The problem with normal

Jackson had just reported to his probation officer at Dorchester District Court and was walking down Westville Street toward another building that was a constant in his life, the John Marshall Elementary School, when his assassin struck.

Make no mistake, this was an assassination, an execution. There were many shots fired, including a coup de grace, after Jackson fell.

Down the street, the kids and the teachers heard the shots, and someone ran by the school’s front door, a blur.

Phil Jackson died on Election Day, and, if not for that and the fact that he was shot less than a football field away from the front door of an elementary school in the middle of the day, his killing would probably have largely gone unremarked upon.

Jackson’s aunt was working at the polling station inside the school when workers heard the pop-pop-pop.

“She was the one who told us he had died; she got a phone call,’’ said Teresa Harvey-Jackson, principal of the Marshall.

Harvey-Jackson started working at the Marshall in 1989, the same year a fresh-faced little boy named Phil Jackson started walking the corridors.

“He was a good kid when he was here, a nice boy, polite,’’ Harvey-Jackson said. “I can’t speak to what happened when he became an adult.’’

What happened is that Phil Jackson got caught up in the street life that finally caught up to him on the corner of Westville and Bowdoin streets.

On Tuesday, the fifth-graders went to the Kennedy Library for a field trip. They had a great time and were all excited and they weren’t back in the school five minutes when the sound of gunfire bounced off the three-deckers on Westville.

Another class was on a field trip to the Blue Hills Reservation. They came back to find the street sealed off by yellow tape. They couldn’t get back to the school because it was in “safe mode,’’ the euphemism the bureaucrats came up with for lockdown.

“We usually have the doors locked during school, but because it was Election Day, anybody could be in here, and that made it more scary,’’ said Harvey-Jackson.

Yesterday, counselors Erin Collins and Mia Khera sat down with the kids and tried to reassure them that they were safe inside the school. That is demonstrably true, but the real world lurks right outside the heavy steel doors of the Marshall.

Two years ago, a Marshall grad named Nicholas Copeland was shot to death as he sat in a car in the school’s parking lot. Yesterday, his little brother was sitting inside the Marshall, trying not to remember.

All things considered, everything was back to normal at the Marshall yesterday.

And that’s the problem.

“This shouldn’t be considered normal,’’ said Patty Fenlon, an art teacher. “If this had happened in the suburbs, people would be falling over themselves to ask what they could do. What happened here? Nobody even called us, much less came by the school to see how everybody was doing, nobody in any position of authority. Thank God for our principal. We took care of the kids and ourselves, because we have to, because no one else is going to.’’

Not long after Phil Jackson’s body arrived at the morgue, his friends put up a street shrine to him at the corner of Bowdoin and Westville. Candles, prayer cards, the usual. It’s common in the city when someone poor dies by knife or gun or ignorance. But yesterday, it was gone.

“His family took it down,’’ Harvey-Jackson said. “They said the kids shouldn’t have to walk past that on the way to school every day, so they took it down.’’

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.