A Tighter Safety Net

Richard Gene Lopez III, holding a gun to the head of a 17-year-old female student after he invaded the campus of Hueneme High School and fired several shots, told his hostage that he wanted to die but couldn’t shoot himself because he wanted to go to heaven.

An Oxnard police marksman, seeing no other choice, obliged by firing a fatal bullet into Lopez’s head.

Thus ended a life of misery and pain that had stymied all of the system’s efforts to help, a life that lasted just 17 years.

Lopez’s actions Wednesday clearly brought undeserved terror to his innocent hostage and scores of other Hueneme High students who witnessed the lunchtime confrontation in the school’s central quad. Their actions, and those of everyone else involved, were exemplary. Thanks to quick thinking, calm reaction and a lot of good luck, no one but Lopez was killed.

We have nothing but praise for the Oxnard Police Department SWAT team, which had the skill, training and equipment to do what needed to be done at that moment. School officials also responded coolly and compassionately to the crisis as they had been trained to do following the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.

And yet we are left with the conviction that Ventura County is not doing all it should to provide broad-based community support for its young people--especially those with even a fraction of the troubles that haunted Richard Lopez.

Without question, his case was exceptional. But how many Ventura County youths are at risk because we have chosen to give too little funding and attention to prevention rather than law enforcement “cures”?

No government program could have spared Richard Lopez from being brought into the world by two 17-year-old parents who already had another child and whose marriage failed even before Richard was born. Only lessons in values and biology taught at home, church and school can change the tragic pattern of unfortunate children being born to unprepared parents.

When Richard’s father refused to pay child support, Ventura County prosecutors tried to collect. But 12 years of attempts including fines and even jail time did not work. Richard’s father eventually broke into his ex-wife’s house and beat her in front of the children. For that he was sentenced to state prison, one of a lengthy string of criminal convictions.

Richard himself was in trouble with the law from the age of 5, when he was scolded in Ventura County juvenile court. By the time he was 9, he was in juvenile hall for running away, according to the grandmother who later took him in.

Perhaps the community’s greatest failing was that Richard Lopez did not get the intense, sustained treatment he needed for his mental illness. He was repeatedly treated and placed in group homes, but the system was not able to protect him--or others--from his rage. Ventura County, like the state of California, devotes too few people and too few dollars to addressing the mental and social problems of its young people who run afoul of the law.

It is too late for Richard Lopez. The best efforts of his extended family, the justice system and the meager resources of the mental health system could not give him what he needed. What is called for is more support for both government agencies and private-sector organizations that work with young people.

The day after the shooting, at a previously scheduled meeting of the Ojai Valley Youth Foundation, executive director Caryn Bosson said, “Our goal is to weave the net of community support so tightly that no child can fall through.”

That net is not woven from SWAT teams, metal detectors and zero tolerance for troubled kids.

It is woven from government decisions to make support for young people a top priority, and from the willingness of adults to give their time, attention and respect to the young people of their own neighborhoods.