What happens when “adults” refuse to stop using drugs even though they have children? They create a culture of crime tolerance, of course.
And what do we suppose happens to a kid who grows up in a town full of people who think the buying and selling of illicit drugs is no big deal?
He gets murdered by a drug dealing rival:
YELLOWS SPRINGS — The Town That Time Forgot. Little Moscow. Hippie Heaven. Tie-Dye Village.
Over the decades, Yellow Springs residents have learned to grin and bear the stereotypes about their charming community and long-time home to Antioch College.
But what residents won’t abide is the notion that there is any more drug use in their village of 3,700 than anywhere else in America.
“I’ve lived in Yellow Springs for 15 years, and I don’t see any drug activity at all,” said Vick Mikunas, a former radio personality on local station WYSO. “I saw more activity when I was living in Des Moines.”
Jennie Hudson, who has lived 17 years in Yellow Springs, agreed. “I don’t know anyone here who has said it’s OK for children to smoke pot and take drugs. No one has ever said, ‘They’re just experimenting.'”
But some Yellow Springs High School students tell a different story.
“I could walk from here (the high school) to High Street and I bet I could find cannabis (plants) growing in about a dozen backyards,” said freshman David Teyber.
Parents in Yellow Springs allow their kids to smoke marijuana “because they still want to do it themselves,” said junior Jake Auten.Six years ago, when Yellow Springs High School senior Tim Lopez disappeared after signing out for lunch on Jan. 22, 2002, his principal and teachers never suspected he was selling marijuana nor that his classmate, Mike Rittenhouse, was a rival dealer with connections to a major drug ring in Yellow Springs.
Lopez’s body smoldered for nearly two weeks in Rittenhouse’s basement bedroom in his parents’ home, where he had bludgeoned his classmate with a baseball bat and stuffed the body in a large storage tub. He later moved the body to the garage. When his father asked about the smell, Rittenhouse told him it was “a science experiment gone bad” and set fire to it, according to court testimony.
Rittenhouse later buried the body in a shallow grave, underneath heavy brush, in his backyard. There it remained for two years until February of 2004, when 1999 Yellow Springs graduate Umoja “Iddi” Bakari (aka Elijah Smith) was arrested in Columbus on charges of shooting and abducting another man in a drug dispute. To save himself, Bakari told police where they could find Lopez’s body.
Gee, you think Rittenhouse’s dad likes the weed? It’s difficult to believe the scenario described in the article.
“Hey son, it smells like death in here” the father wheezes asthmatically while clutching his bong. “It’s my Science project dad, now get back in your room or I’ll cut you off!” little Mike Rittenhouse would shout, his booming voice sending his drug-addled tie-dye clad father scurrying back to his bedroom where he could type out another diary on DailyKos.
It’s incredible really. Rittenhouse killed a kid in his house and let the body rot there and his parents didn’t know. But they weren’t the only “adults” in Yellow Springs living in a hazy dreamland of drug use without consequences:
Yellow Springs police Chief John Grote called the task force’s investigation “a splash of cold water” for his department. “We’re giving a lot more attention to drug issues,” he said.
John Gudgel, who has been principal of Yellow Springs High for 14 years, said there was nothing about Lopez, Rittenhouse or Bakari to raise suspicions at the school. All three were average students, played school sports and appeared to be college bound. Bakari was the son of a respected massage therapist in town, Gudgel said. His younger brother is an accomplished singer and his younger sister excels academically.
“Those are all reasons why, as a school, we were shocked to learn these things,” Gudgel said. “You can hear a lot from people on the street, but you can work in a school setting as principal and think you’re on top of things when obviously you’re not.”
Jennie Hudson, who was Lopez’s nanny from age 11 until he turned 16 and could drive, said Lopez may have been selling marijuana, but Rittenhouse was known to be carrying a gun.
“That says so much more to me than, ‘Yeah, we got a dime bag (of marijuana) from him for the party on Saturday,’ ” Hudson said. “From my experience, marijuana dealers don’t have guns.”
That may have been true decades ago, but not any more, said Phyllis Coontz, an expert on the economics of drug trafficking who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think (guns) are a necessary part of the job. In an underground economy, the only way you exert power is by using force or threatening people with force.”
