From the moment they had arrived six days earlier, the 18-year-olds from Florida had been drinking heavily. Free or cheap liquor was everywhere they turned -- from the poolside bars at the Oasis Cancun to crowded, thumping clubs with names like Party Central and Tequila Rock.

And it seemed that everywhere, too, were representatives of Class Travel International, the company that had arranged the high school graduation trip for Gilbert, Oelrich and hundreds of other U.S. students.

[Photo by Nick de la Torre]
Kelly Gilbert, 24, of Fort Myers shattered her leg when she and Nick Oelrich fell off a balcony while on a graduation trip in 1995.

If parents thought Class Travel was supervising their children, they were wrong. Instead, a lawsuit alleges, the company's employees were not only drinking themselves but encouraging students to join such boozy pursuits as "beer funneling" contests.

Now, after a night blurred by vodka, tequila and rum, Gilbert and Oelrich began to kiss. They leaned against the railing outside Gilbert's room -- and suddenly, they were falling to the floor of the atrium three stories below.

Hours later, on the afternoon of Father's Day 1995, Alachua County Sheriff Steve Oelrich was at home in Gainesville when he got a call.

"You need to get down here," a Class Travel employee said.

The 30-foot fall had shattered Gilbert's leg and hip. It left Oelrich brain dead.

Gilbert would later acknowledge she was partly to blame for the accident. And Sheriff Oelrich doesn't try to absolve his son of responsibility.

Even though they were too young to drink in Florida, they were of legal age in Mexico.

But Gilbert, the sheriff and others say Class Travel and similar tour companies have endangered the lives of thousands of young people who take package trips to Mexico. The companies, critics say, mislead parents into thinking their children will be safely chaperoned when in fact they are left on their own in circumstances in which they can literally drink themselves to death.

"There's a reason they go to Mexico as opposed to Fort Lauderdale, and that's because there's no law enforcement," Oelrich says. "There's not even a report of my son's death. It's a lawless place."

Despite Class Travel's claim to be well-prepared for emergencies, Nick Oelrich's medical care was poor.

He lay on the atrium floor for up to two hours before he was moved to a hospital with no air conditioning or window screens. When the sheriff arrived hours later, his son's face was still caked with blood. Fluid from his brain was draining through a shunt into the fingers of a rubber glove.

[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
Bobby Angelovski, 18, on a senior class trip to Cancun booked through Student Express, shows off his armbands: one for all-you-can-drink in the local clubs, one for medical care, one for the hotel and one for entrance to a club from the night before.

Class Travel, its co-founder later acknowledged, felt no responsibility for Oelrich's death or the safety of any other student.

"Losing a child here and there is kind of the price of doing business for these companies," the sheriff says.

"They're preying on the irresponsibility of youth and giving them a platform where they can go down there and there's no enforcement and no regulation."

Companies specializing in spring break and graduation trips are loosely regulated under a variety of state and federal laws that primarily address financial stability and travel scams rather than safety issues.

While there are signs Cancun's tourism industry has become more safety conscious in the past few years, companies still lure U.S. high school students with the promise of "all you can drink" parties and other alcohol-related inducements.

Class Travel International remains an active corporation, according to California secretary of state records, and it has an e-mail address that students can use to get trip information. However, neither the company's co-founder nor its lawyer would comment for this story.

[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
Keith Goodwin, 18, on a senior class trip in Cancun, drinks a beer on the third-floor balcony of his room at the Continental Plaza, where the balcony railings are 35 inches high, 7 inches lower than the U.S. standard.

Kelly Gilbert also declined to comment, on her attorney's advice. But her lawsuit against Class Travel, which fills eight volumes in the Palm Beach County Courthouse, provides a chilling account of what can happen when kids and booze mix in Mexico.

'Wow, the whole bottle is gone'

Class Travel International was started in 1992 by two friends from the University of Nevada-Reno. Like many similar tour groups, it hired attractive young sales representatives. They in turn recruited student leaders to sign up their classmates for vacations.

The company looks "for somebody highly influential with their class and that is the person that we target," Dean Longway, a Class Travel supervisor, said in a deposition. "They earn rewards, possibly a free trip."

