SHATTERED DREAMS

can so conveniently blame the victims if you ignore the risks and realities that claim lives every year. When you’re just a student, a transient with no perceived roots or familial connections in the place you’re attending college, it’s so much easier for people in the local community to not care about you. By dropping the line “drugs or alcohol may have been a contributing factor” in a press release or news report, you help absolve everyone else of responsibility — or even concern. The cyclical nature of college life guarantees that these tragedies will too soon be forgotten, erased from people’s memory as new classes of students, vulnerable to the same risks, are welcomed.

I was a former mayor, current council member, and congressional candidate when Noah died. I knew something about navigating bureaucracy. Irvine is a city recognized for it's record on public safety. When people were injured because of faulty infrastructure, we didn’t blame the victim, we addressed the underlying problem. What became abundantly clear was that buck-passing and fingerpointing were the default approach in matters involving the health and safety of students in Isla Vista. Property owners were protected by outdated building codes and routinely allowed overcrowding in their units. The Isla Vista Foot Patrol, a division of the Sheriff’s Department had an unhealthy relationship with the student population, preferring enforcement to engagement. “Our biggest problem is residential burglaries,” a Sergeant overseeing the Foot Patrol told me. When I pointed out that landlords would give only three keys for a three bedroom apartment that routinely had six or more students, requiring tenants to leave doors unlocked so their roommates could access the apartment, he claimed to be unaware. I learned a lot of things no parent ever wants to know about the environment their now deceased child was living in. Noah’s death has been a gateway to an education I wish I never had. Grief has been both painful and enlightening. I’m grateful for the growth, but the price of this wisdom and perspective is far too great.

The question of why Noah hopped a property fence between two properties near his apartment remains a mystery. The report on Noah’s death is short on facts and long on opinion, conjecture, and innuendo. Authorities released a story to the press the day after Noah died suggesting he may have jumped out of a cab without paying the fare and was running from the cab driver at the time he hopped the fence. What became clear was that there was no evidence to support that claim. No incident report. No cab driver came forward. Just a story handed to the press by the Sheriff’s department. Needless to say, that allegation, along with the high blood alcohol level that an open bar party will produce, became fodder for certain press outlets. How do you protect a child’s reputation when they cannot speak for themselves and authorities are asserting facts not in evidence. Even before the official report was released it was clear there was no substance to that allegation. I called the Sheriff to ask how, given the lack of evidence, they were going to address the cab jumping story in the report. “We have to put it in,” he said. I pushed back, saying “I could understand if you said you have a theory you can’t prove, but if you put it in the report it will be viewed as fact.” I also pointed out it was a public document. His response enraged me. “Anyone who would use it against you politically, it would backfire,” he said. That he imagined my concern was political spoke volumes about where his priorities were. It would be a long time before I engaged the Sheriff again.

The Sheriff did refer the bar owner who ran the 50 Club promotion to ABC (Alcohol and Beverage Control), the state agency that regulates and licenses establishments that sell alcohol, for investigation. I was certain the bar owner would lose his license. In California, you can’t offer a free ham sandwich to induce people to buy alcohol, let alone an unlimited supply of free alcohol. A few days before the hearing, I was advised by one of the lawyers for ABC that they were working on a settlement. The bar owner got what his lawyers demanded. A mere fifteen day suspension in each bar — but it’s worse. He got to take the suspension in Isla Vista during the last two weeks of December when all the students were away on break and the suspension at the bar downtown the last two weeks in February, undoubtedly the lowest volume of sales between the popular winter and spring holidays. It’s hard to imagine anything making the pain of losing Noah worse, but that did. What if those who turned a blind eye had acted to shut the promotion down years earlier? What if ABC had held the bar owner accountable? What if the county had taken actions to protect those living in aging properties protected under outdated codes and built fencing that delineated the point at which eroding cliffs posed a deadly risk? The hardest question to answer is, who was really being served and protected by their actions?

In hopes of moving efforts to address health and safety risks in Isla Vista, I set aside my resistance and met with the Sheriff to ask if he would convene all the relevant stakeholders. I knew that he had the platform to do so, but he declined. He made it clear that, in his mind, the problem was the students, not environmental risk factors. They just needed to consider the consequences of their actions before engaging in risky behavior. What he said next, in an effort to assure me that he was indeed concerned, was that he routinely warned his officers not to chase kids toward the cliffs. What he didn’t know was that I had feared that was what happened the night Noah died. Had Noah been chased by an officer rounding up kids who were drunk in public, which they surely would have been doing that night? He certainly was drunk after a night of celebration at an open bar party. My thought was that his officers had ignored the directive not to chase kids toward the cliffs. That he didn’t know — hadn’t put the pieces together that his officers were at the fence Noah jumped, acknowledged shining a flashlight over the fence and seeing a shoe in the foliage but choosing not to go down to the beach to see if someone had fallen. Instead, Noah was found by his friend’s girlfriend and two of her friends as they walked the beach at sunrise. The pieces had never added up. There was the story I was told by the lead investigator about Noah’s wallet falling out of the bag that held his personal effects after I discovered it was missing. After first claiming they may never have had his wallet, I reminded the investigator that they told me they had identified him from his driver’s license. Miraculously it was found the next day. When I asked how it could have fallen out of the bag, the investigator told me it’s like when you have a bag of groceries on the seat of your car and it tips over and the lettuce rolls onto the floor. Given the unsubstantiated story about Noah jumping out of a cab, I wondered whether they might have held on to his wallet and planned to plant it somewhere to lend credibility to that story. I’m not given to conspiratorial thinking, and I would like nothing better than to know exactly what led to Noah’s death, but it’s hard not to wonder what the truth is, and what facts might have been suppressed, to ensure that all accountability was buried with Noah.

We will never really know what happened that night. If there were witnesses, they never came forward. Your mind keeps rewriting the story in search of better conclusions that never come. I’m grateful to Noah for the lessons he continues to teach me. I’m grateful to my daughter, now a Marriage and Family Therapist, for her insistence that I get therapy. I had never gotten therapy, despite dealing with some traumas in my life. I thought it was a superpower to find another space to tuck the pain away in. I feared therapy, thinking I would be like a champagne bottle uncorked with everything I’d been holding inside unleashed. The truth is, therapy was my salvation. I was blessed with a great therapist who specializes in grief. At a very basic level, therapy was a safe place to cry — or to wail, as grief compelled me to do. I never understood what wailing was, but grief taught me. Therapy helped me accept and let go, but that was a long and complicated journey. I tell people the greatest lesson I have learned is just how little I control. I have no power to control what others think, do or say. The second greatest lesson is that all the stress I’ve endured throughout my life is because I didn’t understand lesson number one. I know Noah’s death was beyond my control to prevent, but of course the guilt remains. What is a parent for if not to protect their children? Therapy provided perspective I would not have gained on my own. Mostly it provided a platform to understand myself better, to be kinder to myself, to see patterns that served me and those that did not. How I wish I could do life differently with the benefit of wisdom I acquired on this journey. All I can do is start where I am, apply the lessons I’ve learned and do the best I can to extend Noah’s legacy and impact. ♦ bethkrom.com email: bethkrom@gmail.com