The death of Yale graduate student Annie Le and the subsequent arrest of Raymond Clark, a co-worker who has been labeled a “control freak” by acquaintances has gotten me thinking about the risk of violence for students at college.

On TV this week, a criminal profiler noted that strangling of a woman often indicates that the killer felt she had rejected him, usually sexually, even if the rejection simply came in the form of ignoring him.  Even before Clark was named as a suspect, my own theory about the case was that the killer had some sort of sexual obsession with Le, but realized he couldn’t have her, and on the eve of her wedding to another man (the ultimate rejection) killed her in a rage over this. 

I may be entirely wrong, of course, but this theory made me think of how often women encounter strange men in their lives who are interested in them and have trouble taking No for an answer, no matter how politely it’s offered.  (Clark apparently had trouble hearing No from his high school girlfriend when she broke up with him.)  And these types of experiences often begin or escalate once a young woman goes off to college, where many of us have encounters with guys we call “creepy” who frighten us even if they never harm us.

These musings made me recall a piece I wrote back in 2001, immediately after some tragic deaths at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), when freshman David Attias, under the influence of drugs, intentionally drove his car into a crowd of partiers on a street I once lived on, killing four people and critically injuring a fifth, in what has been called “The Isla Vista Massacre.” He was later declared legally insane and is an inmate of a state mental hospital.    In this never-published essay, I reflect on how stressful college life is, and the dangers that lurk there even in seemingly serene and even idyllic surroundings.

DEATH IN ISLA VISTA

It's been 20 years since I graduated from U.C. Santa Barbara, but the news coverage of the recent deaths there bring it all back to me.

Seeing the grainy footage shot moments after the killings, it looked as if  little had changed since I lived there in the mid-late 1970's.  The next day, reading that it all happened on Sabado Tarde street, I felt a peculiar shock.  "That was my street!" I muttered to myself, remembering the apartment building I lived in during my last two years of college.  

As the footage played over and over on the news, I peered at it  closely, thinking that I recognized my old building and wondering with a chill if those kids had been killed right in front of where I once slept, ate, laughed and studied. But between the haziness of the video and my own memories,  it's been too hard to tell. 

The apartments in Isla Vista always looked so much alike -- most of them cheap boxes thrown up in the 60's and 70's by landlords who saw a profit in the growing university population. Scrutinizing the footage, the only identifying sign on an apartment building is one that says "Sea Breeze" in wavy old-fashioned script -- an all-too-common name in any seaside community.  I shudder at the ease that such names imply, and the horror of what occurred just a block from the Pacific Ocean.

Everyone is profoundly shocked at what has happened, and so am I at first.   But as I think back to what college was really like, even in the beautiful bubble that was UCSB, I find myself still sad but less surprised.   As one student interviewed on the news said, "If I reported every person I met who might be capable of violence...." before eloquently shrugging his shoulders. 

Do we really remember how tough college was, not just for us but for so many kids we saw around us?   Did we pay attention to the ones who were struggling, or did we, like that student, simply shrug?   And was there something about the little landlocked island where the killings occurred that made this all too likely to happen?

Although the news stories always refer to Santa Barbara, the campus actually is located about ten miles north of the city.  This is no more a Santa Barbara story than the Seattle earthquake is.  The killings occurred in Isla Vista, a compact community of student apartments which begins right at the northern campus boundary.  

Bordering the Pacific Ocean on one side, Isla Vista -- or I.V. as everyone there calls it --  is just a few square miles in size, and densely packed with residents (as in any college town, apartments are shared with as many bodies as possible to save money).    Like the campus, I.V. is a world away from the old wealthy town of Santa Barbara, and its still wealthier sub-community of Montecito (Oprah as well as many movie stars have luxurious "vacation homes" in Montecito.)

When I was at UCSB, we rarely went into Santa Barbara, which at the time was still a blue-haired old lady town, the streets quiet and dignified, the stores boringly staid, and the number of banks staggering.  You could almost smell the money as you walked the immaculate downtown, which seemed not to have changed a bit since the 1950's.   There were a few fashionable seafood restaurants down by the water, places we students went to for special occasions, when we were feeling flush.   But for the most part, Santa Barbara was neither a place we could afford nor one we were interested in.  Visiting it again a few years ago, I saw that it has become hip, with trendy restaurants and shops and a plethora of espresso bars.   The old lady has washed the blue out of her hair and had a facelift.

Instead, we students hung out in Goleta, the average middle class town which was closest to campus (we always joked that the Regents must have realized "U.C. Goleta" wasn't a very sexy name).  But most often we stayed right in I.V.   There wasn't much there, but it was all ours.  

