Mystery Surrounds Death of U.S. Student in Moscow : Russia: Police call it suicide, coroner calls it murder. Classmate who found the body thinks it was an accident.

An American exchange student from Brown University has been found dead outside his Moscow dormitory, and although police insist that the death was a suicide, the coroner’s report calls it murder.

News reports quoting unnamed faculty members and other sources at the Russian State University for the Humanities suggest that the death of Anthony Riccio, 21, may have been the work of local gangsters who had been renting out space from a university that has a reputation for financial improprieties. But a classmate who found the body said he thought it was an accident.

Police insist that the outgoing and energetic young man who had been studying Russian since grade school hanged himself from a balcony two floors above his dormitory room just 10 days after arriving in Moscow. Riccio’s family and classmates call that an unlikely scenario.

Anthony Riccio loved Russia. When he was in grade school, he told his father, “How can we have peace with Russia if we can’t speak to them?”

Riccio’s death comes on the eve of a U.S.-Russian summit at which Russia’s efforts to combat its soaring crime and lawlessness are sure to be on the agenda.

President Boris N. Yeltsin hopes to convince the West that Russia is now stable, ready for full economic partnership and ripe for Western investment.

But first, Western governments need assurances that Russia can stop the dangerous leakage of nuclear materials from the creaky former Soviet military complex. And Western businesses need assurances that Russia is curbing the organized crime that has become a serious threat to economic development here.

“There is only one problem: the bandits. The gangsters,” Izvestia economics columnist Mikhail Berger said in an interview last week. “Neither the taxes nor the political risks create problems as serious as the gangsters do. . . . This is a real national problem.”

But Riccio’s father, John Riccio, said he would not want his son’s death to discourage travel and exchange programs in Russia.

“This could have happened in New York City or Boston,” Riccio said in a telephone interview from his home in Glastonbury, Conn. “We would support these programs. If we had to do it again, we’d do it again--and Anthony certainly would.”

Riccio described his son, who was a junior in the Russian studies program at Brown University in Providence, R.I., as “very effervescent” and “unique.”

He said he did not dismiss the possibility of suicide but said that was a side of his son’s personality he had never seen.

The younger Riccio arrived in Moscow on Sept. 10 to study under a program run by the American Collegiate Consortium and moved into the dormitory on the southern outskirts of Moscow on Sept. 14, the Moscow Times reported.

John Riccio said he had a telephone conversation with his son Sept. 12 and that he sounded “normal.”

“He was a very nice guy,” a dormitory suite-mate named Maxim said Saturday. “He liked listening to (the rock band) Queen and was very joyful. He liked jokes and to laugh.” He said Riccio had been homesick a day or two before his death but said he thought the death was accidental, not murder or suicide.

Police Chief Investigator Rafik M. Khuseinov said Riccio went from his 14th-floor room to the 16th floor Tuesday and tried to hang himself from the balcony but was too tall. So he climbed onto the balcony railing and threw himself off, Khuseinov said, breaking the rope as he fell.

“This is definitely not a murder case,” the investigator said. “Nobody heard any noise or struggle or shouts.” Moreover, Riccio had little money, he said.

Last week, authorities said a rope was found around Riccio’s neck. But Maxim, who said he was among the students who found Anthony’s body in a pool of blood about 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, said there was no rope, and the coroner’s report, which calls the death a homicide, does not mention one. In the Russian army, where hazing deaths are not uncommon, the official cause of death is nearly always listed as suicide by hanging.

Maxim said Riccio had been in the dorm only six days, knew no one, had no enemies and was not even expensively dressed.

“He was a smoker and used to go to a balcony to smoke,” he said. “I really do not know why he did not go to our balcony.”

But Maxim disputed media reports that “strangers” were living in the dormitory, and he said police and university officials make security spot checks on the dormitory in the middle of the night.

Five other American students who lived in the dorm were moved to another dormitory.

John Riccio said the family intends to have an autopsy performed in the United States.