Officials’ Approval of ‘Rave’ Event Criticized : Deaths: Forest Service OKd huge party after which five were killed in a car crash leaving remote mountain site.

Government authorities Monday were divided over whether an all-night “rave” concert should have been allowed in a remote part of Angeles National Forest, where five departing youths were killed when their car plunged off an embankment.

The dead were identified as five friends from San Bernardino, including a 15-year-old girl and an 18-year-old who was celebrating her birthday. At least three of the victims had attended the party without their parents’ knowledge, family members said.

The fatalities continued a string of deadly Southern California incidents related to rave events, dances that draw thousands of young people to nightclubs, warehouses and open deserts.

Officials stressed that there is no evidence linking the accident to drugs. But partygoers and law enforcement authorities said that drug use can be widespread at raves, and there were several overdoses at Saturday’s event, which drew 5,000 young fans up winding roads to an Angeles National Forest ski resort.

As the tragedy weighed on family members and fellow students of the victims, some officials questioned why any government agency would permit such an event.

“Why would you allow this on our public lands?” said Barry Nelson, chief ranger of the federal Bureau of Land Management in San Bernardino County, which manages desert lands. “In essence, what [a rave] is, as far as law enforcement is concerned, is an outdoor drug-fest.”

Nelson, who works with a multi-agency task force set up to combat raves, said the BLM routinely rejects requests to hold such parties or all-night events in the desert.

Some criticized the U.S. Forest Service, which issued a permit for the event and will reap a portion of the revenue generated.

“Why is a government agency sanctioning this?” said one county official who had been at Sunday’s crash scene. “I think that it’s just insane that the Forest Service would let [rave promoters] operate under a permit.”

A spokeswoman for the Forest Service said the agency was not aware that the party at the Snowcrest Snow Park ski resort would be a rave.

“What was billed here was a music event with deejays,” said Gail Wright, spokeswoman for the Forestry Service. “This is a music-centered activity that is legally permitted. I believe we were convinced that the permittee could control the crowd.”

She said 4,800 tickets were sold at $30 each, and the Forest Service will receive 2% to 3% of the ski resort’s portion. It was not clear late Monday how much that would total.

Even if officials knew Saturday’s event was a rave, Forest Service Deputy Supervisor Susan Swenson said, the agency might have been accused of discrimination if it had rejected the event solely on that basis.

Interviews and records indicate that the agency should not have been surprised that the concert was a rave. There have been several raves in recent years at the same site, including one about a month ago at which at least one drug overdose victim had to be airlifted out by medical teams, according to the resort operator.

Forest officials also met with the promoter before Saturday’s event, and California Highway Patrol officers identified the party as a rave as they figured how to provide traffic control, interviews and records show.

Paperwork provided by the Forest Service on Monday showed the CHP estimated that it needed a sergeant, five officers and three vehicles to “provide traffic control for a ‘rave’ party” at the resort.

A CHP spokesman also said that the CHP had suggested to the Forest Service that the ski report was “not the safest place” for such an event. But the spokesman, Sgt. Ernie Sanchez, said the rave was on federal land and that his agency had no authority to stop it.

The warning of problems came true about 7:30 a.m. Sunday as the revelers began heading home. A Toyota Camry carrying the five friends went off a curve east of the ski resort, plunging down a 1,200-foot canyon.

The dead were identified as Leah Marie Feldhaus, 15; Nicole Marie Martell, 17; Matthew Paul Lopez, 18; Carissa Marie Castaneda, 18; and Sharon Patricia Bjornstad, 18. All were from the San Bernardino area, and three were to have begun classes Monday at Colton High School.

Castaneda, who turned 18 Saturday, graduated from Colton High in June. She was to start classes at Riverside Community College on Wednesday.

“It was all she could talk about,” her mother, Diana, said Monday. “She was so excited about starting college.”

Diana Castaneda and her husband, Randy, said that their daughter had spent the day celebrating with them, and that Carissa said only that she was spending the night with a friend when she left that evening.

They said Carissa went to the home of her friend, Feldhaus, about 9:30 p.m. They were looking forward to her return Sunday morning.

“If we knew where she was going to go, we wouldn’t have let her,” Randy Castaneda said.

“We kissed her goodbye Saturday night. And that’s the lesson for all parents: Always hug and kiss your kids when they leave the home,” he said. “And tell them to be careful.”

