The victim of Saturday’s fatal fall from the cliffs beneath 6625 Del Playa Drive has been identified as 23-year-old Jacob William Aladar Parker, a 2023 graduate of UCSB and current resident of San Diego. Known as Jake to his friends, Parker was in town for the weekend-long All-Gaucho Reunion.
Sources say that Parker had climbed over the barrier fence to the house on Saturday around 2:35 p.m. when he fell down the 50-foot cliffs. He was transported to Cottage Hospital’s ER in Santa Barbara, but pronounced dead later that day.
In a GoFundMe page set up on behalf of Parker’s family, organizer Raquel Startz said, “The sheer amount of love being displayed over this horrific tragedy has truly been a testament to the charismatic, loving, and intelligent human being he was.” She said that he “changed lives in his own way, as a loving son, caring sibling, loyal friend, proud UCSB graduate, sharp entrepreneur, avid Bay Area sports fan, model of health, and a prolific lover of music, so much so that he started successfully running live music events.”
Director of Isla Vista Community Services District, Spencer Brandt, urged property owners to make a move, echoing Supervisor Laura Capps’s statements over the weekend “begging” them to raise their fence heights. “This just further emphasizes the need for higher fences,” he said. “Simply put, people can’t climb over higher fences.”
Brandt added that building records show no recent permits for the property, indicating that plans to increase its fence height were not in the works prior to this incident. The property’s fence reportedly stands at 3.5 feet tall.
Parker is the 14th person to have died from a cliff accident in Isla Vista in the past 20 years and the third in the last three years. In 2022, another UCSB alum, 25-year-old Santa Monica resident Chasen Alibrando, died after falling from the bluffs near the 6600 block of Del Playa Drive during that year’s All-Gaucho Reunion. Then last September, 19-year-old Santa Barbara City College student Benjamin “Benny” Schurmer also fell to his death from an I.V. cliff, prompting a countywide effort led by Supervisor Capps to improve cliff safety in the college town.
In November, the Board of Supervisors voted to amend county codes to bring the minimum fence heights along the bluffs to at least six feet and incentivize private property owners to upgrade their fences along Del Playa by waiving any permitting fees. In February of this year, a woman was rescued after surviving a fall from a cliff at 6761 Del Playa Drive, where the fence also had not been raised or fortified.
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