By Alondra Martinez, Copy Editor
In the time span of two months, Holmes and the surrounding community were featured in three news reports by KENS 5, along with accompanying online articles, all of which have included elements and generalizations that have been challenged for accuracy by students, local businesses, and community members.
The first report appeared on Sept. 24, 2015 and covered the “Holmes Jinx Day” in which some Warren High School students wore offensive costumes stereotyping the Holmes student body. The second report appeared not long after, on Oct. 7 and stated that “rampant Holmes HS brawls” were causing “chaos” for nearby businesses and in the community. The most recent appeared on Oct. 29, after the Oct. 7 article met with pushback from campus and community members, covering “street fights” that feature a location down the street from campus at Ingram and Ingram Hill, near the McDonalds.
The articles were all filed by reporter Justin Bourke and featured on the KENS 5 nightly news broadcast as well as online at www.kens5.com. The presentation of these stories, some of the facts within the stories, and the overall treatment and characterization of the Holmes community by KENS 5, has many students and adult community members challenging KENS 5’s reporting and misleading characterizations.
Bourke’s first report, “Warren HS parents outraged over ‘demeaning’ display” aired and published on Sept. 24, covered the spirit day at Warren High School where some Warren students dressed as “cholos” and other class and racial stereotypes. The Warren “Jinx Day” occurred during their homecoming week before the football game against Holmes, and Warren students were supposed to wear Holmes’ school colors and t-shirts as a way to “jinx” Holmes before the football game. Instead, some Warren students wore the offensive costumes, despite Warren administrator warnings not to do anything demeaning.
KENS 5’s report on the story was titled and focused around the reactions of Warren parents, but failed to include any perspective from Holmes students and parents, the victims of the demeaning display. In the article, quotes only appeared from Warren junior Lee Shaffer and NISD spokesman Pascual Gonzales. Although Bourke says he spoke to Holmes students, the only time Holmes was shown in the report was in an exterior shot of the campus, and it included no reactions or comments from any Holmes students or community members.
Bourke was made available for an interview about the report, and he explained the decision to not include Holmes students or community members in that story.
“We focused on parent outrage because it was the [Warren] parents who reached out to us regarding that. It was parents who sent pictures from Twitter. It’s an interesting story because I don’t think any of the high school kids were particularly outraged by it. Most of the high school kids we spoke to about it, didn’t participate in it. I believe we went over to Holmes. Every time we do stories involving Holmes, we do go over there and try to talk to students,” Bourke said.
Without offering the perspective of Holmes students or community members, the report did not provide a defense or confirmation of the stereotypes presented about the Holmes community outside of Gonzales’ comments which were focused on how Warren administrators handled the event.
The next report involving the Holmes community originally aired and was originally posted online on Oct. 7 (Changes were made to the online article on Oct. 8, which altered the stated post time and date for the article in the dateline). The headline “Stores caught in ‘chaos’ from rampant Holmes HS brawls,” caused a controversy within the Holmes community, with students, teachers, and community members disputing the characterization and misleading nature of the report.
One of the people who contradicts the report is a business owner in the Village IV strip mall where the violence is said to have taken place.
The specific characterization of fights occurring at the strip mall direclty across from the main entrance to the campus being “rampant”, causing “chaos”, and even involving Holmes HS students is disputed by Abby Amparan, the manager of Connie’s Hair Stylists, one of the businesses in the strip mall referenced in the report.
“It’s always other people that come and start stuff,” Amparan said. “It’s always someone coming and picking on the kids at Holmes. I guess it has been severe situations that make it seem like it’s always going on. It’s honestly like one drastic thing every year that makes it seem like it’s always happening,” Amparan said.
Campus officer Chris Casias also disputed the characterization in the report that any fights in the vicinity of the school are “Holmes High School fights.”
“The majority of kids here are good kids. It’s a lot of kids that come from other schools to cause trouble,” Casias said.
The opening to the KENS 5 report stated that, “rampant brawls have shattered windows and spilled into their stores.”
The specific event that is being referenced by the report happened three to four years ago. Now, there are little to no fights happening in the Village IV strip mall, involving Holmes students or others.
Campus officer Adam Dominguez also disputed the characterizations made in the article about the scale of the “rampant brawls” which KENS 5 stated is causing “chaos”.
