From the ugliness at S. Phila. High, a hero emerges

When Violet Sutton-Lawson saw what was happening in the South Philadelphia High hallway - an Asian student sprawled on the floor, being beaten by a mob - she didn't stop to think. She reacted.

Sutton-Lawson put her hands together like a swimmer on a platform, then dived into the crowd, her momentum propelling her through the mass of bodies and onto the boy on the ground.

She wrapped her arms around him, then glared up at the eight to 10 attackers.

"Get away! Get out!" she shouted. "Ain't none of you going to touch him!"

Sutton-Lawson, 58, looked so fierce that the assailants paused, taken aback.

In that moment, school police and staff arrived, pulling away the attackers and ending the assault. Sutton-Lawson helped the boy search for his glasses, which had been knocked off in the fray.

It was 12:31 p.m. Dec. 3.

Amid a day of terrible violence, Sutton-Lawson insisted on peace.

Two minutes after protecting the boy on the hallway floor, she again risked serious injury by using her body to shield a small group of Asian students from a larger crowd of African American assailants in the lunchroom.

"I can't worry about me when I see some children being torn apart," she said in an interview at her home. "I went right to the problem."

People who know her weren't surprised.

"That's Violet," said Joseph Ritvalsky, the retired principal of William Peirce Middle School, who worked with her there for more than a decade. "She's always been pro-child."

On Dec. 3, South Philadelphia High was convulsed by a daylong series of attacks that sent seven Asian students to hospitals. One youth's nose was broken so badly that he required two surgeries.

The incident spawned national headlines, a request from the Vietnam government that Vietnamese students be protected, and a federal civil-rights complaint from an Asian American legal group. The school district responded by adding security cameras, police officers, and staff training.

A long-awaited district report, issued last week, blames the violence on rumors that arose from an after-school fight the previous day, one of them that a disabled African American student had been beaten up by Asian youths. The inquiry cites race as a contributing factor in all the Dec. 3 attacks.

It notes that several adults in the school tried to stop fights and aid students, but describes Sutton-Lawson as particularly courageous. And it provides compelling accounts of her actions, captured by security cameras.

Sutton-Lawson is a not a prototypical hero.

She is a grandmother with an arthritic left knee, broad-shouldered but hardly imposing, standing only 5-foot-7. She is in her second year at Southern, as the school is known, working as a community-relations liaison, helping pregnant students and teenage mothers stay in school.

Fully 84 percent of the 1,000 students are classified as economically needy. The student body is about 70 percent African American, 18 percent Asian, 6 percent Hispanic and 5 percent white.

Sutton-Lawson, who is African American, said that in her job, and particularly on Dec. 3, she sees not color but children.

"All our kids are looking for is attention and love," she said. "They need it so badly."

On Dec. 3, Sutton-Lawson said, she was drawn from her basement classroom by a terrible noise. It wasn't a squeal, exactly - but clearly the sound of someone in pain, accompanied by shouts, screams, movement, and commotion.

When she first saw the boy on the floor, he was curled into a ball, knees at his chest, arms around his head, trying to pad the blows, she said.

She didn't know his name then, and doesn't know it now.

While she was protecting that student, others were moments from being attacked in the lunchroom nearby.

Up to 70 students surrounded a group of Asian youths in the lunch line, punching and kicking them in the head, back, hands, and arms, according to the district report.

Again Sutton-Lawson pushed into the scrum, standing between those who delivered the blows and those who absorbed them. She spread her arms wide, keeping the Asian kids behind her, thrusting her body forward toward the assailants.

"Don't touch him!" she shouted, pointing in turn at several people in the crowd. "Don't touch him! Touch me! I dare you! I dare you! I dare anybody to come over here!"

She said one of the attackers looked at her and said, "You're crazy."

The district report cites video footage:

"Ms. Lawson can be seen intervening by putting out her arms to protect the Asian students and yelling at the African American students to back down. They hesitated, then relented."

School police and staffers navigated through the crowd to reach her.

"The video shows Ms. Lawson leading Asian students out of the lunchroom," the report said.

Sutton-Lawson said it wasn't until she got home that evening that she stopped to consider how seriously she could have been hurt. She shook from the realization, knowing that Philadelphia teachers have been permanently injured by students.

"I was, 'Oh, Lord, I'm so glad I'm OK,' " she said. "I didn't get kicked, I didn't get punched, I didn't get spit on."

Sutton-Lawson works in a program called ELECT (Education Leading to Employment and Career Training). The job pays about $36,000 a year. She doesn't own a car, and notes that her home on Wharton Street, nine blocks from the school, needs work.

What her job offers, she said, is the important work of helping young mothers finish school. She figures if a student can get a diploma, she can always go to college later, even at age 30 or 40.

"She really helped me a lot," said Ashleigh White, 18, who is raising her 5-year-old son, Angelo. "Whatever problem I had, I could go to her and talk to her about it."

Cheryl Yancey-Hicks, assistant principal at Southern, said Sutton-Lawson works tirelessly to help children.

"If something needs to be done for students, she has always been the go-to girl," she said. "She will get the job done. She's all about saving souls."

She wasn't a bit surprised, Yancey-Hicks said, that Sutton-Lawson would put herself in danger to protect students. "If we could clone her and put her in every school . . . "

Sutton-Lawson is a mother of three, twice divorced and now single, a devout believer in God, an actress and a singer, liable at any moment to recite a passage of stage dialogue or break into a spiritual, self-authored song.

She has the voice of an angel.

And she believes in angels, that they are all around, helping people. And that they were with her on Dec. 3.

At school, she'll use her acting skills to change her voice and delivery according to the situation, one moment falling into street jive, in the next breath affecting the upper-crust tone of an aristocrat.

She graduated from Southern in 1969, worked in the retail business, pursued her singing career, and in 1992 took a job at Peirce school.

Ritvalsky, the retired principal, said Sutton-Lawson held the title of community-relations liaison - which meant she was his troubleshooter. If he needed someone to visit a student's home at 10 p.m., she went. And she went, he said, not only without complaint, but with a sincere desire to help.

The school, now closed, stood in a neighborhood called Devils Pocket, and it often lived up to the name, threatening to become a battlefield for warring girl gangs.

"At times, she was on the street corner, one group on one side and one group on the other," Ritvalsky said. "And as mad as they were with each other, they didn't want to mess with Violet. It was that force of personality."

She doesn't consider herself a hero. Last week she answered her door dressed in a plaid bathrobe and pink-striped flip-flops, surprised that a reporter would want to hear her story.

She said that on Dec. 3, when she reached the hallway, she recognized the boy on the ground. They had never spoken, but she knew his face. The next day, she was bothered that he didn't seek her out to say thank you.

But then she thought, What's the difference? She had helped, and that's what mattered. She was much more distressed, she said, by the ugliness of the violence.

"Every day I felt like crying," she said. "I found nothing but sorrow in my heart. Why can't we - like Rodney King said, a simple statement - why can't we all get along?"