Community Beset by Tragedies : Palisades High Counts Its Dead and Wonders Why

Some brought flowers and others scribbled notes saying “We love you” and placed them at the base of the battered coral tree on San Vicente Boulevard in Santa Monica. Billy, a 16-year-old Palisades High School student, brought a T-shirt from a concert of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band.

“It was Cal’s favorite group,” he said.

Days earlier, Calvin Hoftyzer, Lisa Goldberg, Russell Kantor and Reid Mangels, all 17, had been killed in a fiery crash when their 1985 Dodge Diplomat struck a light pole along the boulevard, veered across its park-like median and hit the coral tree at the intersection of 11th Street.

Three of the teen-age victims were seniors at Palisades High School. Since the accident Oct. 28, hundreds of their schoolmates, relatives and curiosity seekers have made a pilgrimage to the site of the crash.

For many in Pacific Palisades, an affluent community of rambling canyons and ocean-view estates that once was home to President Reagan, it is becoming an all-too-familiar ritual. In the last 16 months, 10 young residents of the community--seven of them students at “Pali High”--have suffered violent deaths, most involving alcohol or drugs.

Alarmed by the series of incidents, about 200 parents held a meeting earlier this year to discuss what was happening to their children. Students at the high school, in turn, have established a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, the only such group anywhere on a high school campus, a spokesman for the organization said.

“People are surprised that this has happened again, but I’m not,” said school psychologist Linda Levine. “These children are living in the fast lane.”

The number of deaths is unusual not only for a school in an affluent area, but for those in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by gang violence. Officials of several such Los Angeles-area high schools--Locke, Jordan and Compton--said they knew of no more than one death among their students over the same period.

Earlier Losses

The toll in Pacific Palisades, meanwhile, had been mounting well before the San Vicente Boulevard crash:

- Clinton D. Heilemann, a 15-year-old sophomore, was shot to death by a drifter after midnight on July 3, 1987, as he was drinking beer with a group of friends in a church parking lot.

- David deKernion, 17, who lived in the Palisades but attended a private school, was killed Nov. 7, 1987, when his car collided with another on Sunset Boulevard. DeKernion had been drinking, authorities said.

- Twelve days later, Michele Friedlander, 20, a recent graduate of Palisades High, was killed along with three companions when their car plunged over a cliff and into the ocean along the Pacific Coast Highway near Point Mugu. Friedlander was returning to UC Santa Barbara, where she was a sophomore.

- Alvaro Velasquez, 15, who had just transferred to the high school, was killed in a drive-by shooting March 25 in a West Los Angeles park. Police attributed the incident to gang rivalry.

- John Liberti, 19, a former student at Pali High who had been transferred to a “continuation school” for students having problems, was killed about 2 a.m. July 21 when he drove his car on the wrong side of Sunset Boulevard and collided with an oncoming vehicle.

- Jose Williams, 19, a senior, was shot to death by his grandmother in a family dispute in Venice on May 29.

- And, in a highly publicized incident, Teak Dyer, an 18-year-old senior, was found beaten and shot to death in a Pacific Palisades office building June 22, the eve of her graduation. Security guard Rodney Darnell Garmanian has been charged with her murder and rape. According to a toxicology report, Dyer had a .15% alcohol level and traces of cocaine in her system.

Palisades Principal Gerald Dodd said he is well aware of a “sickening feeling” around the school in the wake of the “unusual cluster of deaths,” but he downplayed the incidents as unrelated.

“It is more an unfortunate coincidence, but I don’t believe there is a sickness in this community,” he said.

To students, however, the events go beyond mere coincidence, according to psychologist Levine. The deaths have taken an emotional toll at the high school, she said, some students becoming physically sick while others have become hardened.

Levine said one student complained to her, “We must be jinxed. There is something wrong here.”

And she agrees that there is something wrong, with the root of the trouble being “a tradition in the community of celebrating everything with a drink. It is a community of drinkers.”

The night of the most recent tragedy, the four 17-year-olds attended an annual “Midnight Madness” celebration sponsored by Palisades merchants, who keep their doors open late and have sidewalk displays. Later, the teen-agers had dinner together.

A toxicology report released last week by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office said that Kantor, who was driving the car, had a .08% blood alcohol level, just below the state’s .10% standard of drunk driving for adults. Mangel’s blood alcohol level was .06% and Hoftyzer’s was .13%. No test was conducted on Goldberg.

High-Powered Car

Friends said Kantor, the son of prominent Westside attorney and Democratic Party activist Mickey Kantor, had purchased the Dodge, a used Highway Patrol car, at a police auction. The car had a powerful V-8 engine, police said.

