Teenager Slain by Police Suffered Mental Illness, Authorities Say

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 is a longtime criminal who has been in and out of prison. His remarried mother had grown so frustrated that she eventually refused to see him.

The boy was scolded in Ventura County Juvenile Court for mischief at age 5, and placed in the county’s 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 said she and her husband, also named Richard, placed their grandson on a bus back to his mother and maternal grandparents in Oxnard early this week after he showed up at their house with a girlfriend from Oxnard.

But they had a change of heart, and just two hours before the shooting Wednesday, they sent a family member to find the boy and tell him to come home.

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

The boy’s 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--until 1995, when he went 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.”

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

“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 incident, witnessed by 150 students in the school’s central quad, police had a sharper picture of Lopez, a short, slightly built associate of a south Oxnard gang who had spent the last couple of years bouncing back and forth 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 boy, 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 was to have appeared 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.

But friends and family members described a youth so troubled that he would shout at total strangers to pick fights, and one 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 and outgoing and had nongang friends.

“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 to get out. They almost came to blows before Lopez’s grandmother got between them.

The last time Reveles saw his 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.’ ”

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Times staff writers Tina Dirmann and Tracy Wilson and correspondent Holly J. Wolcott contributed to this story.