbing them daily. A day later, West Brook and Beaumont United High School students, including the family member of a district trustee, met for a shootout in Rogers Park where three left injured.

Word on the street pointed to the gunman’s identity as a teenage relative of BISD Board Trustee Denise Wallace-Spooner. Contacted about the rumor, Spooner indicated she, too, had been hearing the talk on the street.

“I can’t say anything valid, because I don’t know,” Spooner said with a pause, before adding that it was her belief that not-so-innocent bystanders from the incident are the root of rumors.

“It’s a one-sided story only from documented gang members. No one has talked to (my relative). No one.”

According to a news release from the Beaumont Police Department (BPD), on Wednesday, Oct. 5, at 7:27 p.m., police responded to Rogers Park located at 6450 Gladys Ave. in reference to shots fired. When officers arrived, they located evidence that a shooting had occurred in the parking lot; however, no victims were present.

A short time later, BPD learned that three individual gunshot victims arrived at various medical facilities in the city, with the release reading, “All three victims sustained non-life threatening injuries. Detectives began their investigation and preliminary information has indicated that two separate groups with an on-going disturbance planned to meet at the park to fight. During the fight, someone produced a handgun and began firing shots. The three injured people were all a part of the fight and no innocent bystanders were harmed.”

“This is not the norm for Rogers Park,” offered Beaumont City Councilman Mike Getz, ward representative for the area including Rogers Park, “but it is the norm for shooting victims in Beaumont and many other places.

“These violent incidents almost always occur between people who already know each other. They are not typically incidents that occur at random. I live by the credo that ‘You should not live in fear but you should make wise choices.’ I am not afraid to drive to Parkdale Mall or Walmart or Target, but I am always aware of my surroundings.”

BPD says the investigation is on-going and detectives have identified “all” of the people involved in the gunfight, including the “person or persons” with a gun. As of press time, Beaumont police hadn’t released the identities of the teens reportedly involved in the shooting.

Revealing the identity of the 17-year-old accused of bringing a gun to a park parking lot fight could prove detrimental, Spooner argued, as the teen has been in receipt of threats of further violence since the Oct. 5 shooting. Furthermore, she said, this wasn’t the first time the alleged gun-wielder has been targeted by violence from fellow classmates.

“(My family member) was jerked out of the classroom in the ninth grade and beaten to a pulp,” Spooner revealed of the young man’s introduction to high school at Beaumont United, a school he attended due to advanced course selection offered at the campus. “He was stomped and beat up.

“He’s not the only one. We have several of them that this is happening to. Something is gonna come. Now, look what this has led up to.”

A week after the Rogers Park shooting, no one is in custody, to the best of Spooner’s knowledge, and two of the three students Spooner acknowledged are back in classes at West Brook.  Spooner’s relative, a student of Beaumont United, returned to class briefly, but has since been removed due to continued harassment.

“It’s rumors he can’t go back to school because they are waiting on a warrant for his arrest,” Spooner said, adding that any talk of such is untrue. “He’s the invisible man, but all this stuff is being said out in the air.”

Spooner said she is unsure of what charges, if any, will ever be pressed. As far as she knows, no one is cooperating with the police investigation. Beaumont Police Department spokesperson Carol Riley couldn’t confirm or deny Spooner’s hunch, saying only that there is no additional information to give at this time.

“They have videos where (the West Brook students involved in the fight) are telling people they will kill you, and they have their guns,” Spooner said, adding that she is under the impression there was more than one gun brandished and fired at Rogers Park on Oct. 5. “There was more than one shooter. Yet, nobody wants to cooperate.”

Just over 24 hours before the two bands of armed Beaumont teens met to fight in Rogers Park, a store representative from Dollar General on Phelan
Boulevard called The Examiner reporting that fights at West Brook have spilled over into nearby businesses.

“All the stuff that’s going on at the school – it’s so bad that it feeds over into our businesses,” said Gerry Choate, who works at Dollar General. “When kids get out of school, or in the mornings, we’ll catch them stealing every day. There’s fighting, and they try to fight with us in the store. They start throwing stuff off the shelves.”

“Yesterday, they met in our parking lot on the side of the building and a bunch of kids showed up and were beating one girl and macing her,” she said of an Oct. 3 incident. “We had to call the police.”

Choate said police arrived and broke up the assault. However, once officers left the scene, she said the melee continued across the street at the Kruzin gas station.

“It’s affecting our business where people don’t want to come to the store too early in the morning – when the kids come in at 8 a.m. And then from like 2:45 to 3:45 p.m. it’s like hell at our store.”

Choate said the brutal bathroom assault caught on video at West Brook spurred the fights at Dollar General just down the road, saying her nephew was another in a growing list of assault victims at the high school.

“The fighting ended up in front of our building and we lost customers for about an hour and a half,” saying managers were banning minors from the store during hours surrounding school’s start and finish. When asked whether that would remain a policy moving forward, she offered, “That’s what we’re discussing right now.

“We get constant trouble every single day.”

Violent juveniles multiply

The Examiner has previously outlined violence in the halls of BISD-run schools. According to state-mandated district reporting data provided to The Examiner pursuant to a Public Information Request, information published in a Sept. 29 issue, during the first 23 days of school, BISD high school and middle school campuses reported 158 unique disciplinary referrals for violent incidents that include staff and student assaults, instigating fights, mutual combat, bullying and “one-sided hitting.”

