Isla Vista Faces a Sobering Reality

Arianna Paine’s partying in this community next to UC Santa Barbara came to an end the night she swigged half a bottle of Southern Comfort and fell off a 35-foot seaside cliff. Lying face down in the sand, with a swarm of tiny sand crabs jumping all over her, the 18-year-old quickly regained consciousness with the shooting pain of a broken leg, pelvis and tailbone.

Within weeks, the community college student moved back home to Sonoma, where she has remained since the incident a year and a half ago.

Like many others, Paine had loved this student community sequestered among eucalyptus groves on a coastal bluff west of Santa Barbara--the endless young people to meet, the carefree attitude. But it was too much in the end. “I have alcoholism in my family,” Paine said. “I was obviously over-drinking, and this just didn’t seem like the right place for me. It’s just chaotic.”

In ways that are usually less extreme, young people often go through this cycle of being drawn in and then turned off by the raucous aura of Isla Vista, known as the party town of the UC system. Every so often, an event will jar a student like Paine, or the whole community adjacent to UCSB, back to a more sobering reality.

Such was the case when freshman David Edward Attias allegedly floored his gas pedal, sent his Saab at more than 50 mph down a popular party street on Feb. 23 and veered into a group of students, killing four and critically injuring another. He was charged with murder, indicating that prosecutors believe he did it intentionally. Authorities say Attias showed signs of being on drugs, but there is no indication that the accident had any connection with the college party scene.

And many say the campus’ rowdy reputation is overstated. One thing is certain, though: The town around it is unusual. Here, 22,000 young people are concentrated in less than a square mile, the average age is 23, and thousands of 18-year-olds experience their first taste of freedom from parents in an off-campus environment almost entirely free of adult supervision.

It’s an area where things have sometimes gotten out of control: the burning of a bank building and riots in 1970, raging Halloween celebrations, kids falling off the bluff to their deaths. But in recent years, there has been nothing like the carnage of last weekend’s incident witnessed by hundreds.

Days later, people continued to stand over a shrine of flowers and candles at the crash site, crying. Many sought counseling and missed classes. This weekend was being billed by the student government as Dry Isla Vista. “We challenge students to donate money they would spend on alcohol to the victim’s families,” a flier reads. Although there were parties on Friday night, the scene was subdued.

But no one doubts that the boozing, funky atmosphere will return.

Students will still saunter around in flip-flops, surf the beach at Devereux and join drum pits in the park. They’ll listen to garage bands around kegs of beer, burn couches in the street and ride bikes as frenetically as the people of any city in China--all next to a venerable campus that houses world-class academics, including three Nobel laureates.

The school draws top-flight students from high schools and community colleges, with an average GPA of 3.7 and an SAT score of 1,189. For 3,600 openings this year, the school received 32,000 applications and rejected at least 12,000 students who were eligible for the UC system, said Michael Young, vice chancellor of student affairs.

He said Isla Vista is unlike other UC neighborhoods-- Westwood, Irvine, La Jolla, Berkeley--in that the students are concentrated in less than one square mile.

Drab block apartment buildings and small stucco houses cover the eight-tenths of a square mile of Isla Vista. About half the population are students, a quarter of them from Santa Barbara City College.

On the opposite end, in the business district, students congregate at Freebird’s burritos, Woodstock’s Pizza, Espresso Romas, Morning Glory records and other businesses, as well as in a cluster of parks. There is no general bookstore. Officials are re-designing the county master plan of the area to deal with parking and housing problems, a lack of sidewalks and other concerns.

For two of Paine’s friends, Ruthie Levy and Patricia Petersen, coming to Isla Vista was the happiest time of their lives.

“I just can’t imagine living in a regular town with adults,” said Petersen, 19.

On Feb. 23, Petersen and Levy, Levy’s brother Albert and his friend Elie Israel strolled down the residential streets as people generally do in the area because sidewalks are sparse and drivers generally know to proceed slowly.

Petersen decided to stay at one party, but the others wanted to head to another house. A block from the coast, on Sabado Tarde about 11 p.m., the trio and two others were struck by Attias’ Saab. Ruthie Levy, 20; Israel, 27; Nicholas Bourdakis, 20; and Christopher Edward Divis, 20, were killed instantly.

Levy was a studious Santa Barbara City College student who hoped to someday be a marriage counselor and was drawn to the area from Northern California because of its reputation for fun, her family and friends have said.

“I just loved her,” Petersen said. “She was so free. She danced, and she was always just one beat off. She had such a funny personality.”