Borsodi's Coffeehouse provided music and munchies, the falafel stand a quick lunch, and for a more relaxing meal, the back garden of The Sun and Earth restaurant was the first experience many of us suburban kids had of "health food."  We bought and sold records at Morningstar Music, got cheap clothes at the Yellowstone Clothing Company (where I first discovered both vintage clothes and army surplus) and watched both new and old movies at the small but well-programmed Magic Lantern theater.  

Riding or walking through the tiny commercial area of I.V., we grimly acknowledged the plaque embedded in front of the Bank of America, on the steps of which a student had been shot during Vietnam War protests just a few years before.  (Some time after I graduated, the bank became a disco, and when I've visited I.V. in recent years, I've been sad to see that chain stores and franchises have replaced many of those independent businesses.)

You could easily get around I.V. by foot, but most people rode bicycles, and dodged those who drove cars, especially since the four-way stops that marked most intersections were routinely ignored.  (Traffic lights were reserved for the borders where Isla Vista met the rest of the world.)   An "Isla Vista stop" was to a "California stop" as the latter was to a regulation stop.  Foot hovering over the brake pedal, you glanced briefly around to make sure no one was going to hit you, and then kept going.  It was more like making the sign of the cross than an actual traffic maneuver.

Every student learned such rules and customs of the community, so that traffic accidents were surprisingly rare (perhaps due to youthful reflexes and agility).  And the illusion of safety prevailed, despite the regular occurrence of rapes, the string of still unsolved murders of female hitchhikers that had occurred not long before I enrolled, and the occasional altercation between students, usually at weekend parties.  

As I watched the current students profess to reporters that everyone knows each other in I.V., I had to laugh.  We were always told that I.V. was the most densely populated place in California by square mile.    Whether that's true or not, thousands of students live in I.V. at any given time.  The familiarity of faces you see as you make your way around the neighborhood can give you the feeling you know people, even when you really don't.

I.V. does have a friendly small town feeling.  Even looking back on it more skeptically now, I feel it was a place set apart, where students could truly  enjoy  that pleasant interlude before adult life which college at its best can be.  Even the street names -- such as "Del Playa" (the 'best' street, right along the beach) and my own "Sabado Tarde" (a street made for Saturday evenings) -- suggested a resort by the ocean, and many of us felt lucky to be in such a beautiful place.

But there were always rip-tides in that ocean, and most came in the form of other students.

I lived in an on-campus dorm my first two years, and everyone knew people like David Attias, who was dubbed "Tweaker Dave" and "Crazy Dave" by his dorm-mates in Francisco Torres (an off campus dorm on the edge of I.V.).  You knew they were messed up, if not why or how.  Rather than get involved or try to help, you avoided them.  If they bothered you too much, you might talk to the Resident Advisor (RA) who supervised your floor of the dorm. 

That is, unless you had an RA like I did my freshman year -- a guy who started out normal, but who by late winter was starving himself and refusing to talk to anyone if he could possibly avoid it.   Other RA's had affairs with their freshman charges, or shared drugs with them, and most RA's used their newly legal status to buy alcohol for parties by accessing dorm funds set aside for "party food."

To say supervision was lax in the dorms in the 70's is an understatement.  I was witness to kids suffering from things I had never even heard about before, like the compulsion to starve or purge themselves, and the aftermath of date rape.   At the time, there were no words in the language to identify these problems, and the witnesses tended to join the victims in blaming their suffering on themselves.

And then there were those odd kids that you just wondered about.  Some were obsessed with playing the same record over and over (I still know all the lyrics to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Saturday Night Fever soundtracks even though I never owned either record).   Some immersed themselves in history or fantasy, like the hall-mate I had who regularly dressed in Renaissance costume.  Some had cult-like devotion to cultural icons like Elvis or Monty Python.  Some had strange habits in the bathroom, like the girl who filled her mouth with water and then let it run down her chin in a foamy waterfall as she brushed her teeth, or the shy people who would only shower at 3 A.M. when no one else was around.

But these were mere idiosyncrasies compared to the truly weird ones like Dave Attias, the guys that girls lived in fear of being pursued by, because they would come by your dorm room again and again no matter how unresponsive or even rude you were to them.  They spoke in non sequiturs, their bodies made odd movements, and their eyes saw nothing even when looking directly into yours. 

As a freshman, I stopped going to my psychology class for a week after a twitchy intense guy I'd never spoken to came up and told me that I was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen and that he'd fallen in love with me at first sight.  I got secret admirer notes and gifts from guys who couldn't even have a normal conversation.  Other girls I knew had similar or far creepier things happen to them.  My senior year, my housemates and I were followed around town for months by an almost pathologically shy male "friend" who watched us from his van (and who later pursued me to the Bay Area after graduation).   It was hard to get through college without at least a minor stalking experience.  

