School officers lament girl’s death

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Friday, Feb. 13, 2004 | 11:24 a.m.

If Shadow Ridge High School had school police officers on duty at last week's talent show, would 16-year-old Adasha Edison still have fallen to her death while "surfing" on the roof of a friend's car in the campus parking lot?

That's a question Phil Gervasi, head of the school district police officer's union, said is haunting him.

"I cannot say if anything would have been different that night at Shadow Ridge, but wouldn't it have been great if Adasha would have looked over at the officer and made a different decision?" Gervasi wrote in a memo sent Monday to Schools Superintendent Carlos Garcia and School Police Chief Elliot Phelps.

The police officers' union has loudly protested what it sees as an insufficient budget for campus officers. School police are the lowest-paid law enforcement agency in Clark County, Gervasi said.

At a meeting two weeks prior to the accident, school police told Garcia, Phelps and other members of the district's senior administration that the practice of not having officers attend after-hours events was a recipe for disaster.

"We discussed that it is not what is going to happen but when it will happen," Gervasi said in the memo obtained by the Sun. "Adasha Edison paid the price with her life."

Edison, who would have turned 17 on Feb. 27, died at University Medical Center Saturday, two days after she fell from the roof of a friend's Chevy Blazer.

"Sometimes having a uniformed officer is all the deterrent kids need," Gervasi told the Sun in an interview Thursday. "We need to look at this tragedy as an opportunity to truly make student safety the district's top priority."

Phelps said Thursday he was investigating the situation but that the police department did not have enough officers to automatically attend every event in the district.

"We have 289 schools and 140 officers -- it's just not possible," Phelps said. "And this was a talent show, not a dance or a ball game. I don't think anyone could have predicted what would occur, and I'm not sure having a officer would have made any difference in this case."

Principals can request officers to attend events and in some cases arrange their own security, either hiring a private company or using campus monitors, Phelps said.

Shadow Ridge officials said this morning they were looking into whether extra security was on hand for the talent show.