FIND US ONLINE AT INDEPENDENT.COM, FACEBOOK, AND TWITTER
community
UCSB Student Sentenced for False Rape Report
A Task Force with Teeth?
A UCSB student charged with filing a false rape report after she solicited a man to beat her up in exchange for sex was sentenced Thursday to 60 days in Santa Barbara County Jail and three years of probation. As part of her no-contest plea, 20-year-old Morgan Triplett is also required to complete 200 hours of community service, undergo 60 hours of mental-health treatment, and pay a $710 fine. Triplett had traveled to UC Santa Cruz in February for a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender conference where, according to authorities, she organized a strange and perverse scenario in a desperate attempt to save a troubled relationship. On February 17, Triplett called 9-1-1 to report she had been raped while looking for banana slugs. Though she gave a detailed description of the supposed suspect, which prompted detectives to detain and question several people and put the Santa Cruz community on high alert, authorities became suspicious when Triplett refused to provide her clothing as evidence or allow DNA samples to be sent away for testing. Over the course of their 11-day investigation, police determined Triplett had instead met a man through Craigslist who agreed to kick and punch her and be paid afterward with sex. Triplett would eventually admit to fabricating the rape incident. Johanna Schonfield, Santa Cruz County assistant district attorney, said the male subject was not charged with any crime because there was no evidence to suggest he knew Triplett was going to submit a false police report. And because he hit Triplett with her consent, he couldn’t be charged with battery, Schonfield explained. Previously, in March 2012, Triplett contacted the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office to report someone had tried to rape her as she took out her trash in Isla Vista, where she resides. She alleged a man approached her from behind, put a knife to her neck, and tried to pull down her pants. A skateboarder riding by the scene scared the purported suspect away, she told detectives. No suspects were ever identified or caught, Schonfield said, and it’s not known if the report was truthful or not. In both instances, Schonfield noted, Triplett claimed her attacker smelled of cigarette smoke. Triplett’s attorney, Santa Cruz public defender Jack Lamar, was unavailable for comment, but Schonfield said she heard from him that Triplett is currently in counseling and is close to graduating from UCSB with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Schonfield said false rape reports are extremely rare and hopes this unusual case will not dissuade — Tyler Hayden women who have been actually assaulted from coming forward.
High-profile landlord Dario Pini and attorneys for the City of Santa Barbara have reached a settlement over the 64-count complaint filed last fall alleging that Pini systematically kept 27 rental properties in serious subpar conditions to the detriment of both his tenants and their neighbors. According to the settlement, Pini will pay a fine of $35,000; he will also pay an indeterminate amount to hire well-known attorney — and former district attorney — Stan Roden to serve as special master for the next five years. As such, Roden will be responsible for keeping Pini on track with repairs in a timely fashion, meeting with Pini every quarter to ensure the work gets done. The settlement is far less severe than what City Attorney Steve Wiley initially proposed: civil fines up to $16,000 a day for each property. In addition, he demanded that Pini’s vast real estate empire be placed in a court receivership.
COUNTY Assemblymember Das Williams lost his office at the State Capitol after playing hooky on some important votes. He missed the last floor
session before summer break on 7/3 because he was attending his mother-in-law’s wedding in Hawai‘i. According to the Los Angeles Times, speaker John Perez “can be touchy about members who are late or absent,” but his secretary said Williams requested the move. He has been moved to a smaller office, and some of his aides will be exiled to an annex office.
After a week of hype and excitement, UCSB’s corpse flower (above) bloomed on 7/30, filling the campus greenhouse with its signature putrid smell that knocked visitors back on their heels. Hundreds of people lined up to gawk at the rare plant indigenous to Sumatra’s rainforests and designed to attract fertilizing flesh flies and carrion beetles. UCSB’s plant, named Chanel, cont’d page 12 was artificially inseminated
PAU L WELLM AN
W
BY B R A N D O N FA S T M A N
PAU L WELLM AN
ing to intimidate a witness who saw him riding his motorcycle inside Skater’s Point on 7/21. After tooling around on his mini off-road bike in the city park and on nearby sidewalks and parking lots — parts of the joy ride were caught on tape — Rios loaded his motorcycle onto his truck parked nearby on Cabrillo Boulevard. As the witness wrote down the truck’s license plate number, Rios threatened the person, according to the police report. In addition to attempting to prevent a witness from reporting a crime, Rios is charged with reckless driving and use of unauthorized equipment in a skateboard facility.
