Teen’s Shooting Culminated a Short, Tragic Life

The short life of Richard “Midget” Lopez was a tragedy in the making for years.

Before he took a Hueneme High School student hostage Wednesday, prompting a police marksman to kill him, the troubled 17-year-old had survived stretches of homelessness and had been treated repeatedly for mental illness, authorities said.

His father was a longtime criminal in and out of prison. His remarried mother had grown so frustrated that she sometimes refused to see him.

The boy was scolded in Ventura County juvenile court for mischief at age 5 and placed in Ventura County juvenile hall by the time he was 9 for running away, his fraternal grandmother said. Suffering from hallucinations and hearing voices, he was in and out of group homes.

“I want everybody to know my grandson had a mental problem; he was on psych medication, and I have the bottles here,” said Lopez’s grandmother, Lydia Lopez of Barstow, with whom he lived for most of the last year.

“He used to hear voices that told him to run and jump off the bridge, and he tried to jump off three times,” she said. “He needed help, and I cried out for it. What good is it now? He’s dead.”

Lydia Lopez and her husband, also named Richard, placed their grandson on a bus back to his mother and maternal grandparents in Oxnard early this week, she said, after the teen showed up at their Barstow house with a girlfriend from Oxnard.

But they had a change of heart, and two hours before the Wednesday shooting sent a family member out to find the boy to tell him to come home and begin to work with his grandfather, a long-haul truck driver.

“I sent for Richard,” Lydia Lopez said. “But they couldn’t find him. It was too late.”

The teenager may have suffered, too, because his father, Richard Lopez Jr., 34, refused to pay child support repeatedly in the 1980s, according to court records. The father pleaded guilty to a string of criminal offenses--drug use and petty theft--before 1995, when he was sentenced to state prison for felony spousal abuse. In 1999, drug offenses and a burglary put him back in state prison, where he remains.

Lydia Lopez said the teenager spent most of the last two years with her, because his mother, Cynthia Hernandez, could no longer deal with him.

“He was too much trouble for her,” the grandmother said. “All of his court reports say it reflects the way he was brought up.”

The slain teenager’s family home in south Oxnard, adjacent to gang hangout Durley Park, was overrun with relatives and friends Thursday.

One elderly man declined comment for the family. “We’ve been told not to say anything,” he said.

Oxnard Police Sgt. Jim Seitz, who heads the shooting investigation, said years of trouble and mental illness apparently made Richard Lopez III suicidal.

Often Spoke About Suicide

“He’d talked about committing suicide often for the last couple of years, according to his friends and family members,” Seitz said.

Oxnard SWAT team members fatally shot the young gunman after he told a 17-year-old hostage that he was distraught over family problems but couldn’t kill himself for religious reasons, so he would force police to do it for him.

The day after the terrifying incident, witnessed by 150 students in the school’s central quad, police said they had a better picture of who they were dealing with.

They confirmed the portrait of Lopez, a short, slightly built associate of a south Oxnard gang, as a troubled teen who had spent the last couple of years bouncing between Barstow and Oxnard.

School officials in both cities said he had apparently not attended classes since mid-1998, when he enrolled at Rio Mesa High School near Oxnard but failed to show up for the fall semester.

The last time Oxnard family members saw him was Dec. 30, Seitz said, and they had no idea he was back in town until he was killed.

“When he was here he was basically not staying with anybody,” Seitz said. “We have preliminary reports that he had mental health treatment over the years in Van Nuys, Barstow and in Ventura County.”

The teenager, who had a long history of minor crime, was being treated at a halfway house in Van Nuys until a few months ago, when he went absent without leave, authorities said. He had been scheduled to appear today in Ventura County Superior Court to answer a charge of handgun possession last summer.

Seitz said he did not know the details of Lopez’s final arrest or his criminal history.

But friends and family members described a youth so troubled he would shout at total strangers to pick fights and who desperately sought the comfort of his fractured family but did not consistently receive it.

Friend Peter Reveles, a 17-year-old who lives next to the teenager’s maternal grandparents in Oxnard, said Lopez was likable, outgoing and had friends outside his southside Oxnard gang associates.

“But he was pretty crazy sometimes. He had a temper,” Reveles said. “He would get into all kinds of stuff. He was just starting to calm down. He didn’t go out as much as he used to. Didn’t hang out with those guys as much.”

Reveles recalled an incident several months ago when Lopez began shouting at a passing car, prompting the man in the car to get out. They almost came to blows before Lopez’s grandmother came out and got between them.

The last time Reveles saw his slain friend was Thanksgiving, he said.

“He said he was doing all right but he just wanted to come home,” he said. “But he said he had to calm down. He said, ‘It would be better for my family.’ ”

Richard Gene Lopez III was born Oct. 20, 1983, in Port Hueneme. His parents were both 17 and already had one child, a baby girl. They were married just three months and separated five months before Lopez was born.

Child Support Was Lacking

As a 2-month-old, he was supported by welfare and remained so most of his young life, court records show. Prosecutors spent 12 years trying to wrest back child support from his father, who in 1987 owed the County of Ventura more than $23,000 for the boy and his sister.

Prosecutors filed criminal charges against the father twice in 1987 over the child support dispute. He served two jail sentences and was ordered to pay $102 a month. But the child support was still unpaid by 1991.

“I know I’ve messed up,” the father acknowledged in a written statement that year. “I want a new life and I feel I can do that with the help of the Lord.”

But records show that Richard Lopez Jr. went on to commit new and more violent crimes. In April 1995, after remarrying and getting a second divorce, he broke into his ex-wife’s house in Oxnard and beat her in front of their three children, ages 7, 5 and 3.

The father pleaded guilty to abusing his children’s mother and was sentenced to three years in state prison. He later was convicted of using illegal drugs in 1997 and 1998 and of burglary in 1999. He is serving a four-year sentence in the medium-security Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.

Meanwhile, the father’s teenage son was having horrendous problems--dropping out of school, suffering from mental illness and ending up in trouble.

“He needed help bad,” grandmother Lydia Lopez said. “When I lived in Oxnard, I cried to the police. I went to the child development people. I went to all the meetings. Then I brought him back to Barstow.”

The teenager’s family hoped the move more than a year ago would turn his life around.

“Grandma and me started taking him to church with us,” said cousin Nellie Lopez, 40, who lived near the grandparents’ Barstow home. “He was a kid who needed love.”

Lydia Lopez said she gained legal custody about a year ago.

“The court issued him to me,” she said. “He stayed here until the day he left and never came back. They had a party at a motel in Oxnard. . . . They arrested him with a loaded gun.”

After a stay in the Van Nuys halfway house, the teenager bolted again a couple of months ago, authorities said.

He returned to Barstow for a while, then visited Oxnard in late December, living on the streets.

“When he’s not allowed at his mom’s he goes straight to his grandma’s, then [sometimes] he chooses to go to the street,” Lydia Lopez said.

Finally on Wednesday, he chose a dramatic way to exit this world.

He told his hostage, Lorena Gonzalez, not to worry. He wanted police to kill him, because he said he couldn’t go to heaven if he shot himself, the hostage’s father said.

“He was a sick little boy,” cousin Nellie Lopez said. “If they had known his background, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

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Times staff writers Tina Dirmann, Tracy Wilson and Margaret Talev, correspondent Holly J. Wolcott and Times researcher Penny Love contributed to this story.

* PREVENTIVE ACTIONS

Hueneme High officials credited security and planning for averting disaster. B2