“I don’t think there has been anything as big as the article cites, but I’m glad they have security working there to keep the community safe,” Dominguez said.
Another of the four businesses in the strip mall referenced in the report disputed the characterizations made in the report about Holmes’ relationship to the past events in the area.
“They are exaggerating in the stories. These are good kids,” La Corona’s employee Laura Montes said.
With the report characterizing violent “brawls” across the street as “Holmes HS fights” coming only 13 days after the initial report about the Jinx Day at Warren where Holmes students were presented as “cholos” and “thugs”, Bourke stated that the Warren Jinx Day and the Holmes HS brawls reports had nothing to do with each other and were not connected. Bourke says the tip for the article came from a random conversation with a Bexar County Sheriff Lieutenant.
“The story regarding the Holmes fights; we were out there in the area for a completely different story and randomly had a conversation with the Bexar County Sheriff Lieutenant who was patrolling that area. He told us just in conversation that fighting had been a problem three to four years ago, and that’s when he got over there in the parking lot,” Bourke said.
While in his interview with the Gavel staff Bourke stated that the Bexar County Sheriff Lieutenant whom he spoke with about the fights mentioned that they occurred three to four years ago, neither the article nor the broadcast by KENS 5 mentioned this fact. No time frame was reported, and in the news broadcast, anchor Deborah Knapp introduced the story with the statement, “It sounds like this has become a chronic issue.” The characterization of the event that occurred three to four years ago as “chronic” and “rampant” by KENS 5 is misleading according to the timeline in which they actually occurred.
“This was honestly about two or three years ago. Now it’s better. Two months ago, there was a beginning of a fight, but that’s it,” Amparan said.
In the report on the “brawls”, the only quoted source about the fights was the son of the owner of Star Nails, Daniel McGrath, a former Warren High School student.
The sole source quoted about the fights by KENS 5, McGrath claimed they began after students displaced from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 arrived at Holmes.
“The time that I saw the three fights I went outside and talked to a kid and asked, ‘Man why are there so many fights going on?’ He told me at Holmes in the bathrooms all the kids that are here are talking about the Katrina kids, and the Katrina kids were talking all over the walls about the other kids. All the kids were beefing against each other, so that’s why there’s been so many fights,” McGrath said.
Bourke confirmed that almost all of his other sources had the fight McGrath described as occurring three to four years ago.
“We talked to the employees and the owners of the stores. Only one of the employees in one of those stores would actually go on camera, but we spoke to all of them off camera. They all said the same thing, which was three to four years ago it was a big problem,” Bourke said.
The fight which McGrath describes in detail in the KENS 5 report happened at least three to four years ago by most accounts.
“They mentioned one particular fight where the student’s head was put through one of the glass windows. We weren’t there, but we confirmed the story with a number of people,” Bourke said.
This fight from three to four years ago was the main incident referenced in the KENS 5 report, which characterized fights such as these as “rampant” and “chronic” as well as labeling them as “Holmes HS fights”. McGrath recounted the fight’s events, as he saw them, including the fact that he wasn’t sure if those involved were students.
“That day, whenever that happened, there were these three kids, older kids, well I don’t even know if they were kids, but I’ve never seen them before. All three of them beat up this little kid that went to Holmes,” McGrath said.
McGrath went on to describe how the window of Connie’s Hair Stylist was broken during the fight. Both McGrath and Amparan confirm that this fight from three to four years ago was the reason on-site security was hired.
“Until we went to the district, they wouldn’t do anything. My mom complained to the people here and she would say ‘You guys don’t do anything’. It wasn’t until after they slammed the window that she said, ‘I’m going to call the news and make this company look bad.’ That’s when the actual owner came, which was a shocker because he’s on the other side of the world. He came here and they brought the news and he said, ‘That’s it, we’re going to bring security for you guys, but we got billed for security and it was a lot of money,” Amparan said.
The employees told them that security stopped the fights in Village IV, but not in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Another point in the article that students and community members have suggested is misleading came, again, in the form of a lack of accurate representation of Holmes students by KENS 5.
For the Holmes HS brawls article, Bourke says he spoke to every student who walked across the street that day and none of them expressed interest in watching or promoting the fights.
“We told the district we would be outside the school and we simply talked to every student that came by. None of the kids we spoke with had any interest in fighting,” Bourke said.
