Authorities are searching for a man who strangled and raped an 18-year-old freshman at a UC Santa Barbara residential building last week. The attack comes a year after another freshman student at the school, Liz Hamel, died after being found unconscious under a third-floor walkway in a different residential hall on campus. The cases are not connected, but UCSB police are once again being accused of not doing enough.
The attack occurred around 11 p.m. on Saturday, May 9, in Tropicana Gardens, a UCSB-owned, privately managed housing complex in Isla Vista, according to a campus alert and the victim’s family attorney. The student, identified only as Jane Doe, attended a party at the Sigma Pi fraternity earlier that evening, between approximately 9 and 10 p.m., before arriving at Tropicana Gardens around 10:30 p.m. The dorms are an approximate 2-minute walk from the fraternity house. Police received a 911 call roughly an hour after the attack. In its campus alert, UCSB police said the attacker and victim “met earlier in the evening at a party in Isla Vista and were otherwise, unknown to one another.” The attacker remains unidentified and at large.
Tropicana Gardens is a residential building on Cervantes Road, with residents requiring a pass for entry. According to the timeline established by investigators, both the victim and the attacker entered through the building’s back door that night, though it remains unclear whether one or both had authorized access…