Noel Lopez wasn't typical of the street kids who hang around Westlake Park. He wasn't a runaway or a throwaway. He had a caring family who were eager to help him. He wasn't an aimless high-school dropout with few options. He'd attended a couple of years of college on a full scholarship, and later held a job as a parking valet and had his own apartment downtown.
Morgan Schweitzer
Courtesy of Lopez Family
Once popular and charismatic, Lopez grew moody and erratic.
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See a slideshow of photos here by Alice Wheeler documenting the street kids of downtown.
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He also wasn't a kid. He was 25 in April 2008, the last time anybody saw him alive.
But Lopez was mentally ill. Diagnosed back in his hometown of Odessa, Texas, as bipolar, he began to spiral downhill after moving to Seattle five years ago.
That's how he landed in the world of street kids—a world, it turned out, he was utterly unprepared for. Lopez didn't understand the rules, or the consequences of breaking them.
On the morning of April 14, 2008, construction workers found his battered body at a job site on Seventh and Madison, just a few blocks from Freeway Park. Pools of blood were everywhere. Close by were the instruments that had been used to break his bones from head to toe and cause a hemorrhage in his brain: two-by-fours, an iron crowbar, and other heavy construction tools.
Lopez's hair, cut into a Mohawk, had been spray-painted bright orange. The same paint had been used to scrawl several messages in one corner of the site: "I am God;" also, the word "Smurf" and the number 13, in Roman numerals.
The scrawls proved to be brazen clues that led straight to the murderers—and to guilty pleas just a few weeks ago. They were also cryptic signs of a subculture that roams downtown, with its own language, hierarchy, and—at times—brutal thirst for violence.
Manic and delusional, Lopez in his last months became so ill that he donned a Batman suit underneath his clothing. His family couldn't get him committed to an institution because he was not deemed to be an imminent threat to himself or others. Instead he wound up being a victim himself, killed in a manner that the investigating homicide detective—a veteran of a hundred murder scenes—described as "extraordinarily violent."
Lopez was born on Christmas Day in Odessa, Texas. He was Patricia and Gerald Lopez's seventh son, a birth placement that according to folklore guarantees special powers. Young Noel did not take those auspicious signs lightly. "He thought he was magical," Patricia recalls. And she tended to agree. "Everything came to him so easily," she says.
He did well in school, played soccer and the double bass, acted in plays at Odessa's community theater, and won first place in a high-school artwork competition. He had dark-haired good looks and what his childhood friend, Dallas Kielhorn, called "a certain charisma." "Everyone seemed to want to know him and be around him," says his younger sister Amanda.
And he in turn wanted to be friends with everyone, whether they were white, black or Hispanic. According to his older sister Lita, that was pretty unusual in Odessa, a small west-Texas town known for its oil-and-gas-drilling industry, and as a onetime hometown of the Bush family. Lopez, like his siblings, crossed racial lines simply by being born. His father Gerald, a lawyer, is Hispanic. Patricia, a stay-at-home mom, is white.
Until Lopez went to Florida State University on a scholarship for Hispanic students, his family saw no signs of illness. But returning home after his freshman year, Patricia says, he seemed oddly irritable and impatient. "I didn't take it seriously. I thought it was typical of college students." By the following summer, however, it was clear something was wrong. He fought not only with his parents but with his siblings, to whom he had always been close.
"There was an aggressiveness I had never seen before," Lita says, adding that he seemed "so moody and dark." And he seemed to take the notion that he was magical much more seriously than before. "He thought he was a shaman," his mom says. The family got him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed Lopez as bipolar and prescribed medication.
Lopez decided not to return to college, instead accepting an invitation to stay with Kielhorn, who was by then living in Seattle and working as a house painter. Seattle was an artistic place and would be a welcome change from Odessa, Kielhorn told his friend. Kielhorn and his girlfriend drove all the way to Texas to pick Lopez up.
Once in Seattle, Lopez worked for Greenpeace as a successful canvasser, and "wholeheartedly believed that he was saving the planet," Kielhorn recalls. But after a number of months, Kielhorn says, a roommate of Lopez called with bad news: "Noel was going off the deep end." He had developed an obsession with Fight Club, the 1999 movie about a white-collar working stiff suffering from insomnia who seeks relief through fisticuffs. "Noel was trying to organize people to be a kind of underground force," Kielhorn says.
Lopez was not so far gone that he couldn't appear lucid. He wanted to be an animator and got himself admitted to the Seattle Art Institute. But then, according to Kielhorn, the symptoms got worse. Lopez would get a financial-aid check, and it would trigger a manic spending spree. "After the money was gone, he'd get depressed," says Kielhorn.