In 1995, the "target" at Barron Collier High School in Naples was a popular senior active in student government. When the student began touting a graduation trip to Cancun, Kelly Gilbert and her parents assumed the school was sponsoring it.

"It was common knowledge that seniors went on a class trip together," Gilbert said in her deposition. "Class Travel, it sounds like it's associated with the school."

The company's literature also suggested that safety was a prime concern. It required students to sign a "travelers agreement" stating they would not use illegal drugs, rent motor vehicles or engage in fighting or other behavior "that may be harmful." Any violation of the rules could result in being sent home.

The literature also noted that while students could legally drink in Mexico at 18, "Class Travel neither condones nor encourages this practice."

As Gilbert and other students soon learned, the company seemed to encourage alcohol consumption.

[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
Tiffany Brown and David Strack dance on a ledge together at Yuppie's as other spring breakers walk between clubs in Cancun.

At a meeting in a Naples hotel before the trip, a Class Travel representative told them "that as long as you can look over the bar, you can drink in Cancun." He also talked Gilbert and others into buying a $99 add-on package called the "Fiesta Frenzy" that included a week's worth of "free cover charges" and "free beverages" at Cancun's best night clubs.

Gilbert's mother agreed to the trip, despite reservations about the drinking age. An A student, her daughter was active in many campus organizations including Students Against Drunk Driving.

"I thought she had the maturity and I thought this was a chaperoned trip and they would be watching her," Hilda Gilbert said. "I thought if somebody was drinking excessively, they would stop them."

On June 12, 1995, Gilbert and hundreds of other recent Florida high school grads were bused to Miami where they boarded planes for the short flight to Cancun. It quickly became obvious what the main activity would be.

Class Travel representatives "passed out some agenda of days and nights and where to go for what specials, because every night there was a drink special somewhere," Gilbert said. "The whole trip revolved around drinking. I mean it ended up that way.

"Everywhere we went there were either free or half-priced drinks, even when we went snorkeling, the "booze cruise' they called it. I mean there was always, always alcohol. There was a bar in the hotel, the hotel pool had three wet bars, all special discounts for Class Travel kids."

Gilbert noticed that Class Travel's young employees acted less like chaperones and more like avid party-goers who enjoyed drinking as much as the students did: "They were all cute . . . and the guys were very flirtatious." At one point, a Class Travel staffer summoned Gilbert out of the crowd to join a "beer funneling" contest.

"You put the funnel in your mouth and they made you pick a partner and the partner held the thing up and poured the beer in the top and you drank it."

Gilbert said she threw up, then continued partying.

[Special to the Times]
Alachua County Sheriff Steve Oelrich's 18-year-old son Nick died after falling from a balcony on a senior class trip to Cancun.

The day before the students were to go home, Gilbert took a sunset cruise where she met Nick Oelrich, son of the Alachua sheriff. They drank some alcoholic "pink stuff" on the boat, then went to a club called Fat Tuesday's where they ordered Long Island Iced Teas, made with vodka, rum and tequila, and stayed until around 4 a.m.

After returning to the hotel, they and one of Oelrich's friends downed shot after shot of straight rum until they realized, as Gilbert later put it, that "Wow, the whole bottle is gone."

Finally, about 7:30 a.m., she and Oelrich went upstairs. They had just begun to kiss when they tumbled over the railing.

The fall knocked out Gilbert. When she regained consciousness, she saw Oelrich lying next to her. "And he was snoring. And I remember, I was screaming at him, "Stop snoring, stop snoring and help us.' (But) he snored the whole time."

Gilbert knew there was "something really wrong" with her leg and that her hip felt "real heavy." She blacked out again, to be jarred awake by the sound of their ambulance colliding with another vehicle. The driver was so badly hurt that she and Oelrich had to be transferred to a second ambulance.

At the hospital, "a Class Travel person came in and kept asking for (my) phone number. I couldn't remember it. They kept asking me what Nick's name was. I couldn't remember it. I kept calling him Andy for some reason."

When Gilbert awoke, she saw two Class Travel employees. They demanded she sign a form before they would let her talk to anyone else.

