Mop-Handle Attack A Universal Topic For Sunnyside

SUNNYSIDE, Yakima County - For weeks, what happened at Sunnyside High School has been the talk of the town.

Anger, amazement, resignation and shame - all are expressed in the cafes near the feedlots, on the dusty downtown streets, in the La Fruteria Morales and its neighbor, The Safari Restaurant and Lounge.

Outside the modern, Southwest-styled high school, best friends, both non-Hispanic, argue about whether the boy accused of using the mop handle could have done it.

"He can be a jerk," said one, a senior, "but I don't think he could do something so sick."

"I do," replied the other, a junior. "I think he's the type."

Ironically, says Jose Morales, president of the Lower Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, that boy and his brother, also one of the accused, come from a good family with longtime roots in the area. The father owns a shop in town and, unlike some other Hispanic youngsters, these kids have stayed within the system.

"I know renegade kids that would think nothing of what happened," says Morales, who knows the family. "These kids are in school, they get good grades, they're not renegade kids."

At school, the kids grimace as they tell about rumors that their basketball archrivals, the Grandview Greyhounds, have already prepared a T-shirt emblazoned with a broom in a circle with a slash across it. The caption reads: "Sunnyside, Clean Up Your Act."

On a construction site in town, three non-Hispanic workers taking a lunch break disagree with each other about what to call what happened. "It's what the high-school wrestlers do to people on the team - it's initiation," says one.

But when another calls it "one little incident," he interrupts. "It is rape," he admonishes.

"I think the coaches should all be fired," says Greg Smith, a contractor and father of two, eating lunch in The Pub on the city's main street. "I think the wrestling team should be suspended indefinitely until it's been straightened out."

As a father of two girls, Smith says: "You send your kid to school, you expect them to be safe."

He, too, is troubled by the unanswered question: "Why didn't one of them say something?"

Would his own children do that? "I just hope that I've brought them up a little better than that. That's not something you just sit around and watch somebody do.

"We're all trying to figure it out."

For both Hispanics and non-Hispanics, what happened has brought a deep feeling of regret. There's always been a lot of pride in this little town, residents say.

In The Skunk tavern, playing a game of pool after work, Gilbert Ramirez speaks for many parents when he says: "It's scary the way things are going."

He, too, once attended Sunnyside High School. "It kind of makes you feel ashamed now."