Attias Trial Points Up Dorm Life’s Wild Side

SANTA BARBARA — A crowd of students spills out of the Francisco Torres Residence Hall, laughing and taunting one another on their way out for a night of partying in Isla Vista.

Of dorm life in the two 10-story towers, Nino Boles-King, 19, offered a mixed review. “The food [is bad], but it’s really easy to get [messed] up” on drugs and alcohol, he said. That’s not the kind of endorsement managers of the massive student housing complex next to UC Santa Barbara would like to receive.

But after a Francisco Torres freshman named David Attias ran down five people in this college community, killing four, it’s one they’ve had to live down.

“It is sex and drugs and rock and roll, and it’s filled with freshmen,” said Abby Pollak of Oakland. Pollak has a special enmity for the place. Her son, Elie Israel, was one of the four pedestrians killed by Attias’ turbocharged Saab on Feb. 23, 2001.

Since Attias’ murder trial started several weeks ago, Francisco Torres has become almost a co-defendant as tales of student excess emerge from the witness stand.

Attias’ attorney, Jack Earley, said the chaotic environment in the residence hall--the seventh floor, on which Attias lived, was called the “floor that never sleeps”--exacerbated Attias’ long-standing mental problems.

Earley said his client had a psychotic break as he drove through Isla Vista spouting rap lyrics he listened to at ear-splitting levels in his dorm room. Before Francisco Torres, he apparently never listened to rap.

Earley couldn’t say how much blame the residence hall shares for what happened. “It was a factor in his mental health,” he said. “What percentage it played, I’m not sure.”

Under the best conditions, college dorm life is part commune, part wilderness camp, fragrant with the odors of unwashed socks and two-week-old pizza boxes. But to hear some people talk, the wild goings-on in the residence hall, which is affiliated with but not owned by UC Santa Barbara, would make the fraternity depicted in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” look like a finishing school.

Listening to the testimony last week, one spectator said she’s doubtful she will allow her son to go to UC Santa Barbara. UCLA suddenly looked a lot better. “There’s no partying there,” she said.

But the owner, GMH Associates Inc. in Pennsylvania, along with college administrators and students, say the residence hall and the campus have been unfairly demonized because of the Attias case. “We provide an experience [where students can be] nurtured in a safe place,” insisted June De Ponte, director of marketing for GMH.

On-site managers would not allow a reporter and photographer from The Times to look around the building Friday night. “We have had nasty experiences in the past with media,” said Casey Hayden, a dorm official.

Some people say the focus on Francisco Torres is because it houses so many students, mostly freshmen living away from home for the first time.

“FT is a large building, and it’s filled with students under 20,” said university Dean of Students Yonie Harris. “You’re going to have the normal behavior you expect in young people this age.”

“I think it’s a shame people are getting this idea,” said Marisa Lagos, a junior covering the Attias trial for the campus newspaper, the Daily Nexus.

At one time, UC Santa Barbara and the surrounding community may have fairly earned a reputation for a lifestyle that was more about tanning than fanning the pages of textbooks. But that changed when the faculty started winning Nobel Prizes and competition for enrollment became more spirited.

“This is a school that’s difficult to get in,” Lagos said. “You have to be serious to stay enrolled here.”

Francisco Torres’ jaunty Web site boasts of its paradisiacal location “nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez Mountain range.” With room for 1,300 students, the dorm includes two large cafeterias, a swimming pool, tennis courts, fitness center and a computer center with unlimited direct access to the Internet--all for $9,125 a year.

There is no reference to police reports like the one about a student walking around the fourth floor stairwell, urinating on the walls as he went. Or to the legendary food fight last year that authorities say caused $10,000 in damage and caused the residence hall to install security cameras. Or to the time the fire alarm went off and so many drunken students were dragged out of the building by roommates that someone called sheriff’s deputies to report a multiple kidnapping.

Still, the residence hall’s defenders say it’s no different from a lot of student housing. “You can find the same stuff in the on-campus dorms,” said one sheriff’s deputy.

But after the Attias case, and the videotaped assault of a freshman in Isla Vista last year that horrified the community, nobody in a position of authority is finding much comfort in that. To many people, the legendary fun-and-sun atmosphere that annually lands UC Santa Barbara on the list of top party colleges has gotten way out of hand.

Big Increase Noted in Alcohol-Related Crimes

Crimes involving alcohol in Isla Vista--a student city of 20,000 jammed into less than a square mile, making it one of the most crowded places west of the Mississippi--have skyrocketed in recent years. The 796 reports of public intoxication in 2001 were three times as high as in 1998, according to statistics supplied by the Sheriff’s Department’s IV Foot Patrol, which supplies law enforcement in Isla Vista. Loud party calls increased five times, and urinating in public more than doubled--to 250 incidents.

Those are just the nuisance, quality-of-life crimes. There were 18 rapes, 22 cases of resisting arrest and more than 100 cases of battery and spousal abuse.

After a number of incidents in which six people fell off the cliffs--some as high as 90 feet--overlooking the sea and two of them died, county officials decided to install security fencing.

Local authorities are now studying laws to severely limit the weekend bacchanals. On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors will consider giving deputies additional authority to declare a party a public nuisance and shut it down before revelers get out of control.

Lawmakers will also debate a “Urinating/Defecating in Public Ordinance” to control the “significant problem” with outdoor urination.

The ironic thing is that although much of the recent flurry of activity by government agencies was provoked by the Attias case, Attias had no alcohol in his system the night of the collision on Sabado Tarde in Isla Vista.

In fact, his mental deterioration came about after he stopped taking the psychotropic medication designed to smooth out his twitchy, impulsive personality, which gave him his nickname, “Crazy Dave.” He had a habit of barging into other students’ rooms and lecturing them on everything from politics to drugs. Far from being warped by the atmosphere in Francisco Torres, Attias was so disruptive that his floor mates asked him to leave the floor, according to evidence at his trial.

And as for defense claims that he was desperately remorseful after the accident, the prosecution played a chilling tape of a phone call a cocky-sounding Attias made to a friend after his arrest.

“I’m in an orange suit, dude,” he said. He didn’t seem worried. “My dad’s on the way. He’s got money,” he said.

His father is television director Daniel Attias. Though some have pointed fingers at the so-called Hollywood lifestyle, people who know the family say David Attias was a difficult, demanding child almost from birth. According to court testimony, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit at 13, when he tried to strangle his sister.

Promises of Change Followed Rampage

After the auto rampage last year, there were public testimonials and promises that Isla Vista would change.

Some people don’t think much is different. A walking tour with the IV Foot Patrol of the major streets Friday night found the avenues crowded with students cruise-walking from one party to another. Blasts of music, like mortars, were going off all around. One of the largest gatherings was in front of an apartment building, where a nearly naked man who called himself Extreme Elvis was singing “In the Ghetto.” Nearly naked because he was wearing dark socks and shoes and nothing else. “We’re on tour,” he said of his band. “I’ve got a gig in L.A. tomorrow.”

Most revelers were having fun. But there were some short tempers in the crowd, too. Before the night was over, several students showed up at the local hospitals with broken bones from fighting.

Students living in Francisco Torres said they try to take the good with the bad. “If you tend to be a party person, it’s hard” to break away and get any work done in the residence hall, said Molly Krain, 19, a Santa Barbara City College student from San Jose. “You have to be disciplined.”

Kelly Morgan, an 18-year-old UC Santa Barbara freshman in pre-psychology, loved her freshman experience at Francisco Torres. Of course, she asked for, and was granted, a room on the one floor in the towers designated as a “24-hour quiet floor.”

“I have gone to other floors and it’s pretty rowdy,” she said.