The teacher and student who were shot in the parking lot of TechBoston High School on Tuesday evening were boarding a fan bus that was headed to the school’s State Tournament basketball game in Framingham – a game that was played despite the shooting incident two hours prior to tipoff.
While the 17-year-old student victim wasn’t identified, the Boston Teacher’s Union (BTU) confirmed in a statement that history teacher Kherson Bethel, 31, was shot as he and a group of others were boarding a fan bus to go to the basketball game.
The shooter is still at-large, the Boston Police said, and the investigation continues, but no new updates were shared by the police since Tuesday night.
It was not certain by Thursday if the team bus had already left the school when the fan bus was shot at, as Boston Police said they didn’t want to reveal details from the scene that could compromise witnesses. Regardless, the team continued to Framingham and played the game about two hours after the shooting occurred.
Teacher and assistant basketball coach Justin Desai tweeted that the entire school community was proud of the players for a “triumph of a different kind.”
“Championship level pride for Tech Boston Hoops and TechBoston student athletes last night,” he tweeted. “We were given the option to postpone. Players and coaches decided we wanted to play. Last night our kids fought through and fought on. Not a W, but a triumph of a different level.”
Sources indicated that the team knew about the incident and what happened and chose to play. The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletics Association (MIAA), coaches and referees gave the players an option to postpone, and they chose to continue with the game.
TechBoston lost to Watertown 59-50 in what was a state Final Four game.
The decision raises a larger question, say some experts in urban violence, about how such decisions are made and whether they contribute to normalizing very abnormal situations such as what happened Tuesday evening.
A recently launched collaboration called Transforming Narratives of Gun Violence (TNGV), which includes Emerson College, Mass General Hospital and Dorchester’s Louis Brown Peace Institute, said such a decision should be supported by best practices. There are situations, said Dorchester’s Rachele Garden, who represents Emerson on TNGV, where it could be appropriate to play on, but a decision without proper guidance could be difficult for the kids over time.
“I can imagine circumstances in which either decision might be the right one,” said Gardner. “But, I think the critical question is, how and by whom was the decision made? If it was made by coaches and players, did they have adequate support from trauma responders in making that decision?…If the team was expected to carry on as normal without acknowledgement of the trauma, then that is extremely problematic.”
She said a decision in concert with school and city leaders, particularly with trained professionals in the Boston Emergency Services Team (BEST) or the Boston Trauma Response Team, would likely be ideal. That, she said, would be a different story if that was done and everyone saw power in overcoming the incident by playing on.
“Part of TGVN is looking at the root causes and rippling effects of violence, not just focusing on the gun and the crime scene,” she said. “Among the rippling effects is the normalization of violence for youth in our neighborhoods. To what extent are they expected to continue on with life as usual in the face of traumatic events and what is being done to make space for them to process and heal, especially when violence seems to occur so frequently?”
Both victims of the shooting were transferred by ambulance from the scene with serious, but not life-threatening injuries.
