David Ritcheson, 18, jumped 200 ft to his death in the Gulf of Mexico ending a short but tormented life. Just over a year ago (April 2006), David, a Mexican-American, was brutally raped by a pair of teens in a racist assault fueled by drugs and alcohol. Surprisingly, David gave no sign of the mental torment and agony he must have been enduring. He survived the assault and went on to testify before Congress about hate crimes and seemed to be getting his life back together.
Ritcheson’s body, mangled first by a savage assault that made national headlines and then by a 200-foot fall into the Gulf of Mexico, will make a slow final journey home and remain on board a cruise ship until it returns to Galveston on Thursday, the FBI said. There the Galveston County Medical Examiner’s office will conduct an autopsy and the FBI its own investigation.
David Ritcheson’s ordeal began in April 2006, when he went to his friend (Gus Sons) house accompanied by David Henry Tuck and Keith Robert Turner. An altercation occurred between Tuck, Turner and Ritcheson. Tuck punched Ritcheson so hard that it broke Ritcheson’s cheekbone and knocked him unconscious. What followed was a terribly brutal attack on the teenager:
Tuck and Turner dragged the teenager outside, and for the next five hours stripped him naked, burned the victim with cigarettes, choked him with a gardening hose and proceeded to engrave a swastika into the victim’s chest, Tuck kicked Ritcheson with steel-toed boots, and furthermore violently kicked a PVC pipe up his rectum several inches while yelling racial slurs. After the sodomy ended, the perpetrators poured bleach on the victim’s body to conceal the evidence of the crime. According to County prosecutor Mike Trent, the attackers may have poured bleach inside the pipe as high levels of toxins were found in the boy’s organs.
David Ritcheson spent the next three months in hospital undergoing 40 surgeries. In December 2006, Tuck and Turner were both convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Tuck, who was described by prosecutors as a white supremacist, was sentenced to life in prison, and Turner was sentenced to 90 years. Ritcheson eventually recovered from his physical injuries but refused all attempts to provide psychological counseling for the emotional and mental scars left by the attack.
“It seemed to everyone that David was climbing back to normalcy in his life,” lawyer Carlos Leon said at a news conference. “What we’ve learned from this is he just internalized his pain.”
Before he jumped, members of the crew of the Carnival cruise ship Ecstasy and his friends tried to convince Ritcheson not to jump. They talked to him for about an hour before he finally jumped, ending all his suffering.