Anti-Gang Group Tracks Results ith all the talk about gangs lately, one would think Santa Barbara is in the midst of a crime epidemic. According to numbers shared by South Coast Task Force on Youth Gangs coordinator Saul Serrano at a conference on Monday and then again at the City Council on Tuesday, however, juvenile infractions seem to have decreased significantly in recent years. In 2009, there were 368 juveniles on probation, 306 with gang terms and conditions. Thirty-five kids got off probation. Fast-forward to 2013, and those numbers are 296, 203, and 79. Deputy Chief Probation Officer Steven DeLira added that over the past 10 years, Juvenile Hall admissions have decreased by 45 percent, and staff for juveniles is down 37 percent (or 40 positions) while the total population of juveniles in the county has decreased by only 5 percent over that same time period. Numbers compiled by the Police Department and Sheriff ’s Office also indicate that gang-related incidents have decreased over the past few years. The number of females with gang terms have flatlined countywide, DeLira told The Santa Barbara Independent. In fact such numbers have been dropping statewide and nationwide for reasons that experts are still trying to sort out. Locally, the South Coast Task Force on Youth Gangs was formed in response to a 2007 spike in violence, including the stabbing of 15-year-old Angel Linares near Saks Fifth Avenue on State Street. Because of its location and fatal result, that particular stabbing galvanized city and community leaders and started Santa Barbara on a path to a proposed gang injunction and turned gangs into a political hot potato. When market worker George Ied was randomly beaten to death by gang members — two of whom were sentenced Tuesday — on the Eastside in 2010, that only furthered the perception that gang activity was getting out of hand. Individual participants in the Gang Task Force — including government officials — have complained since its inception that its meetings are full of sound and fury but that they accomplish little. Perhaps it didn’t help that the first coordinator was a blustery orator from Los Angeles who had trouble finding allies in Santa Barbara and whose theatrical presentations eventually felt incommensurate with his actions. In contrast, Serrano is homegrown, understated, and quietly seems to have devised modest but concrete goals for the Task Force. Those include a centralized database for “at risk” youth that tracks data from Probation, schools, and service providers — initially the Community Action Commission. Such a database would aid both administrators — who would be able to identify gaps in service — and families, who could log in to obtain information or seek referals for service. UCSB professor Jill Sharkey, who is heading up the effort, compares it to mint
GANG OF ONE: Saul Serrano, coordinator of
the South Coast Task Force on Youth Gangs, brought about 200 participants to a Service Provider Summit at the Carrillo Rec Center Monday. Most of the providers cater to youth rather than gangs specifically.
.com, a website that can track all of your financial accounts. Information-sharing agreements have been obtained from all of the participating agencies, but fundraising and software hurdles still stand between the concept and its realization. Agencies and nonprofits are doing the work “in the trenches,” said Serrano, suggesting that progress needs to be looked at over time rather than after quarterly meetings. Still, at the City Council meeting Tuesday, Councilmember Bendy White urged Serrano to devise concrete goals and metrics for the Task Force so that both the public and potential funders can gauge its success. Serrano responded that he and a committee are in the process of doing so. Serrano’s other goal is to foster more collaboration among the area’s many service providers who on the one hand radiate a generosity of spirit, but on the other have a history of climbing on each other’s backs fighting for grant money. To that end, he is attempting to arrange a monthly meeting. He also put together a summit on Monday that included high-profile speakers such as former sex slave and current social entrepreneur Carissa Phelps and writer and former gang member Luis Rodriguez. The most impactful speaker may have been S.B. original police officer Adrian Gutierrez, who grew up on the Eastside and still lives there. He shared a number of personal stories that he had never told publicly before. For instance, he said one of his friends was shot by a cop when he was growing up, and now he is friends with that officer. He saw another friend be killed by a store owner, he said. He told the story of a rude Westsider with an incarcerated father he met at a truancy hearing. The boy, alone, called his cell phone the next Thanksgiving. When Gutierrez invited him over, he said he couldn’t be seen on the Eastside. So the officer met him at Shoreline Park, and they ate turkey off the hood of his car at midnight. The boy then joined the Police cont’d page 12 Activities League. august 1, 2013
THE INDEPENDENt
11