He expressed himself with paints and colored pencils: a boy in flames and the words "The Voices Made Me Do It."

The signs were all there, but no one put them together until Richie was dead.

Richie was 19 and only a week away from his long-awaited high school graduation, about to report to the Marines, when he decided to kill himself.

On the evening of Monday, Jan. 19, he set out from his home in Santee and headed for the Wal-Mart, about two miles away, a can of paint thinner in hand.

He walked down a dirt path behind the store and found a clearing in the trees near the San Diego River bottom. He took off his clothes and poured the liquid over his body. Then he flicked a lighter and set himself ablaze, searing the bare branches above him.

His friends and family say Richie couldn't have known how much his death was going to hurt -- him or them. He was always a sensitive boy, physically and emotionally.

He probably didn't realize that skin has more nerve endings than any other organ. With only the soles of his feet and the tip of his nose left unscorched, it would be 11 1/2 hours before Richie would die at the UCSD Burn Center.

And he probably didn't know that more than 100 teen-agers would be so horrified and upset by his death, they would clutch each other and cry at his funeral.

He probably didn't realize how deeply his final act would shock his parents. They never even knew he was depressed.

Only after his death, when his friends and family came together to look for answers, did they begin to understand the puzzle that was Richie Newman.

"I feel like I have a lot of new family members. They were just Richie's friends before," said his mother, Sherry Newman. "I know that would make Richie really happy."

Richie was born in a Poway hospital, three weeks late, just like his two brothers. He weighed a strapping 10 pounds, 3 ounces, and had a hole in his heart that finally closed when he was 12.

Richie's mother and father separated before he was born, so he was welcomed into the world by his mother and his aunt, Priscilla Jaynes.

When he was 11 months old, his mother brought her boyfriend, Dan Newman, home to meet the family. Dan stood over Richie's crib and the baby uttered his first words: "Da-da."

"I always felt that Richie picked Dan to be his father," Sherry Newman said as she shared details of her son's life with his friends and relatives in her living room. "Dan might not have created Richie, but Dan was Richie's daddy all the way."

In 1979, little Richie won the diaper derby at the Del Mar Fair. His mother held up a corn dog and he crawled across that mat faster than you could say Oscar Mayer.

"He was on the news that night, so he's made the news twice," said Jaynes, 49. "He made the news the night he died."

In 1980, Sherry, Richie and his older brother, Steven, moved from Escondido to live with Dan Newman in Bremerton, Wash., where the Navy transferred him. Sherry and Dan were married that year.

Because of Newman's Navy career, Richie would end up attending 10 schools, the last being Santana High School in Santee.

He had trouble with classroom learning, but in the fifth grade he was tested and deemed "gifted."

In the 11th grade, he was tested again. His IQ was 128, above average by 28 points.

But he still had problems in school. He earned D's in English, history and science. Sometimes he didn't pass at all.

Richie enrolled at Santana High in 1995, and he signed up for a mix of regular and self-paced courses. His counselor soon decided that Richie might do better if he spent the whole day in an independent study class.

"He was very quiet and I tried to engage him in conversation," said Jody Brown, his teacher. "It took a couple of months before I even found out he played the guitar.

Slowly, Richie's personality emerged.

"I loved his sense of humor," Brown said. "He had a very dry sense of humor when he finally opened up."

Richie did well in art and music classes. He played drums in the school marching band, joined a heavy metal band and the school guitar club. He diligently played the guitar his father had built for him.

In his suicide note, he gave this guitar, his most treasured possession, back to his father: "Dad, I want you to keep my guitar, for it is the symbol of everything I stand for."

Richie kept his feelings hidden from most people. He revealed his most private thoughts in his songs, to his girlfriend Velvet Wilson, and in notes to himself.

Richie met Velvet in the school band. They dated for almost a year, broke up a few times and finally settled into a friendship.

"He had a control problem, but that was OK," Velvet said as she sat in the Newmans' living room. "He had really low times. He would talk like he didn't want to live anymore. He would scare me. ... I was always scared he would do something like that."

For a while, music seemed to hold Richie's hope for the future. Joining the Marines, his friends said, was just a way to earn money so he could follow his dream of a music career.

Sherry Newman found a list of goals when she was packing up his bedroom:

"My final goal is to get a good following in the music industry and get signed to a major record company."

Richie tried to encourage his friends to be the best they could be.

"He'd push you to the limit," said Mike Hintz, 17, a fellow band member. "If he had the slightest idea that you could do something ... by the end of the day you'd probably get it done."

When Richie wasn't playing video games at the arcade, he often watched MTV's "Beavis and Butt-head," the cartoon show featuring two teen-age misfits who do stupid pranks and make idiotic comments about music videos playing on television.

Richie nicknamed himself Beavis. When he painted the picture of a boy going up in flames, that boy was Beavis.

His friends said that although Richie may have been a bit of an oddball, he was nothing like the real Beavis.

He was smart, funny, a good listener and very sensitive to other people's feelings, they said.

"He was always in agony if he thought he'd hurt somebody," said Velvet, 18. "He couldn't have realized it would be like this (for us), because otherwise he wouldn't have done it."

On the afternoon of Jan. 19, Richie sat for hours at the living-room table, first drawing icicles on black poster board, then writing a poem over them with red, white and blue colored pencils.

It was finals week at Santana High, and Richie told his mother the poem was for his English final. He asked his mom to buy him some more acne medication and asked his dad whether his guitar had been fixed yet.

