Trying to make sense of Ritcheson's death

As Spring teenager David Ritcheson's family heads to Mexico today to claim Ritcheson's body, a few details are emerging about when he jumped from a Carnival cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday morning. Witnesses said Rtcheson climbed up a tower near the bow of the Ecstasy about 6:15 a.m., and moments later, ship crew members showed up and began trying to negotiate with him. Friends joined in — "What the [expletive] are you doing?" one of them yelled up at Ritcheson — but in the end, no one could persuade him to stay on the boat. Ritcheson jumped into the waters of the gulf, 200 feet below, at around 7:35 a.m.

Friends and observers say Ritcheson's death was a surprise to them: Although Ritcheson was brutally attacked in April 2006, most of the surgeries to repair internal injuries had been done, and he had chosen to be publicly identified as the victim of the attack and speak before a congressional panel in support of expanded hate crimes legislation. Even so, Ritcheson rarely talked about how he felt and declined counseling, and he said in interviews that he hated being known as the person who survived the attack: "I shouldn't care what people think or say. It's just the fact that everyone knows I'm the kid," he told the Chronicle. "It was bigger than Houston. It was bigger than Texas. It was bigger than America. Everybody in the world knew what had happened and everybody knew the details of it." Mike Trent, the Harris County prosecutor who got Ritcheson's attackers convicted and sent to jail, said Ritcheson thought he was able to cope by himself: "I thought he had turned a corner and was trying to make something positive out of what happened to him," Trent told the AP. "He thought that he could handle everything on his own."

In the wake of Ritcheson's death, supporters of the hate crimes legislation Ritcheson spoke in support of in April vowed to push for Senate approval of the bill in his memory. "He was powerful," U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston) said. "I was watching him sitting there with poise [during the April hearing], with a smiling face and with commitment and courage and dedication and the rightness of what he was saying. He was not in any way doubtful of what he was saying." The legislation would make it a federal hate crime to attack someone motivated by prejudice based on the victim's real or perceived race, color, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity; current federal hate crime law applies only to violence based on race, religion, color or national origin, and is only in effect when the victim is attacked while carrying out a federally protected act like voting. The White House has said President Bush's advisers will recommend that the president veto the bill if it gets Senate approval because the administration believes local and state hate crime laws are adequate and because the bill doesn't protect groups like the elderly, the police or military personnel. "Now we have a greater reason to move this bill as fast as we can," Jackson Lee said. "Maybe [Bush] will rethink his position."