"I remember being mad at them because they were insinuating this was my fault. . . . The woman said, "Your friends are waiting outside for you and we have your parents on the line but we can't let you talk to them or see them until you sign this piece of paper.' " Gilbert said she signed it without looking at it.

Around 2:30 that afternoon, Hilda Gilbert answered the phone.

"Well, your daughter is not dead," she recalled the Class Travel representative as saying. Gilbert was so upset she handed the phone to her husband, who was given the number of an air ambulance service.

Several hours after the accident, their only child was lying in the Hospital Americano with dirty, bloody hands, unable to communicate with the Spanish-speaking staff. At last, an American nurse arrived and took control. She criticized the doctors for not putting a neck brace on Gilbert and shouted at Mexican guards to let the girl onto the air ambulance even though she had no identification with her.

Gilbert was flown to West Palm Beach and taken to St. Mary's Medical Center, where she was reunited with her parents.

"I remember the doctor saying, "I want everything that was done in Mexico taken off her."'

'He wanted to die here'

About the time the Gilberts' phone rang, Sheriff Oelrich got a call. It began like so many he himself had made in a long career in police work: "Your son has been in an accident."

The Class Travel employee on the other end of the line sounded young. "He kept saying, "You need to get down here.' I said, "How far did he fall?' and he said, "Three stories.' I knew right then this did not sound good. I got a Spanish-speaking doctor to call down there and what they told him was not a pretty story."

Oelrich hired a Lear jet for $6,000 to fly himself and his wife to Cancun. It was dark when they reached the hospital, which was so primitive it reminded him of something "out of an old black-and-white movie from the '30s." Some of Nick's friends had gathered at the hospital, there was but no one from Class Travel.

Nick, a talented artist and athlete, never regained consciousness. The Oelriches checked into a nearby hotel and doctors called a couple of times during the night to say they didn't think he would make it.

"I was desperate to get him back to Gainesville," his father said. "I was at such an advantage because as sheriff I had all those contacts. Shands (Hospital) sent a jet ambulance down with a doctor and nurse-paramedics. I can only wonder what the average citizen would do under these circumstances."

Although Nick had been in the hospital less than a day, receiving only minimal care, Oelrich was billed $28,000, which he had to put on his American Express card. "At this point, whether it was $2,800 or $28,000 I didn't care. I just wanted to get him out of there.

"I knew he probably was not going to recover. They had more on their plane than this hospital had on its shelves. I told them that if he dies, not to mention it. If you die in Mexico there's a whole series of other things you have to pay to get a body out of there."

At Shands, Nick's bloody face was finally cleaned. His hands had felt stiff while he lay in the Mexican hospital: now they were softer and more relaxed.

"It was almost like he knew he was home," the sheriff said. "If he had to die, he wanted to die here."

The Oelriches agreed to let doctors take Nick's heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, part of his stomach and some bone and tissue. Nick -- a boy "who loved to share," his father says -- helped more than 100 people.

Two years after the death of his middle son, Oelrich proposed that the National Sheriffs' Association start a Gift of Life Foundation to raise awareness of the importance of organ and tissue donations. Since it began in 1997, the program has distributed more than 80,000 donor cards and 16,000 bumper stickers nationwide.

"This was the narrow silver lining," Oelrich says, "of what was absolutely the darkest cloud in my life."

[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
Rachael Mason, 18, on a senior class tour with her high school in Livonia, Mich., is treated for a hangover at AmeriMED, a clinic whose care is included in her vacation package.

'An unreasonably dangerous product'

Kelly Gilbert spent weeks in the hospital. That was followed by several more months learning how to walk again, first on crutches, then with a walker and finally a cane.

Although she had been accepted by the University of Florida, she was unable to move to Gainesville until the following spring. She became close to the Oelriches -- they took her to church and invited her to dinner -- but she found it painful literally and figuratively to walk around the huge Florida campus.

"Everywhere I went, everybody knew about the accident. . . . It was always, "Oh, you're the girl who fell off the balcony in Cancun.' You can only take so much of rehashing that sort of thing before it just gets to be too much."

