Sense of Adventure Led 3 to Their Deaths in Wilds

They were adventurers--young, fearless, inclined to choose risk over caution.

When Arthur Noriega, Jeremy Warwick and William Strother set out 11 days ago for a night of joy-riding in the hills southeast of Hemet, the trio figured they were in for just another foray into the rugged but familiar hinterlands of Riverside County.

It didn’t work out that way.

When their pickup bottomed out on a narrow dirt trail in the San Bernardino National Forest, the friends found themselves stranded, without water, flares, a flashlight. Without a way out.

They tried mightly to survive, the evidence suggests. There were the remains of a campfire, made of socks and sticks, that looked like an effort to create smoke to bring help. There were notes scrawled in the sand and trail markers--messages left by each victim as he fought through the thick brush, searching for a route back to civilization.

But it was the footprints that told the story for detectives. They led away from the pickup and then back, in a giant, fruitless circle.

“It looks like they remained by the truck for two or three days, hoping someone would spot them, and then tried to make it out,” Riverside County Sheriff’s Sgt. David Donowho said. “By then they were hot, dehydrated and weak. . . . They’d lost their wits.”

The bodies were found earlier this week, scattered within a three-mile radius of the truck and partially hidden by brush that might have been used as a screen from the searing desert heat. Investigators say there were no signs of foul play, and autopsies were expected to confirm their conclusion.

That leaves the victims’ families to wonder: How could three buddies, whose favorite pastime was romping through the outback, die this way?

“Artie knew those mountains, those roads, like the back of his hand,” said Noriega’s cousin, Victor, 21, who grew up in San Jacinto and now lives in San Jose. “We just can’t understand how they couldn’t find their way back.”

He and Artie, 19, were “like brothers,” Victor said, and they often roamed the mountain ranges that rise steeply from the floor of the Hemet Valley.

“He was a mountain kid, Artie was,” Victor recalled, his voice unsteady. “He was experienced. It just seems impossible for him to die this way.”

Dean Warwick can’t figure it either. His curly-haired son, Jeremy, 19, was an explorer at heart--the “kind of kid who would go down any road that he hadn’t taken before.” But he wasn’t foolish.

“He goofed up now and then, like a lot of kids, but he had sense,” said Warwick, an unemployed television salesman. “It’s a mystery.”

Warwick last saw his son at 1:30 a.m. Sept. 9. Jeremy had pulled up outside the family home in his 1972 Mazda pickup, and invited his father to check out the new mag wheels he had bought for the vehicle.

“Then he drove off, and that’s the last I saw of him,” Warwick recalled. “I assumed they were going off to party. They liked to do that, just hang out together a lot.”

Because Jeremy had a habit of “taking off, sometimes for days at a time,” Warwick didn’t worry much as the days passed and his son failed to return. But across town, Bertha Noriega knew something wasn’t right.

Artie, too, was a roamer, but he called his mother every day, without fail. As the days passed and the phone remained silent, Noriega became worried. By Sept. 12, she was frantic, and she and her husband, Jose, filed a missing person’s report with the San Jacinto Police Department. Warwick and Beatrice Strother, who had last seen her sandy-haired, 17-year-old son Sept. 8, followed suit.

It was not until Sunday--one week after the youths vanished--that a trace was found. A U.S. Forest Service helicopter crew, flying over the Hixon Flat area southeast of Hemet, spotted a pickup truck.

After hiking through the thick underbrush, searchers found the vehicle. Its four tires were flat, and Sgt. Donowho said investigators counted 16 spots where the truck had become stuck along the trail.

Noriega’s body was found not far from the vehicle, while Strother’s body was in a ravine about three miles to the west. Warwick’s body was discovered Tuesday, two miles north of the truck, in a gully. He had made it to within about one mile of Bautista Road, which, although unpaved, is well-traveled.

Warwick said the youths had been friends since junior high and were “peas in a pod.” They weren’t saints, he said, and were still struggling to find a niche in life.

“Artie and Jeremy dropped out of (San Jacinto High) school, but they were good kids, generous and kind,” Warwick said.

Beatrice Strother said her son, who lived with her at a residential hotel, was on a home-study program.

“The thing that really gets me is that Artie called me, just a couple days before they went out there,” Victor Noriega said. “He wanted to move to San Jose and get a job. He wanted to get his life together.”