Killing of Chester Jackson and Shooting at Murray–Wright High School

On April 16, 1987, a shooting occurred at Murray–Wright High School, a Detroit Public Schools secondary school in the city's Woodbridge neighborhood. According to contemporaneous reporting by James Risen of the Los Angeles Times, a student entered the school's parking lot around noon and shot 17-year-old Chester Jackson, a junior running back, in the head, killing him. The attacker then went into the school's gymnasium and shot 18-year-old Damon Matthews, a basketball player, in the face. An 18-year-old, Tomeka Turner, was also wounded, apparently in the school's corridors as the attacker fled the building. Matthews received treatment at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

The attacker was identified as Michael Schofield, who was 14 years old at the time of the crime. He was 15 at sentencing and was ordered to serve time in a juvenile correctional facility until he turned 19. Risen, writing for the Los Angeles Times News Service, described the shooting as the incident that put "most clearly into focus" a broader pattern of youth violence affecting Detroit at the time.

The 1987 shooting followed a separate violent incident at the school less than two years earlier: on October 18, 1985, during homecoming festivities, a car pulled onto the football field during a Public School League game between Murray–Wright and Northwestern High School, and one occupant fired a shotgun into a crowd of roughly 300 people, injuring seven, including six teenagers ranging in age from 13 to 19. All were treated at Detroit Receiving Hospital, and the suspects fled the scene.

In the aftermath of the April 1987 shooting, school officials closed Murray–Wright for two days and held special assemblies addressing school violence; officials reported that about half of the students who attended these assemblies did so with a parent, despite earlier concerns that few parents would attend.

Michael Schofield's history of violence did not end with his juvenile sentence. According to the Wikipedia summary of this case, Schofield killed four people on September 11, 2003, during an attempted robbery of a convenience store in Westland, Michigan, and then killed himself. A co-defendant in that 2003 crime, Leslie Gordon, was sentenced to life without parole.

This dossier is based on a Wikipedia article's historical summary of the school, which in turn cites contemporaneous news coverage. Two additional sources — a Los Angeles Times archive page and a Detroit News archive search link — are referenced by the Wikipedia article as corroborating sources but their text was not independently reviewed for this dossier; they are included here for completeness and further verification.