However the only student interviews KENS 5 showed in the airing of the story portrayed the opposite. The only students that were shown in the broadcast, were students who showed interest in watching and encouraging the fights.
Though their identities were protected, the only students quoted in the report contradict Bourke’s admission that the majority of students KENS 5 interviewed that day showed no interest in the fights. The student interviews that appeared in the report included a quote from a young man describing how word of fights spread, and then a small group of two to three students laughing who said, “Why wouldn’t you watch a fight?”, and “Yeah. They’re exciting.”
In an apparent effort to correct that, by the next day, two changes were made to the online article, but without noting that the original article was changed with a standard posting of “correction” or “clarification” at the end of the article.
The first change was a quote that was from Gonzales explaining why students would gather to watch fights, saying, “It’s like watching a train wreck.”
According to Bourke, this was changed because Gonzales told him that he didn’t like that quote and wanted a different one.
The other item that was inserted after-the-fact was a one-line sentence added acknowledging the majority views of Holmes students that were interviewed, reading, “The majority of students Eyewitness News spoke with had neither knowledge of, nor interest in fighting.”
Bourke explained the rationale for the changes.
“I talked to Pascual [Gonzales] after the story aired and he wasn’t happy with the quote that we had picked and I told him that we were happy to change it out for another one. We weren’t trying to make the district look bad or the school. Pascual and the district as a whole have been amazing with us, really bending over backwards to help us get our stories on a weekly basis, so we were happy to make that change. We didn’t think it took anything away from the story,” Bourke said.
A little more than three weeks after this article was posted and then changed, a third story was reported by Bourke as a follow-up about the alleged fights in the community surrounding Holmes.
Posted and aired on Oct. 29, the article “‘It’s horrifying’: San Antonio street fights gaining online notoriety,” focused on YouTube videos of street fights in San Antonio, with Bourke reporting on location just down the street within a mile from campus near the McDonalds on Ingram Hill. Similar to the report about the “rampant Holmes HS brawls”, the video displayed screen captures of YouTube videos of fights.
In both reports, no dates are reported for when the videos were posted on YouTube, nor is there confirmation of their locations. According to Gavel staff research, the videos used in the “rampant brawls” report were originally posted at least three to four years ago, and it’s unclear if any of them are in identifiable areas such as the Village IV strip mall.
The videos used for the Oct. 29 report also go without note of their actual posting date, and while other clips are shown, the report focuses on what Bourke calls “the biggest” of “a number of fight videos from all over the city.” That video appears to take place near the McDonalds on Ingram Hill, some time in 2011.
“The reason we focused on that fight was because it was the only fight that was at a location that was distinct enough for us to find it. Most of the videos, we found they were in back yards or really indistinct areas, like a McDonald’s parking lot. This one was very easily identifiable, so we said okay, it’s near the area of Holmes High School,” Bourke said.
Gavel staff members conducted an identical search on YouTube of “San Antonio Street Fights”, and found videos of fights clearly and identifiably taking place outside of the Holmes HS area.
The first video that appears in the list is titled “San Antonio Street Fight Knockout at McDonalds” with the location clearly labeled in the description as the McDonalds on Marbach and Loop 410. There are others located in iconic, identifiable San Antonio areas including a more recent fight right outside of the famous Mercado in Market Square in downtown San Antonio. Throughout all of this, the impression of the Holmes community has stayed the same for some people.
Additionally, the only YouTube video used in the report that shows the title and description of the video along with the content, is the only video that has Holmes High School in the title.
While the recent reports by KENS 5 show the Holmes community as a place where students engage in “rampant brawls” and “street fights,” most who come in contact with Holmes students maintain a positive impression.
“Personally, it’s Holmes. It’s good. I love Holmes. I do think that there are a lot of the other kids that come and try to pick on them. I don’t think it’s a bad school, I really like it,” Amparan said.
Bexar County Juvenile Probationary Officer Gilbert Perez works with students on campus every day. Perez knows the students and has experience with both the good and the bad that happens around the community.
“I agree with Pascual [Gonzales], there is no school that doesn’t have fights. I don’t think because of a few individuals Holmes should be generalized,” Perez said.
While the public perception of the Holmes community is influenced by news reports and stereotypes, when individuals interact with students, they often have a different impression.
“If I’m being honest, we spoke with a number of Holmes kids and they all were wonderful, nice, bright kids,” Bourke said.