As students settled into their seats for a Martin Luther King Day assembly on January 12, 1995, a freshman was bullied by then-junior Hassan Coaxum into giving up the weed he was selling. The freshman left the assembly and returned to school during lunch with a nine-millimeter handgun. Upon finding Coaxum in the first-floor lunchroom, he chased him through the halls. As the chase played out through a packed entrance way, Coaxum and bystander Rachel Thompson (class of ’99) both received nonfatal gunshot wounds while the crowd scattered to safety.

The shooter, whose name remains unreleased because he was tried as a juvenile, fled Garfield only to be arrested at a nearby park.

After she recovered, Thompson went on to found Garfield’s first Students Against Violence Everywhere chapter. As of their first meeting on November 16, Garfield juniors Emerson North and Troy Osaki are reinstating the peace-promoting club after its long absence from Garfield High School.

North and Osaki are putting together a student-led organization to build awareness about youth violence and ways of combatting it across Seattle. Their goal to “deteriorate the current rise of youth violence,” is fairly unaddressed throughout Garfield’s student groups, but not unheard of to previous generations of Bulldogs.

According to both North and Osaki, the SAVE group that existed in the ’90s tried to address violence at the earliest age that it appears in kids’ lives. Members went downtown on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and passed out balloons with the words “Don’t buy your kids violent toys,” printed on them.

Osaki and North see the new SAVE as starting an assortment of projects, from holding community forums to sponsoring speakers, as well as holding benefit concerts.

“We think that by having this feeling of music, a community can come together against violence,” says Osaki.

Money from any concerts and fundraisers would probably be passed to local groups working to make mentors, college scholarships, tutors, sports and arts activities more available to kids who can’t normally access them.

Though they don’t have plans to spread their ideas to downtown shoppers as old SAVE did, both founders of the SAVE reincarnate agree that violent behavior is connected to the experiences people have before high school.

“Youth violence doesn’t just spring up; it starts with your toys,” says North.

The pair carry this theory to middle school, but think kids of that age can take prevention more into their own hands.

“We’d love to go to middle schools and talk, to have a forum on the cause of violence,” says Osaki. “Middle school is where a lot of violence starts. It’s where the actions get picked up.”

While the original instance of the now-national SAVE was first formed at a North Carolina high school in 1989, the catalyst for the current Garfield incarnation of SAVE came from ex-club-president Pam Eakes, a friend of North’s. Eakes’ suggestion to restart SAVE gave a tangible outlet to the ideas the junior already had about controlling violence among youth in Seattle.

“My real inspiration for starting SAVE was when Quincy got shot last year. I’d known him forever,” says North.

In early fall, as North asked fellow junior Osaki to help shape the club with him, the pair enlisted the efforts of Garfield counselor Samuel Labi as their advisor.

As a first public move, they settled on surveying Garfield students about their experiences with violence, with the goal of making the point that a hefty portion of kids are exposed to it in Seattle. Labi passed out surveys to students, with questions regarding what they’ve seen or witnessed, and what’s happened to them. The first official meeting was soon scheduled for November 16.

At their first meeting, well publicized via Facebook and word-of-mouth, around 22 students came to help decide how SAVE would work to prevent everything from hallway scuffles to violence on the scale of the deaths of Aaron Sullivan and Quincy Coleman. SAVE hopes to have future meetings every other week in a conference room adjacent to the Garfield counseling office, though they may move to a larger, more open space.

Though the methods and membership of SAVE are still being formed, everything they’re against is visible to most at Garfield.

On the day North, Osaki and I had set up to talk, we found each other in the commons halfway through lunch. A few seconds into a conversation, people began to rush over to the front hall as two girls exchanged punches, and the mass of the commons filled in around the pair. The two girls ran into the main office, followed by a running officer Bennie Radford, and faces press to the windows of the office only to be shooed away.