Today’s Topic

When parents sent their teen-agers off to a party a generation ago, they worried about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Today’s parents have graver concerns. Sending a child to a high school party these days can be deadly.

Sadly, that’s what happened June 5 in posh San Marino when gang members toting semiautomatic weapons crashed a party, shooting and killing two teen-agers while wounding seven other people.

In today’s Youth Opinion, high school students--some from San Marino--talk about flyer parties and the loss of innocence from killings that happen in their neighborhoods.

When a tragedy such as the San Marino killings occurs, the questions that follow are inevitable: Who is to blame? How could this happen? How can we prevent this from ever happening again?

Some of the blame apparently goes to flyers, printed invitations to the party. Flyer parties are nothing new. Someone decides to throw a party, presumably to earn some money, so they distribute flyers to a few hundred of their closest friends.

Admission is a few dollars, sometimes there is a charge for drinks. There is usually little or no control over who walks through the front door. So, if armed and angry gang members show up, as they sometimes do, the flyer party becomes a Molotov cocktail ready to explode.

In the strictest sense, San Marino officials say, the June 5 party was not a flyer party. The youngster giving the end-of-the-school-year bash apparently distributed only a limited number of flyers to his friends.

“It wasn’t really the flyers that brought the problem on,” San Marino Mayor Bernard Le Sage says. “The problem was that the flyers got into the wrong hands.”

That is the problem with flyer parties, says Jodi Stout-Ward, whose son, Ty Stout, was killed Dec. 8, 1990, at a flyer party in Yorba Linda.

“I would advise any parent whose child wants to attend a flyer party to investigate immediately,” Stout-Ward says. “Kids have these parties to make money. They actually hope the police will break them up before the party is over so they’ll have collected the admission fee, but they’ll still be left with all the liquor.”

“There is a total lack of control and there’s no accountability, Stout-Ward adds. “When we went to parties, we knew the people who were there. There is a certain accountability in friendship.”

What bothers many people is the apparent lack of accountability--not only on the part of the youngsters throwing such parties--but by the adults who allow these parties to take place.

“I get a real sense that many young people are not supervised very well by any parental leadership,” says Stanley Moore, a political science professor at Pepperdine University who notes that more than 55% of California’s children are raised in single-parent homes.

“For many of these young people, they don’t have a great deal of hope,” Moore says. “They are looking for constant entertainment. These parties play some role in meeting those kinds of needs.”