Complaint About Tragic Party Raises Its Own Questions

“It was like Macbeth,” the actor down the street was saying. “Everything was lined up, the way things are in tragedies.”

Alan Echeverria leaned against a parked car. The neighbors with him shot each other meaningful glances. “The history was lined up. And then somebody called LAPD.”

This was the other day on the little street that made big news this past weekend, the street on which a Halloween party ended with a promising actor’s being shot to death by panicked police. It’s one of those rustic lanes that wind up behind Beverly Hills into the canyons. Yoakum Drive, its name is, but some of the locals call it “Camp Yoakum.” Bougainvillea cascades down the hillsides. The pickups of prop men alternate with the BMWs of lawyers. There’s no sidewalk; million-dollar garage doors open right up onto the blacktop. The road is so narrow that, in some spots, two cars can’t pass unless one pulls over. This, perhaps, would account for the preponderance of signage: “No Parking.” “Slow! Children At Play!”

Echeverria and his neighbors were sharing a story. They were outside the big blue turreted house where the shooting happened, speaking in hushed tones. They needn’t have bothered. The stricken young host of the party had gone running a half-hour before, sprinting as if his life depended on it. There was no one home at “the Castle,” as it’s been dubbed, just an old suit of armor at the stained glass window. Still, this wasn’t easy to say out loud.

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“See, this isn’t the first time,” Echeverria said. “This isn’t the first set of tenants. The first ones had this after-hours thing. This was two summers ago, something like that.”

“Horrid people,” recalled Nancy Clement.

“Awful,” agreed Deborah Mueller, petting her dog, Woodshop.

“I went outside one night and some guy had passed out in my driveway,” remembered Echeverria. There were drugs, they said, and beer bottles and bare-chested hookers and people throwing up in the ivy every weekend. This in a neighborhood where the homes are so close, one man’s property line is another man’s side entrance. As a result, they said, the neighborhood banded together. The homeowners association in Benedict Canyon hooked them up with the LAPD.

The police offered phone numbers, they said. Whom to call about blocked driveways, whom to call about noisy parties. “They said, ‘We can’t tell you what to say, but if you think somebody’s prowling on your property, that’s a higher priority,’ ” Mueller recalled. Action was taken, and taken; the authorities were called on every conceivable violation. The bad tenants were driven out and replaced with quieter, and still quieter renters. But the aggressive vigilance, many neighbors now say, didn’t stop.

Iva Frank, a physician’s wife who eventually left the block, said parking enforcers continued to materialize for infractions by any household. Notes would be left on the windshields of visitors. When the second bunch of tenants at the Castle had some friends over for the Super Bowl, she said, someone complained about the volume of the TV.

“Certain people,” said Echeverria, “used those complaints to empower themselves.”

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Los Angeles is--famously--two cities, one hard and lethal, one as suburban as a school zone full of picky parents in SUVs. Yoakum Drive is that latter Los Angeles. The tenants giving the Saturday party behaved accordingly.

As has been reported, they followed every tenet of party diplomacy. They hired shuttles. They invited the neighbors. They shelled out several thousand dollars for a loft to which to move the party after 12:30 a.m. Karen Roberts, who lives across from the Castle, said the host met specially with her and two other neighbors whose homes were closer than most to the action. She said she, herself, wasn’t bothered; she fell asleep with earplugs and didn’t awaken until after police had arrived.

But someone--the police won’t say who--called in a noise complaint, right after midnight. LAPD Sgt. John Pasquariello said the call came in around 12:15 a.m. Though it was purely a noise call and the squad cars took more than a half-hour to get there, the neighbors have latched onto the timing. “It means,” said one anguished homeowner, “that somebody was sitting on the clock, waiting to make that call that should never have been made.”

And therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare said in another sad story. “That police officer,” said Mueller, “did what he was trained to do by LAPD.” Character--institutional character, in this case--was destiny. But what of the character of the caller? Of the suburb? Of intolerance? Of all of the other players in this tragedy?

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.