Alumnus of Peninsula high school killed by fall from beachside bluff

The young man killed last weekend by a fall from a beachside cliff near Santa Barbara has been identified as an alumnus of Carlmont High School, in Belmont.

Jacob William Aladar Parker, 23, died Saturday, April 20, at a Santa Barbara hospital, the county sheriff’s department said. He had fallen around 2:30 that afternoon from the 50-foot bluff along Del Playa Drive, in the Isla Vista neighborhood near the University of California campus.

Parker, a 2023 graduate of UC Santa Barbara, had been living in San Diego. He returned to Santa Barbara for the weekend’s All-Gaucho Reunion and was attending a party at an apartment building on Del Playa when he reportedly climbed over a 4-foot fence at the cliff’s edge and fell to the beach, sources told the Santa Barbara Independent.

Parker was a 2019 graduate of Carlmont, where he was on the football team. His LinkedIn page said he attended Santa Barbara City College before going on to receive a bachelor’s degree from UCSB last year.

He was the 14th person to die from a fall at the Isla Vista cliffs since 1994; most of those were students. The hazards prompted the county’s board of supervisors to approve a plan last fall to raise the fences along the bluff to 6 feet, among other safety measures.