Trevor Garfield is an African Americans high school science teacher at Roosevelt Whitney High School, a high school in the Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Dennis Broadway, a gangster student to whom he had given a failing grade threatens to murder him, writing the number 187 (the California police code for homicide) on every page in a textbook. The administration ignores the threat, and Dennis ambushes Garfield in the hallway, stabbing him in the back and side abdominal area multiple times with a weapon.