Richie's grandfather was visiting, so Sherry and Dan Newman took him to Viejas Casino and Turf Club that afternoon. Richie's grandfather was probably the last person Richie hugged.

Richie finished his artwork and, without a word to his 13-year-old brother Billy or his 22-year-old brother Steven, took off.

Once he got to Wal-Mart, he followed the dirt path behind the store down to the river bottom, where homeless people are known to sleep and where he and some friends had had a picnic last summer.

Richie removed all his clothes and set his black tennis shoes next to his black leather jacket. Then he poured the paint thinner over his body and set himself on fire.

The searing pain had to be far more severe than he expected. Perhaps that's why Richie lay down in the few inches of water in the river bottom. Perhaps he changed his mind.

Somehow, he dragged himself through the bushes and up the slight incline to the parking lot, where he fell to the sidewalk and curled up in a fetal position.

A couple saw him and called 911. It was 7:09 p.m.

Chris Parks, 19, was working as a sales clerk in the Wal-Mart electronics department that night when a customer ran into the store in a frenzy.

"Get security! Get security!" the customer screamed. "I've got a kid outside cut up and bleeding and there's a fire going down by the river!"

Parks ran out the front door, saw the flames jumping above the treetops, then headed back inside to grab a fire extinguisher.

He raced down the dirt path and over to the blaze. "It was his clothes that were burning," Parks said. "All I saw were a pair of shoes."

As Parks was putting out the fire, he heard sirens approaching. He ran up to the sidewalk, still clutching the fire extinguisher. He couldn't seem to let go of it.

"I saw this black lump on the ground," Parks said. "I had no idea what it was."

As he got closer, he realized it was a person. Parks knelt down beside Richie and tried to say something reassuring.

"Hang in there," Parks said. "You'll be OK. Those sirens are for you."

Richie opened his eyes and looked at Parks.

"It was awful, it was awful," Parks said. "It's the worst smell you've ever smelled in your life."

The Santee fire truck arrived, then an ambulance, a sheriff's cruiser and a Life Flight helicopter.

Paramedics put Richie on a gurney and stabilized him in the ambulance before transferring him to the copter.

Before paramedics closed the door, Richie turned his head and looked right into Parks' eyes.

Parks went back to work after that. Or tried to.

"It just all hit me," he said. "I knelt down and leaned against the video display and started crying. I couldn't believe what I saw. It was unbearable. Watching someone lying there, dying right in front of you and you can't help them."

Weeks later, Parks was still having flashbacks of Richie looking him in the eye. "It's going to be with me for the rest of my life."

Steven Newman was at home when the call came from a Santee Fire Department official, saying Richie had been badly burned in a fire involving gasoline.

Everyone in the family thought Richie had been burned in some kind of accident.

Steven called his aunt, Priscilla Jaynes, and paged his father at the casino to tell them to go to the hospital. They arrived about the same time that the Life Flight helicopter, with Richie inside, landed.

As painkillers poured into his veins, Richie couldn't say a word to his family. The doctors had put him into a drug-induced coma.

At first, an overly optimistic nurse got the family's hopes up. Then a doctor told them there was nothing more he could do. They would try to make Richie as comfortable as possible in his last hours.

"It wasn't a sudden death as maybe he'd hoped," said Dr. John Hansbrough of the burn center.

An hour later, Richie's family learned that he had done this to himself.

The nurse wrapped Richie's entire body with white gauze, leaving only his face uncovered. She told the family members they couldn't touch Richie, but they could talk to him. His hearing would be the last sense to go.

"We talked to him all night, telling him everything," Sherry Newman said.

Jaynes told him he was going to heaven, and the sky would be his canvas.

"Whenever we saw beautiful clouds, we'd know Richie painted them for us," Jaynes said. "We told him how proud we were of him."

Richie's heart finally gave out at 6:30 in the morning.

The nurse told Sherry Newman she could finally hug her son goodbye.

As word of Richie's death spread throughout Santana High School, most of his friends reacted with disbelief and anger at whoever was telling what must be a cruel joke.

"I told them they were full of crap, they were sick," said Rachelle Schoenberg, 17.

Mike Hintz went to the school counselor and asked if the stories were true. He felt his knees buckle when he learned they were.

"I almost collapsed. I couldn't stand up," he said. "I fell on my friend's lap and just sat there for a second. ... I just didn't think he'd do something like this."

Guidance counselor Joel Jette spent most of the day trying to help a steady stream of students deal with the loss.

Every time one student would offer an explanation, another would correct him or her with a different explanation.

"Everyone was his best friend," said Jette, who added he knows of no other suicide in his 14 years at Santana.

Jody Brown, Richie's independent-study teacher, was so upset she had to leave school.

"I basically fell apart," she said. "I couldn't stand it."

More than 150 people came to Richie's funeral at El Cajon Cemetery. A family member videotaped the ceremony.

The tape shows dozens of young men and women crowded together, hugging each other tightly. Most of them cried as one of Richie's favorite songs, Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven," was played. Atop the casket were stacked so many bouquets of flowers, you couldn't see the lid.

Through his tears, Steven Newman choked out a short but heartfelt speech.

"There's something I want you all to learn from this. No matter how bad you feel, no matter what you're going through, there's always somebody that you can talk to, someone who can make you feel better. If you don't know anyone, come talk to me. I don't want anyone else to go through this."

© 1997 Armywifenmomof3@cs.com

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