As the Waves Shattered

By Becca Lynne

This project is an untangling of experience. The 2014 Isla Vista UCSB Campus Shooting.My freshman year of college, 2013-2014, I attended the University of California Santa Barbara. The main draws were its close proximity to vast hiking networks, palatable weekend drives home and comparatively cheap in-state-resident tuition. Admittedly, the campus "culture" was far from an optimal fit for me. As such, I decided to leave UCSB and transfer.Tragedy struck Isla Vista the month before I was bound to hurriedly shove my belongings into boxes and turn in my apartment key to my landlord. The weekend of May 23rd I happened not to be Isla Vista-- when Elliot Rodger drove through the streets I had walked countless times, shooting into the stores I have frequented earlier that week. In fact, I found out about the incident when I looked at my phone to find countless worried texts from relatives asking if I was okay. One even went as far as to ask if I was alive. It was not until I turned on CNN some thirty minutes later and saw yellow crime scene tape lining the sidewalk I had travelled mere hours before away from my morning lecture that it dawned on me: it could have been me. Any other Friday I would be harking down a burrito with friends, admiring the ducks in the central park or drinking yet another latte. Death struck me as both starkly cruel and exceedingly random.My final month at UCSB was clad in grief. Paddle outs, memorials, optional final exams and dwindling class attendance all became features of daily life. When I look back at my time in Santa Barbara I still remember it as a place where the sun was omnipresent, as were smiles and good spirits. But the last few days of May and June 2014 were hardly so.Later, as a creative writing minor, I was asked to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. The style Capote used-impersonal yet personal, journalistic yet sensational-captivated me. I began to form a mold from the narrative that I then found myself inserting my Isla Vista recollections into. Capote was fundamentally fair. He gave equal time to perpetrator and victim, leaving all value judgments to the reader and even then, his profound equivocality made it near impossible to declare good and evil.Inspired, this started as an elongated dismantling of memory. I conducted an array of interviews with individuals privy to special knowledge of the incident and collected an extensive reserve of news articles on the subject. Next came the process of restacking the blocks into coherency. The goal of this project has always been to shed light on the totality of the circumstances surrounding the 2014 Isla Vista Shootings-including the broader cultural implications and ramifications. In order to do so, some plotlines, though based on fact, have been dramatized and fictionalized. Similarly, some details have been altered to preserve the confidentiality of sources.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08ZBRJZZR
• ISBN13: 9798723807921
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"