“If you were to see the vehicle (after the accident) you could tell they were traveling at a high rate of speed,” said Santa Monica Police Detective Phil Sanchez.

Levine said many of the students are simply following the life styles of their successful, driven parents. “These kids are not nerds. The nerds are not dying,” she said. “Raise your children to be nerds.”

The backgrounds of the latest victims reflect the makeup of Pacific Palisades. Three of the four were children of attorneys and the father of the fourth is a vice president of a uniform manufacturing company. Hoftyzer, Goldberg and Kantor attended Palisades High, while Reid, a former resident of the community, went to a private school north of San Francisco in Marin County.

In Pacific Palisades, with a population of 30,000, the median price of a home is $660,000, many children receive cars on their 16th birthday and the high school--which was the subject of the best-selling book “What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65”--is among the top academically in the Los Angeles Unified School District and also a power in such sports as tennis, swimming and volleyball.

Combination of Factors

Parents, students and teachers attribute the series of deaths to a combination of factors shared by many well-to-do communities--fast cars, young inexperienced drivers, late-night parties and alcohol and drugs.

Nationwide, however, deaths from teen-age drinking have been on the decline, according to the National Highway Safety Administration. The number of 15- to 19-year-olds killed in traffic accidents involving someone under the influence of alcohol dropped from 4,133 in 1982 to 3,259 in 1987.

In groping to explain why they might have a problem worse than in other areas, Palisades teen-agers complain that there is not enough for them to do, that the community’s small business district offers little for their enjoyment. “If we want to go to a movie, the closest is in Westwood,” a winding 7-mile drive away, one student said.

Most of the time, the young people wind up creating their own action. “Sometimes they will just find a quiet street up in one of the canyons, turn on their (car) loudspeakers and have a party,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Steve Cunningham, who has been on night patrol in the Palisades for two years.

“We have broken up parties where there are as many as 300 kids. Sometimes they hold the parties at homes when the parents are out of town. They bring alcohol, they bring drugs and then drive their cars.”

Youth Needs Cited

Joe Jelikovsky, a drug and alcohol counselor who has been trying to establish a teen center, says the “community has structured itself to meet the needs of adults, but has neglected the needs of the children.” Proposals to expand the Palisades YMCA or build centers for teen-agers have met with resistance because adults are worried about how they will affect property values or the environment of the canyons, he said.

Jelikovsky helped start a group called Alternatives to hold events for teen-agers at which alcohol is not served. The group was organized after the murder of Dyer, who was abducted after attending a graduation party.

The effort gained support from an editorial in the Palisadian-Post, a community newspaper, that criticized parents who permit alcohol to be served to minors.

“We have heard of teens being allowed to consume eight or nine beers each at an adult supervised party,” the editorial stated. “Some parents apparently think nothing of providing a case of liquor for their children’s enjoyment. As a result many teens are unable to get home after a party. Many parents solve that problem by inviting the drunken youngsters to ‘crash on the sofa.’ But what about the teens who refuse the invitation and stagger or, worse, drive home in a dangerous drunken state?”

It’s not that Palisades High has been unresponsive to national efforts to combat teen-age drinking. In addition to the weekly meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, begun in September, the school has drug prevention and safe rides programs, the latter providing transportation home, no questions asked, to students who may have had too much to drink.

Pessimistic Outlook

But with everyone growing weary of funerals and crash site memorials, there is some pessimism about such efforts these days.

In the aftermath of last month’s fatal accident, school officials called in six psychologists from the Los Angeles Unified School District to talk to students about their feelings.

“A lot of kids could be learning a lesson from this tragedy,” noted science teacher Nikki McDaniels, “but many seem to be laying wagers on who is going to be next.”

PTA President Sally Iorillo asked a representative of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to speak at the school after hearing reports that the response of some students to the four deaths was to say that they wanted to go out and get drunk. “That is not an appropriate reaction,” she said.

But there also was some second guessing about the fast-track life style last week when more than 400 students packed the Palisades High School auditorium for a remembrance ceremony for the victims. A large sign over the stage read, “Russell, Lisa, Cal, Reid We’ll Miss You.”

“Most students have just been sickened over the loss of four exceptionally bright children,” said Dodd, the principal. “Russell ran cross country, Cal was a swimmer and Eagle Scout and Lisa was in advanced placement art. They were all making plans to go to college.”

“It has been devastating,” said Andreas Wettstein, 16, a close friend of Russell Kantor. “It seems like death doesn’t bother you until it happens to someone you really know.

“Too many of my friends have died,” he said.