Students Say They Hustled Drugs to Please New School ‘Friends’

When he started high school in Huntington Beach this year, Jason Corbin was just another frightened freshman.

But after a senior named Steve befriended him, the 15-year-old student at Ocean View High School felt his status suddenly rise. Here was a senior, talking to him and giving him occasional rides home in his pickup truck.

“I thought it was pretty cool because I could hang out with the older kids,” Corbin said.

The friendship continued for several days, with Steve never asking anything in return for the rides he gave Corbin. Steve finally made one request: Could Jason get him some cocaine?

Eager to accommodate the senior because “you usually be cool to your friends and stuff,” Corbin arranged through an acquaintance to sell Steve half a gram of cocaine for $60.

At the crack of dawn two weeks later, two uniformed officers from the Huntington Beach Police Department showed up at Corbin’s front door. With an arrest warrant in hand, they slapped handcuffs on him as his two brothers, ages 5 and 6, looked on.

Bleary-eyed from sleep and clad only in gym shorts, Corbin was whisked away as his frantic mother read a note from the officers stating that her son had been arrested as part of an undercover operation at his high school.

As it turned out, “Steve” was an undercover agent for the city police and was one of four operatives who posed as students in a joint anti-drug effort by police and the Huntington Beach High School District. Corbin was one of eight students arrested Nov. 12 for allegedly selling small amounts of cocaine and marijuana to the agents.

The students all face expulsion hearings Friday before a school district panel. None has been allowed to return to school since the arrests, and most are attending alternate, remedial schools.

Five of the eight students face trial Jan. 25 on their criminal charges, which carry a maximum penalty of probation until age 18 and a one-month incarceration. A sixth student--the only adult--is awaiting an unscheduled preliminary hearing date. A seventh has pleaded guilty, and the eighth was convicted in a trial before a juvenile court judge.

Deputy Public Defender Carol E. Lavacot, who is representing Corbin and two other youths, said all eight of the students have told essentially the same story: that they were befriended by an undercover agent and enticed into selling drugs.

Lavacot said that she is using entrapment as a defense and that she is attempting to persuade the court to drop the criminal charges and place the juveniles on informal probation.

Lavacot, along with parents of the three youths she is representing, fiercely denounced the undercover tactics, saying the students were only “kids” responding to peer pressure from the agents.

Besides Corbin, another freshman at Ocean View also became befriended by “Steve” and sold him drugs when he requested it, Lavacot said.

And a 17-year-old student, whose mother asked that he not be identified by name or school, sold a bag of marijuana to a new girl in his class whom “he fell in love with,” Lavacot said. The girl turned out to be an undercover agent who said she was new in the school.

“He was in tears in my office, more from her disappearing from his life than from the drug charges and expulsion,” Lavacot said. “He was in love with her. The thing that bothers me is what is this going to do to this young man and his relationship with girls?”

Huntington Beach Police Capt. Bruce Young agreed that the youths arrested in this sting were not major criminals and represented only a periphery of the drug world. And he said he was not surprised that some parents are critical of his department’s operation.

But Young added that parents often are the last to know when their youngsters are using drugs. And he said it is his department’s responsibility to enforce the drug laws in any way it legally can.

Police Objective

“Our object is to terminate drug sales on campus, period,” Young said.

Young denied that entrapment was involved in any of the cases, and said that the undercover operatives--all of them 19-year-old police cadets--were counseled beforehand on the law and what they could do and could not do.

“They were to make themselves available (for drug sales),” Young said.

Young said he also does not hold much sympathy for the boy who sold drugs to the female operative because she was pretty.

“Well, there’s a lot of pretty females on campus, and the suspect could have sold to any one of them,” the captain said. “How about another pretty female who asks for drugs?”

Lawrence Kemper, superintendent of the 16,000-student school district, staunchly defended the operation, which was requested by the district.

“Substance abuse is a very substantial problem in our society and . . . we have an obligation to cooperate with law enforcement agencies to eradicate abuse,” Kemper said, adding, “I empathize” with the parents of the arrested students.

Parents’ Concerns

The school district’s empathy came as little consolation to the parents, who say their children may suffer long-term damage.

“It’s cruel what they did to him,” Dawn Corbin, 30, said of her son, Jason. “They used him because he’s young, naive and gullible. He did wrong, there’s no question about that. But I’m sorry, Jason is not the big drug dealer at Ocean View. He’s just a kid three months at the school.”

Mrs. Corbin, a housewife from Westminster, said Steve was a real “ego booster” for her son as well.

“This guy was like God to Jason,” she said.

The mother of the 17-year-old boy who fell in love with a female agent expressed outrage at both the school district and Police Department.

“I think this was the ultimate peer pressure and he unfortunately responded to it,” the mother said, trying to control the anger in her voice. “My son never sold drugs before. The circumstances would never, ever have come up if he had not been approached by that girl.”

The mother said that she had just moved her family from one part of Huntington Beach to another and that her son was forced to transfer in his senior year to another high school within the district.

Ride in Sports Car

On his first day, lonely and afraid in his new surroundings, the boy met a “beautiful” girl purporting to be “Lindsey” who also was supposedly new in school, the mother said. Lindsey took him to lunch the very next day in a sports car.

“He was wooed and wowed by her,” the boy’s mother said. “She was a very flashy girl with a flashy car.”

A few days after they met, the girl told the boy that she “desperately needed” some marijuana but did not know where to find it at her new school, the mother said.

“My son said he thought he’d do her a favor,” the mother said. “He went out and got her a bag for $30. He didn’t even make money.”

The boy was arrested a few weeks later and, like the other juveniles, was held in the Juvenile Hall facility in Orange for nearly two days until released to his parents.

“What we’ve got here is a dumb kid who thought this girl was really something,” said his mother. “He made a foolish mistake. My son had never been in trouble, had never been truant and had good grades. But now his life is all messed up. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Mary Robarge, mother of a 14-year-old Ocean View freshman who also sold drugs to “Steve,” said her son looked forward to graduation in three years and then college. But with the stigma of this arrest and the fact that he may have to sit out a year from regular school, Robarge said her once-enthusiastic son has turned sullen and rebellious.

“They shot down all of his dreams, is what they did,” said Robarge, 31, a widow from Huntington Beach who supports three children on a Social Security income.

Robarge said her son met Steve his first week at high school and that the older student “buddied” up to him. Robarge said her son gushed about his new friend when he returned home.

“He said, ‘Mom, I met this new kid at school and he’s really neat,’ ” Robarge said. “My boy just idolized the kid.”

Steve took the boy out for rides in his truck after school, and within a few days of their first meeting, asked if the freshman could find him some cocaine, Robarge’s son said.

“I got him a tiny bit, (but) I didn’t sell it,” the freshman said. “I don’t do drugs, no. I’m not a drug dealer.”

A few weeks later, the boy was arrested at his home.

“They handcuffed him in front of his little sister, and he was crying,” Robarge recalled. “His sister asked, ‘Mommy, why are they taking my brother?’ ”