Friends’ Deaths Fill Teen’s Scrapbook : Violence: In the last two years, 16-year-old Nicole Richardson has cut out and pasted stories on 10 of her pals in the sad chronicle. Seven of them are dead.

Sixteen-year-old Nicole Richardson’s scrapbook is full of newspaper clippings about the kind of horrors most people living in the inner city try to forget:

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But Nicole doesn’t want to forget these victims. They were all her friends, killed or hurt on the streets outside her window.

“I just wanted to keep things of them,” she said. “I just started putting them in the book. I look at this almost every day, to remember.”

In the last two years, Nicole has cut out and pasted stories on 10 of her friends in the sad chronicle. Seven are dead.

“I don’t want more people in here,” she said.

The first clipping recounts the August, 1990, drive-by shooting of Marvin O’Brien, just a few blocks from Nicole’s home in Dorchester, a working-class enclave south of Boston’s downtown.

Nicole mainly remembers Marvin smiling, always cracking jokes.

The night he was killed, she was walking with her aunt when they heard gunfire. “When we got to the top of the street over there we saw them,” she said.

“When I saw him I didn’t really believe it. I just walked by, started crying.”

The boy apparently had been in a street gang. Nicole didn’t attend the funeral because she worried that gang members might show up.

Marvin O’Brien was the first person she had ever known who was killed on the streets, and she saved the stories about him.

When several friends were killed within the space of a few months last spring, she began assembling the scrapbook.

Nicole, a quiet girl who wants to be a carpenter and build low-income housing, put great care into making the book. On its opening pages are copies of the Lord’s Prayer, a poem, and the lyrics of the song, “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye,” by Boyz II Men, one of her favorite groups.

Nicole had never known such bloodshed until her family came to Boston from Charleston, S.C. Her father died when she was young, and Nicole’s mother, Vicki, moved north eight years ago to be near her mother. Vicki Richardson had six children to rear, as well as a niece and nephew she took in after her sister succumbed to a drug habit.

Vicki Richardson keeps Nicole inside often, keeps track of her friends--and worries.

“I still can’t believe some of them are gone,” she said of the children in Nicole’s book. “I used to talk to them, tell them, ‘You’ve got to get out of that stuff, leave drugs and stuff alone. It’s not good.’ And they said, ‘Oh, I’m not worried about anything, I can take care of myself.’ And the next thing you know, boom, they’re gone.”

Nicole is quick to defend her friends. Most were “trying to get out of this, get away from all this violence,” she said.

But in a neighborhood where 10th-graders carry weapons to school, the wrong word or a misinterpreted glance can mean trouble.

“You never know when something’s going to happen,” Nicole said. “All you can do is be on alert. Watch your back and watch who you talk to.”