The portrait that has emerged about Attias, on the other hand, is one of social isolation. Friends and acquaintances described him as a troubled kid having difficulties making connections with others and acting bizarre and erratic.

Students and faculty members emphasize that this crash was not a symptom of a riotous town.

Yonie Harris, dean of students, said UC Santa Barbara’s reputation as a party school is not borne out by facts and that, according to a Harvard study, it falls in the middle of universities in terms of student binge drinking, which she called a national problem.

Tony Black, a landlord who owns an apartment building on the busiest block of the craziest street--Del Playa--said he has had no problem with tenants in 20 years. Last week, as he spent the afternoon picking up beer cans, cigarette butts, some boxer shorts and other items off his lawn, he said the area has not changed much in all that time. “These kids are good kids,” he said. “A lot of people my age say the kids have really gone downhill and are unacceptable. They forget what they did in college was unacceptable, too.”

Isla Vista partially earned its party reputation from its annual Halloween celebrations. The holiday used to draw thousands of people from all over Southern California and around the nation to get drunk and carouse for several days on Del Playa. After a particularly crazy year in 1992, when police arrested or issued citations to more than 1,000 people, law enforcement cracked down. It is far quieter today.

The Isla Vista foot patrol, a group of Highway Patrol, campus police officers and sheriff’s deputies, say they have a growing problem with alcohol abuse. Arrests for public intoxication in the area have gone from 237 in 1998 to 862 in 2000. Much of the increase can be attributed to more enforcement and a growing population, but students and other residents are also drinking more, said Lt. Peter Arnoldi, who was commander of the station until he was transferred last month. Isla Vista accounts for 44% of all alcohol-related offenses in the Sheriff’s Department’s jurisdiction, which is most of the county outside the city of Santa Barbara.

Generally, Arnoldi said, the area is safe. Major crimes, such as rape, assault and burglary, are down almost 12% since 1999. “To be perfectly honest, I’m going to miss this area,” Arnoldi said. “It’s a good group of people.”

Yet there are nuisances. “You don’t want to drive on Del Playa after dark,” Arnoldi said. “People will throw things at your car or even run across the trunk.”

And they burn couches. Every summer, students moving out of apartments decide to ignite the furniture in the street. In fact, Del Playa is pocked with pits where the fires were so hot they melted into the asphalt. For a few months last year, police were responding to 20 burnings a night and decided to work with the district attorney’s office to increase penalties by reclassifying the offense from an infraction to a misdemeanor or even a felony.

Last fall, the foot patrol said the situation could have turned into a tragedy. On the same street where Attias would later crash, a young man got drunk and passed out. His friends stripped him naked, put him on a couch and set him in the middle of the street. Then they covered him with trash. As any student will confirm, a couch sitting in the street in Isla Vista is an invitation to ignition.

Luckily, “the deputies got there before someone torched that couch,” Arnoldi said.

The 25-member patrol is busy almost every weekend night. At the time of the car wreck last weekend, the foot patrol was busy breaking up a 500-person frat party that had gotten out of control with fights and uninvited guests. “We had to deploy pepper spray,” Arnoldi said.

Sevan Matossian has documented the “IV” scene for more than a year. The former UCSB student who lives in his camper began carrying a video camera around as he went to parties. His first footage was of a friend mouthing off to police who were responding to a complaint about a party. He aired it on the local cable access channel, and Isla Vista television was born.

Every weekend night, he and friend Greg Shields document activities along the main party streets at night. On Del Playa, which runs along the coast, people cruise on foot and on bikes, stopping in on casual parties often held by people they don’t even know. It is a far more disorganized, casual scene than a typical fraternity row.

On tape around Del Playa and Sabado Tarde, Matossian captures couches burning, women baring their breasts for the cameras, people smoking pot. He interviews people, asking random questions about sex and offbeat topics. “It’s drunken activity,” he said, adding that some of it gets routine. “I see couch fires all the time--they’re a dime a dozen.”

But on Feb. 23, he came upon the grisly scene that he can’t get out of his head. Attias was running around the bodies, people were silent, in shock. He taped the incident, for which he has taken a lot of criticism from students, and he has sold the footage to the news media around the country. Matossian said it was the most scarring thing he had ever witnessed. “You see a guy lying in the street, laid out like Gumby,” he recalled, with tears welling up. “I’m filming thinking, ‘I should go over to comfort the bodies.’

“It’s like seeing God. It’s just something you should never see.”