And then of course, there was what we were supposedly there for -- learning.  The pressures of college were felt even at UCSB, which still gets labeled a party school.  We tolerated the jokes about "U.C. Surfboard" (even though the surfing was terrible) and were capable of self-mockery, as in the official dorm sign I saw when I arrived as a freshman,  "Welcome to the Country Club."   Many of us worked hard and got a good education, even if we were attending the college with "the best looking students" (according to Rolling Stone magazine).   As at any college, there were students who partied, and students who studied, and many who did both and still made it to graduation older and wiser, probably for both experiences.

Unfortunately, there were also always the lost kids -- the ones who didn't make it to their sophomore year or even to the end of their freshman year.   We all felt the shock of suddenly being independent, able to do much of what we wanted.   But, for some, the fear and floundering was never replaced by the growing competence of a normal college student, because something necessary for that transition was missing or damaged in them.  Most of these kids just dropped out and disappeared.  Until now, none at UCSB have felt compelled to act as David Attias did.   Hearing his story over and over on the news this week has reminded me of my own freshman life in the dorms, and what a strange world I felt I'd been dropped into.  

Compared to the sense of freedom that I.V. offered, the dorms (which largely housed freshman and sophomores) were a sort of pressure cooker of forced socializing and immersion in a new life without parents and family.  Most students found new family in their dorm-mates, but for others, it was just like the rejection of high school, only twenty-four hours a day.  There was no going home (that place "where they have to take you in") at the end of the day.  We each had to find a way to cope, not just with any academic pressures, but with the need to fit into a whole new social system.  

Hearing David Attias' dorm-mates talk about his odd behavior made me reflect on my own dorm, San Nic, a cinder block high rise with tiny rooms and cheap built-in furniture shared by two scared freshmen who most often were strangers up till the moment they were expected to study, socialize, undress and sleep a few feet away from each other.

The "random" roommate I was assigned my freshman year was a dream, even though we couldn’t have been more different -- she a sociable former cheerleader, who'd come to college largely for fun, me a serious student and recently born-again Christian.  But we ended up opening our hearts to each other, spending many hours sharing our deepest secrets and feelings about life and love in the way that you only do at that age.  I turned her on to the love of reading and writing, and she got me to loosen up and have more fun.   We both benefited from our differences. 

By contrast, my sophomore year, I chose as my roommate a woman I'd only met briefly through friends, but who seemed compatible with me in just about every possible way.   Yet this led to a nightmare year of roommate hell, during which she not only borrowed my possessions but loaned them to other people, used up my toiletries, tried to stiff me for the phone bill, and worst of all, decided mid-year to sleep during the day and study all night, a schedule she expected me to comply with. 

But I adjusted to life in the dorms, and even flourished, as I made more friends and discovered social skills I didn't know I had.   And always there were the traditions and characters that made the place fun and distinctive, and helped us cope. 

San Nic had an outside staircase that we regularly used in lieu of the unreliable and smelly elevators that shook violently as they took us up the eight floors.  We'd often stand out on one of the landings just to take in the air, surveying San Miguel, an identical dorm across the lawn, with which we had a friendly rivalry. During my freshman year, every evening just before dinner, the air between the two buildings would ring out with the sound of "The Crier" -- some guy who mock-wept in a loud voice for a minute or so, the sound carrying eerily albeit comically to us all.   

Try as we might, we never managed to identify The Crier, whose unseen wailing was a soundtrack to our own birth as independent adults.  Far from being annoyed, everyone spoke of The Crier with amused affection, perhaps because we felt that he wept for us all, for the stress and strain of this new life, corralled with strangers, far from the homes we'd always known.  Like the feigned yet still mournful sobbing of The Crier, our jokes often held a sharp edge of truth, a way to let out the intensity of being out in the world for the first time.

Once I stood on the 7th floor outside landing with a friend, taking a break from the intensity of studying for finals.  Feeling both exhausted and giddy, I leaned out over the railing and jokingly yelled, "I'm going to jump!"  

Immediately, a stranger's voice yelled back to me from San Miguel dorm, "Don't jump!  Take an Incomplete!"

If only someone had helped David Attias find a way not to jump but to take an Incomplete, maybe he would have left the cauldron of college life and found a shelter for his suffering.  And if he had, some kids who are now names in a tragic news story would have survived the joyful struggle of college just as I did, and emerged into what they thought would be the truly scary world, the one that awaited them beyond Isla Vista.

Thinking of them, all I can hear is The Crier.