Gilbert returned to the Naples-Fort Myers area to be near her parents. She enrolled at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in history and English two years ago. She is working in a law firm, waiting to hear if she has been accepted at Stetson Law School in St. Petersburg.

Although Gilbert, 24, can walk again, her left leg and hip remain damaged enough that she likely will need costly medical care for the rest of her life.

A year after the fall, Gilbert sued Class Travel International. The suit alleges the company's Fiesta Frenzy package was a "defective and unreasonably dangerous" product and that Class Travel violated Florida's 21-year drinking age by providing alcoholic beverages to Gilbert.

The suit also contends the company's literature indicated Class Travel's staff would "adequately supervise and provide for (Gilbert's) safety and well-being."

In her deposition, Class Travel's co-founder Kelly Millard was questioned by Gilbert's attorney about the supervision on trips.

Q: A student that goes on one of your trips can get totally inebriated . . . and you have no duty to tell that student to stop, is that correct?

A: Whether it has to do with duty or not, it has to do with authority. If the student is 18, the student has the right to choose whatever they want to do."

Q: Do you think that your documents, by stating that you . . . deal with emergencies, provide well-qualified associates with nursing credentials, CPR and first-aid training, Spanish, plus years of experience may imply to a parent that you do look after the safety of the children that go on your trips?

A: I don't believe so.

Q: Is part of the service (Class Travel provides) that students are safe in general?

A: I don't believe so.

Millard could not be reached for comment. Class Travel's other founder, Marc Radow, would not answer a reporter's questions, including whether the company had changed its policies.

Since the 1995 accident, Cancun's tourism industry has put greater emphasis on safety and better medical care, local authorities say.

Signs in Spanish and English advise: "Be cool while in Cancun and be careful" and give a 911-type emergency hotline number. Travel companies have bilingual staffers who students say are attentive to their needs.

Those on package tours also get a white bracelet for AmeriMED, a modern, U.S.-owned clinic that opened two years ago along the main hotel strip. The same group of U.S. investors is close to finishing a 25-bed hospital with intensive care units and sophisticated equipment.

"Now these kids are very fortunate we are here," said Dr. Victor Alvara, regional director of AmeriMED.

However, students continue to die, including two last weekend: one by drowning, the other in a motorcycle wreck.

Other students are injured seriously, among them a 21-year-old U.S. man who was bitten on the leg by a crocodile after he urinated in a lagoon near a popular club. Drug overdoses also are on the rise.

Local authorities say the number of incidents is small considering that more than 325,000 Americans visit Cancun each year. And no matter how diligent the travel company, they say, it is impossible to keep tabs on kids 24 hours a day.

"I think the number is very low," said Dr. Alberto Sola, medical director of AmeriMED. "These things are going to happen anywhere in the world."

But Sheriff Oelrich and Kelly Gilbert think far more adult supervision is needed, especially when young people have such easy access to seemingly unlimited quantities of alcohol.

"They should have had us in our rooms at a certain time or locked us down," Gilbert said in her deposition. "You know, that's how all the other events that we've been chaperoned before had gone. It was always, you do stuff, you do what you want to an extent and then there's a stopping point.

"And there should have been a stopping point. There should have been somebody to say, "No."'

-- Times staff writer Jorge Sanchez and Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

Before they go

If your child is considering a spring break or graduation package trip, you should:

Be aware the legal drinking age in Mexico and the Bahamas is 18 and is rarely enforced.

Make sure you have adequate insurance to cover hospitalization and air ambulance services if needed. Medical care in Third World countries is often primitive compared to that in the United States.

Read all literature from the travel company. Many companies have disclaimers seeking to absolve themselves of any responsibility in case of injury or death. Also check the company's Web site if it has one. Web sites often tout "all you can drink" specials that are not mentioned in literature intended for a parents' eyes.

See if any complaints have been filed with the Better Business Bureau and consumer fraud office in the city or state where the travel company is located. You can also check the Web site of the Federal Trade Commission, which has pending actions against many companies. Go to wwww.ftc.gov and search for "Trip Trap" and "Travel Unravel" for the latest information.

See if the U.S. State Department has issued travel warnings for your child's destination. In February, the department issued a special fact sheet on Cancun.

-- Times staff writer

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