‘Drug-Dealing’ Sorority Girl Murdered, UCLA Faculty Blames Epidemic of Violence and Sexual Assault Against Women

At 7:05 am on September 21, firefighters responded to a house fire on Roebling Ave. in Westwood, California, a few blocks away from UCLA’s campus. First responders found the charred remains of Andrea Del Vesco, a 21-year-old Pi Beta Phi sorority girl from Austin, Texas, double-majoring in Spanish and Psychology.

The blonde, attractive, and seemingly-affable young senior was the model victim, according to American cultural consciousness; she was an older JonBenét Ramsey and received ample media attention as a result.

As reports surfaced about Del Vesco’s criminal allegations, the narrative of a feeble woman killed by a deranged male high off the drug of patriarchy became slightly complicated. “At the time of her death, Del Vesco was facing drug-related charges. On July 8, she pleaded not guilty to charges of possessing Ecstasy, LSD, methamphetamine and Psilocybin, officers said,” reports CBS Los Angeles News. “According to the Superior Court’s website, she was scheduled to appear in court [the following week].

A few days later, police arrested Alberto Hinojosa Medina, a student at Fresno State University, and Eric Marquez, a fifth-year biology student at UCLA for the young woman’s death. While prosecutors have yet to explicitly announce potential theories surrounding motive, “there has been media speculation that an alleged drug connection could have killed Del Vesco over fear over fear she would turn in a suspected source in a hypothetical attempt to make a deal with prosecutors,” according to LA Weekly.

The “rat” theory is, of course, plausible, and perhaps even likely, given Del Vesco’s alleged drug dealing with hard substances, such as meth and Ecstasy.

Rather than confronting and decrying drug-related violence and addressing students’ abuse and exploitation of hard drugs, putting the entire campus community at risk, UCLA faculty decided to double-down on gendered rhetoric and oppression politics.

In a submission to UCLA’s student newspaper The Daily Bruin, Professor Zeke Trautenberg dogmatically perpetuates the docile woman narrative, reframing the highly-suspicious murder as a symptom of a larger university social problem. The submission is “undersigned by graduate students, faculty fellows and lecturers of the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese,” and calls on “Chancellor Gene Block, University of California President Janet Napolitano and the UCLA administration to implement effective training programs – not just another online tutorial – for staff, faculty and students about preventing and responding to violence and sexual assault on campus.”

Rather than confronting and decrying drug-related violence and addressing students’ abuse and exploitation of hard drugs, putting the entire campus community at risk, UCLA faculty decided to double-down on gendered rhetoric and oppression politics.

It’s unclear how or why Trautenberg came to the unsubstantiated conclusion that Del Vesco’s murder was a gender-based crime. The addition of the term “sexual assault” in his plea to university administrators is also seemingly for rhetorical purposes, a ploy to throw in as many buzz-words as possible in order to compound the effects of gratuitous fear-mongering.

“Finally, we demand that the UC take an active stance to bring attention to and end violence against women, students and teachers,” writes Trautenberg, “and that it provide survivors of violence with support worthy of our core Bruin values of accountability, integrity and respect.”

As Trautenberg exploits the Del Vesco death for political ends, he forces a complex case into the rigid and divisive of gender-based violence, somehow finding room to tap into the purported epidemic of sexual assaults on campus at the same time. True to the ideological reflexes of the Left, Trautenberg avoids the facts and evidence in favor of aggressive emotional appeals and cartoon-like depictions of female victims and male aggressors.

Trautenberg’s whitewashing of an apparent drug-related follows the scripted pattern of campus-centered moral activism. Social Justice Warriors bend the facts to fit the narrative, pushing for crusades against the inherent oppressors of society. “If you’re not a member of one of the designated victim-groups from the left, then college will be no walk in the park, to put it mildly,” writes The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo. “Schooling-while-male (being a young man on college campuses) is about the worst description you can fit these days—especially if you are white, since you have all that extra “white-privilege” on top of your inherent patriarchy.”

Prestigiacomo explains that in these university mob-justice based bubbles, due process and evidence-based theories are abandoned, in favor of prima facie guilt and carefully defined and exclusive victims. “If you are schooling-while-male, you mustn’t question the exaggerated ‘rape culture’ and its ‘supportive’ workshops which contribute to its aggressiveness—even if the statistics behind the ‘rape culture’ are largely falsified and you yourself are not a rapist of any sort.” adds Prestigiacomo.

Del Vesco’s case is murky at the very least. She was accused of drug-dealing by the police, arraigned and due in court just days after her suspicious murder. To exploit the murder case as some recycled social-justice project is shameful. Instead of protecting students from the clear consequences of drug-related violence and substance abuse, select members of the UCLA faculty have decided to push their political agendas.