Outside the nearby home of Lopez, another Colton High student killed in the crash, were two easels holding various photographs and tributes--and a collage of snapshots that Lopez had received from his girlfriend, Sharon Bjornstad, who died with him Sunday morning.

At the base of the easels were flowers and the burned remains of candles, left there from an impromptu vigil Sunday night. Inside the home, Lopez’s parents, Richard and Maria, were surrounded by their three other children--all older than Matt--and some of Matt’s closest friends.

They pored over photographs laid out on the dining room table. There was more laughter than tears, recalling Matt’s life as a free spirit.

“His friends would come to him for advice and counseling,” said Richard Lopez. “He would bring peace to any environment. He was a peacemaker.”

The five youths were riding in Bjornstad’s car, and her parents assume she was behind the wheel when the vehicle crashed. A witness had told police the car was not speeding and did not leave skid marks before nose-diving down a deep ravine.

Bjornstad’s father, Ray, knew Sharon had attended rave parties and was headed for one Saturday night. And he had agonized over how much freedom to give her.

“If I had to do it over again, I’d have kept her at home,” he said Monday. “But it’s so hard to hold them in. When you get to be 18, you’re such a free spirit.

“I wish I hadn’t let her be so free. I should have held her back.”

Martell, 17, a straight-A student, had begun her senior year at Aquinas High School in San Bernardino just last week.

“Because of her volleyball skills, 10 colleges were looking at her,” said her grandmother, Mary Wallace.

The family of Feldhaus, the 15-year-old, declined to comment.

The deaths stunned the school, where two of the victims, Bjornstad and Feldhaus, worked on the student paper, the Pepper Bough. A crisis response team counseled about 150 students, some so upset they asked to be excused, said Cheryl Donahue, a spokeswoman for the school district.

Officials stressed that it will be weeks before routine drug toxicology tests on the victims are completed.

But some witnesses said that use of drugs popular with rave fans--Ecstasy and LSD--was widespread at the event, adding to the questions confronting authorities.

Paramedics said they treated several overdose victims Saturday.

Los Angeles County Fire Capt. M. Ponder, the incident commander at the ski resort Saturday, said all the raves he has dealt with in the Angeles National Forest have been held at Snowcrest.

“Whenever they have them, we’re there,” he said, meaning that paramedics are always called in to deal with drug overdoses, asthma attacks, seizures and minor injuries. “I see it as a problem.”

He said they had to airlift out four overdose victims Saturday night and Sunday morning.

He described the scene as a lot of “half-wasted kids dancing” and walking in the streets.

Officials with the promoter of the event, B3 Cande Productions, could not be reached Monday.

The ski resort operator, Jackie Steely, said such summer events have been crucial to keeping her resort afloat financially.

And she insisted there was a high level of security and extensive searches of arriving teenagers to keep out drugs and alcohol.

“They’re not even allowed to bring in water. . . . They usually are very, very safe events,” Steely said.

She said she had been “happy to provide a safe environment for these kids,” because many raves operate illegally without security. She acknowledged that some drugs were apparently smuggled into the event Saturday, but insisted that such problems only involved a fraction of the fans attending.

Former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer Trinka Porrata, one of the state’s leading experts on rave party drugs, said that even with security, fans manage to sneak in illegal substances.

She said girls hide small amounts of GHB, Ecstasy and LSD in their bras. Young men may hide it in their underwear, or in small breath-drop bottles.

“The reality is [security guards often] don’t know what they are looking for, other than the obvious,” she said.

Sunday’s deaths continued a recent spate of fatalities surrounding raves, which are promoted on the Internet and in fliers handed out at clubs.

In March near Walnut, two teenage girls were killed and two others were injured when their car hit a tree while they were driving home from a rave, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials said. Police found open containers of alcohol in the trunk, but attributed the accident to exhaustion induced by Ecstasy.

Near Palm Springs last summer, a 24-year-old man died after apparently walking off a cliff under the influence of several hallucinogens during an all-night rave in the Mojave Desert.

And in another case last year, a 25-year-old man was arrested and accused in federal court of illegally manufacturing GHB and selling it at rave parties he produced near Joshua Tree National Park, just outside Palm Springs. A 15-year-old boy died after ingesting the drug, sold in small water bottles. Several others were hospitalized.

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Times staff writers Karen Alexander, Carla Rivera and Tony Olivo also contributed to this story.