Barrington Police Chief John LaCross
Providence Jounal photo / Bob Thayer

Barbara O’Neil said she wanted to surprise her 15-year-old daughter and her friends at their birthday sleepover by arriving home early with pizzas. She was the one surprised that night last December, she said, when she found her Lincoln house and backyard filled with teenagers and beer.

Her daughter told her that many of the guests had invited themselves. “She was afraid because of peer pressure to tell them to leave,” O’Neil said. “She should have had said ‘this is out of control, you’re wrecking our house, get out of here.’ [But] she’d be blackballed at school.”

The neighbors had already called the police, who arrived shortly after O’Neil did. According to a police report, teens scaled the fence and ran. O’Neil, the report said, tried to hide the beer cans and kept asking the officers if they needed to report the incident.

“I said that out of fear,” O’Neil said this week. “It was a nightmare. If it was in your home, your daughter, wouldn’t you want to protect your daughter and discipline your daughter yourself? Wouldn’t you want to handle it yourself?”

In the end, O’Neil was the only one charged, after teenagers there told the police that she’d given them permission to stay. She was fined $350, the minimum under the so-called “social host law,” passed by the General Assembly last year to punish adults who allow underage drinking at their residences.

It took three years to get the law through the General Assembly — and the final version was weaker than its original draft. Still, it was praised by law enforcement as a step toward curbing teen drinking. The penalty for a first offense is a maximum fine of $1,000 with a possibility of up to six months in prison; a third offense is a felony.

And yet, after all the promise, a Journal review of District Court records found that just three people have been charged under the new law. No one has been charged this year.

Several teenagers have died this year in alcohol-related accidents, focusing renewed attention on underage drinking.

A Barrington teenager was indicted this week on a charge of second-degree murder in an alcohol-related boating accident in July that killed a classmate. Last month, La Salle Academy suspended 31 students after learning they’d been at a house party in Bristol where alcohol and marijuana were used. The father of the girl who hosted the party told the police that he’d been sleeping . The attorney general’s office is investigating to determine whether the father should be charged under the social host law.

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said he didn’t know why the law hasn’t been used more often.

He wondered if there are fewer house parties. “You can’t tell what you’ve stopped just by having the law on the books,” he said yesterday.

But police chiefs from the three departments that have used the law say that there aren’t fewer house parties — just fewer parties where the parents are home.

“Kids are still drinking, but they’re being more discreet,” said Barrington Chief John LaCross. “We do have house parties, but the parents are not in the house. The parents are away for the weekend.”

The law was prompted by an incident in April 2002, when a teenage boy who’d been drinking at a Barrington house party drove into a tree. The police were able to charge the man who’d bought the keg, but not the mother who allowed the party. Police chiefs say one reason the law isn’t applied more often is that budget constraints have cut back the extra “party patrols” that helped them curb house parties. Most small towns have just a few officers on at night, when the parties happen, which makes it difficult to corral dozens of fleeing teenagers. The Barrington police used the new law last December when they arrested a woman who was home when her daughter hosted a party in her County Road apartment. The woman, Kathleen Munroe, pleaded no contest and was fined $350 and placed on probation for six months. But this July, the Barrington police realized the law was flawed after breaking up a house party and realizing that they couldn’t charge the mother, who was home, because the party was in the backyard. The law says an adult can be charged when the offense is “in his or her residence.”

Lynch and the police chiefs intend to ask the General Assembly to fix the “backyard loophole” but he said the law is a start. But the slow deliberations at the State House are frustrating to Portsmouth Deputy Chief Paul Valente, whose department was the first in Rhode Island to use the social host law. “The law is turning into a spider web,” Valente said. “We fix one piece and another piece grows. Every year, we have to fix something.”

He’s not convinced that the state legislators really want to crack down on the overall problem of drunken-driving. “You have zero tolerance on shooting somebody, and you don’t have zero tolerance on people driving vehicles while drinking, and that’s just as bad as firing a gun. You still kill people,” Valente said.

The Portsmouth case began in August 2006 when the police broke up an underage drinking party at 117 Blackpoint Lane. They were called to the home by an angry parent who found her 14-year-old daughter there, passed out drunk.

According to the police report, the homeowner, Joanne Harvey, told the police she’d gone to bed and didn’t know about teenagers drinking — even though there were dozens of teenagers at the house with alcohol. Her own daughter was passed out on a trampoline, according to the police report; Harvey told an officer that her daughter “just sleeps on the trampoline a lot.”

Over the next several months, as the Portsmouth police interviewed teenagers who’d attended the party, they heard a variety of stories. Some said Harvey knew about the drinking. Others denied any drinking at all. One told the police that someone had told them not to talk to the police. Even the mother who’d reported the party wanted to withdraw her complaint because she didn’t want to get Harvey in trouble.

The police issued a summons for Harvey nearly four months after the party. She pleaded not guilty in March, and a month later — eight months after the party — a judge in Newport District Court filed the case for a year. Harvey did not return a call from The Journal this week.

Valente said he wasn’t surprised that some adults try to cover up underage drinking parties — they’re concerned about their own kids being “social outcasts” with their peers if they speak out. When parents are involved, “the first words that come out of their mouth is, ‘Hey, we used to do it,’ ” Valente said.

One of the sponsors of the social host law could say the same thing. State Rep. Jan Malik remembered drinking when he was a teenager. As a father, he said he allowed underage drinking parties at his house when his two children, now 24 and 25, graduated from high school. He took away the other teenagers’ car keys and stayed up with them all night, keeping an eye on them in his backyard.

Malik said he thought he was being responsible. Now, he said, he knows he was wrong. “Things have changed over the years,” said Malik, who plans to work with Lynch and Chief LaCross to improve the social host law.

“I’m not losing hope. The kids want to change,” LaCross said. “The parents are the frontline soldiers, but it’s got to be the youths. Too many kids that they love have lost their lives, and they realize that something’s got to give.”

As for Barbara O’Neil, the woman charged in the Lincoln case, she said she’d talked to her daughter about the dangers of drinking and driving. Being charged for her daughter’s drinking party was another lesson. “Instead of her being disciplined, I got the brunt of it,” O’Neil said, adding she believes the police wanted to make an example of her.

She has her own advice for parents: “Be open with your kids, talk to them, and know what’s going on in your children’s lives. Try to make sure they understand that peer pressure is not something they need to be afraid of. And, keep your liquor locked up.”

amilkovi@projo.com