The BISD-provided data, which covers a time from the first day of the current school year on Aug. 10 through Sept. 12 – a total of 23 days of in-school instruction – also delineates behavior that includes: gambling at Beaumont United and West Brook high schools; possession and/or sale of controlled substances at Beaumont United and Odom Academy Middle School; terroristic threats that required removal from campus per the Texas Education Code at Vincent Middle School and West Brook; “improper touching of a student” and pornography possession at Beaumont United; and “improper sexual conduct/action” at King Middle School and Marshall Middle School.

By Sept. 13, BISD PD had filed six cases with the DA’s office for four violent crimes and two robberies, according to data produced by the Jefferson County District’s Attorney’s Office in response to an information request.

As for the rest of 2022, BISD PD filed 57 criminal cases with the DA’s office, bringing BISD’s violent case count up to 33 for 2022, so far. That data further reveals that, in 2021, BISD PD reported 78 total cases, 45 of those violent, with 42 total cases, 16 violent, in 2020 during the pandemic.

The growing issue of violence among Beaumont’s youth isn’t confined to the city, according to a 2021 annual report from the Jefferson County Juvenile Probation Department given by Chief Probation Officer Edward Cockrell. His data, reported to the county juvenile board and county commissioners, reveals that aggravated assault charges have increased in the county at large.

“This year’s report reflects a 16% decrease in overall referrals to the department,” he wrote. “Felony referrals increased by 8%, while aggravated assaults increased by 17%. Misdemeanor referrals decreased by 32%. Misdemeanor assaults decreased by 14%. Youth certified to stand trial as an adult increased by 63%. There were three certifications in 2020 and eight in 2021. The increase in certifications may be contributed to two referrals for murder and the increase in aggravated assault referrals.”

Among the 220 serious offense charges referred to the Juvenile Probation Department in the 2020/2021 fiscal year, there were 105 felony allegations including: two homicides, four sexual assaults, 10 robberies and 34 aggravated assaults. There were also 54 assaults classified as misdemeanors.

The lion’s share of alleged youthful offenders in the Jefferson County juvenile program are male, minority, between the ages of 13 and 16 years old, although four 2021 juvenile offenders were just 10 years old at the time of their commitment. Of the 69 cases disposed of during 2021, none were sent to state juvenile detention, eight were certified as adult offenders, and 49 were sent home to their parents.

Kaleb Martin, just 15 years old when he was brought into the custody of the juvenile system in 2020, will be one of the youthful offenders not going home with his parents following a bad decision to participate in a large crowd fight. Oct. 10, Martin was sentenced to serve 30 years in adult prison for the shooting death of a Beaumont woman in April 2020.

Sunday, April 19, 2020, at 4:26 a.m., Beaumont officers responded to apartments in the city’s south end to find a 41-year-old woman shot to death by a 15-year-old Beaumont ISD student.

“Investigators learned there was a fight at the apartments involving a large crowd with juveniles involved,” Beaumont police advised the morning of the shooting. The victim, Monica Landrio Grogan of Beaumont, had allegedly entered the scene of the shooting in an attempt to break up the wee morning hour commotion.

“Witnesses advised the victim fired a round in an attempt to break up the fight,” police advised. Grogan, a grandmother and mother with two children still yet to graduate, was subsequently shot “multiple” times and spirited to the hospital via EMS with critical injuries.

In the aftermath of the assault, police concluded the gunman was the later identified 15-year-old Martin. Originally arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, Martin’s charges were soon upgraded when Grogan died as a result injuries sustained from the teen’s barrage of bullets on April 20, 2020.

Just over two years later, Sept. 3 of this year, Grogan’s family gathered together to celebrate the matriarch’s life and the impact she had on those who knew and loved her. Oct. 10, many of the same loved ones gathered in the gallery of Judge John Stevens’ Criminal District Court to lay eyes on the child that killed their mom.

“She had grandkids,” and children that still needed Grogan, her daughter told Martin, the defendant privy to the communication from the solitude of a jail cell while watching and interacting with the court proceedings over Zoom. “You took her from us.

“Why did you take my mom away?”

Grogan’s son and cousin also took turns talking to the teen, neither offering forgiveness nor condemnation.

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Grogan’s eldest son, Preston Westbrook, said, grappling with his own emotions over the loss of his mother, and the knowledge that it was a child that was responsible. Westbrook pontificated on the struggle with knowing how to even feel.

“I don’t know how you’d feel, either,” Westbrook told Martin, invoking the now 17-year-old to put himself in the position of the victim’s family.

Judge Stevens likewise spoke words of wisdom too late to help Martin, but given in the spirit to those yet to walk the same path.

“The effects are like throwing a rock in the pond; it ripples everywhere,” Stevens said, pointing to the branches of pain felt in families of those lost to violent crime. “There is no way you can truly put back the pieces when someone is killed. The acts cause something that is lost forever.”

BISD Trustee Spooner, who has guided her children, her family’s children, and their children’s children through the school district she says she wholeheartedly loves and serves, is encouraging the community to come together to save the youth of tomorrow from mistakes of today.

“It’s praying time,” she said. “It’s praying time.”

Jennifer Johnson is a nationally award-winning investigative journalist with decades of experience in Southeast Texas. She can be reached at (409) 832-1400, Ext. 231, or jenniferjohnson@theexaminer.com.

B. Scott McLendon is a staff writer in his fourth year in Beaumont. Contact Scott with questions, comments and story ideas by calling (409) 832-1400, emailing scott@theexaminer.com or visiting The Examiner at 795 Willow Street in downtown Beaumont.