Image of Strength Is Shattered by Youth’s Suicide

He was 16 but mature beyond his years, an exemplary ROTC captain and budding karate expert whose close friends at Crenshaw High School sought him out for advice and emotional support when their lives were going awry.

But when Rahsaan Thorpe’s own life recently went awry, he told no one, preferring to maintain the strong image that had been put to the acid test when one of his sisters died in 1991. The silence festered terribly this time and yielded tragic results: On the morning of April 3, Thorpe hanged himself in the garage of his Leimert Park home. Police have ruled the death a suicide, yet no one close to Thorpe could cite any clear reason why the teen-ager would take his life.

“He was a father figure, a big brother to me. He talked me out of killing myself more than once,” said Jason Hepburn, 15, a Crenshaw freshman who mourned his friend at a memorial service last week. “As many times as we went to him, why didn’t he come to us?”

Thorpe was remembered by many as a high-spirited but serious youth enrolled in Crenshaw’s gifted students magnet program with a heavy academic load that set him on the fast track to higher education.

Bright and self-motivated, Thorpe once grew impatient with his academic progress--it was too slow, he said--and took accelerated Spanish and trigonometry courses at Los Angeles Trade Technical College while attending Crenshaw. He also studied martial arts and was beginning to instruct other students at Crenshaw.

At Audubon Middle School, he frequently got into trouble with his homeroom teacher for selling lollipops that he made at home, a business that proved popular among his fellow students and delighted the enterprising Thorpe.

“He had a mind of his own. He knew what he wanted,” said Carla Amos, Thorpe’s mother. “He met challenges head-on. He was an exceptional child, the one I didn’t have to worry about. He was going to continue on, no matter what. And if you needed him, he was there for you.”

Amos is still coping with the death of J’Neane Griffie, her 21-year-old daughter who was sexually assaulted and shot execution-style near Compton College in September, 1991.

Rahsaan and J’Neane were close, said Amos, and her son grieved long afterward. But Amos said she thought Rahsaan finally had put the pain of the loss behind him. She admitted that the night before she discovered his body in the garage, he had gone out for a long walk to clear his head, as he was wont to do.

Sometimes those walks turned into long bus rides, trips that lasted hours and frequently took him to the end of the bus line. “He had done that before, so I wasn’t too worried at first,” she said. “We might know how a person reacts, but we can’t ever tell.”

Amos said Thorpe really blossomed after enrolling at Markham Medical Magnet Middle School in Watts. Nurtured by a host of teachers, particularly English teacher Yvonne Divans Hutchinson, Thorpe discovered a love of poetry and literature that led to his participation in an annual book-reading marathon.

Rokeya Bogan 14, said she’ll remember her fellow ROTC member as a wonderful friend who kept her in line but also knew how to live it up, whether he was at the beach or at the military ball they both attended last month. “He was such a nice person, you’d never think he’d do anything like this,” she said at the memorial service.

Bogan’s friend Jonee Williams, Thorpe’s most recent girlfriend, said the suicide confounded her as well. “He had so much to live for,” she said, shaking her head. “When I had problems, when my mom and I didn’t get along, he always helped me. He said, ‘Don’t let things bother you so much.’ It hurts so much to see him do this.”

In addition to his mother, Thorpe is survived by his father, Benjamin Thorpe; a sister, Anturinita, and a brother, Maurice.