With the advent of crack cocaine, she said, drug operations around the world consolidated into major cartels. “The drug industry today has become very sophisticated. The drug cartels control everything. You don’t have these kinds of mom and pop operations you had in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Hudson said she tried to warn Lopez that he was risking serious harm by selling drugs. She often watched over Lopez while his single mother, Barbara McQuiston, traveled on business. McQuiston, who now lives in California, did not return a phone call requesting an interview.
“We talked very openly about a lot of things, even drugs,” Hudson said. The summer before his junior year, “I told him how when you run with people like that… it’s a different world, it’s a drug world. They will kill you for 30 bucks.”
Way to go Jennie! That open honest talk about pot, the one where you no doubt relayed your “experience” with pot dealers being non-violent, was just what Tim needed. Not some sort of adult intervention, not for a person who was his “nanny” up until a couple of years before to pull rank and say “No more bullshit pot dealing kid.” No just a couple of conversations, maybe while sharing a spliff and instilling in him a total lack of boundaries.
The worst part of the case is that Hudson clearly did care about Tim and went looking for him when he disappeared. She got no answers from his classmates and peers, even though she believes they must have known what happened:
Gudgel said the best deterrent to drugs in the school are the students themselves “because kids are our best informants, and they don’t want to see drugs in the building.” He said that in a junior and senior high school of just 375 students, “these kids know each other to a fault. They’re not going to keep any secrets. They’re going to tell.”
But Hudson is not so sure. She said one of the most disturbing aspects of Lopez’s murder was that some students must have known what happened, or at least had an inkling, but not one spoke up for more than two years.
“After Tim went missing, I asked every teenager I knew — What could have happened? What could have happened?” she said. “It was only after he was found that it all came pouring out. Why didn’t more of it come out before then?”
Yeah. Weird, it’s like they were raised without morals. It’s almost like there is some dysfunction in their lives that keeps them from learning the difference between right and wrong:
As some students claim, there are parents whose recreational drug use sets a bad example for their children, Gudgel said. “We have heard statements from parents like, ‘I know my son or daughter gets high. But if they do it, I’d rather have them do it at home than out on the street.’ But I don’t think our community is any different from other communities that have that contingent. Look at what happened in Centerville” where a school board member recently resigned for having underage drinking parties in her home.
Is it any wonder an environment like that would produce a Mike Rittenhouse?
YOU ARE AN IDIOT! KILL YOURSELF!
Well, if an anonymous poster on the Internet thinks I should die who am I to argue…
Seriously if you’re not 13 leaving comments like this on blogs should deeply embarrass you. The way you deeply embarrass you family when people ask what you’ve been up to and they have to say you’re still getting an allowance from them.
Sorry. I should have been more verbose in my feelings towards this entry. I just assumed that no one would look at it anyways.
I think that you are an idiot because you obviously do not understand what to take out of an article. To prove my point, you bolded statements made by freshman in high school. Seriously, have you ever spoken with a fourteen year old? It was irresponsible reporting to quote an immature source for this type of article, and it lacks any real substance. It’s like you’re completely jacked up on FOX NEWS, and you only recognize the lowest form of reporting.
Tim and Mike were bad apples, and there are still more bad apples in the Yellow Springs. And yes, Yellow springs is a “liberal” town, but that means it is extremely safe, tolerant, and pleasant. No one supports a “culture of crime” unless they are the ones making money off of it (aka the criminals!). You infer way too much from this article, and its appears you do so to push your own liberal bashing agenda.
Open up your eyes, go outside, and do more research before you say anything, or please… stay off of the internet.
Asinine. The bolded statement was to show that these 14-year-olds were exposed to and aware of the immature activities of the so-called adults. The quote came from your own local paper. Are you implying that in a story about high school kids it’s inappropriate to quote kids in high school?
I’m amused by the fact you think liberal mean safe, maybe you weren’t alive in the 70s when almost every inner city (including the one I grew up in) were turned into hell on earth for we minorities by White liberals like yourself who funded the gangs that murdered our families. Or maybe you never lived in the liberal big cities where liberal’s policies allow criminals to run roughshod over people who can’t afford to move to a suburb or gated community.
But you do maybe live in a town where some kid got murdered, many of the kids in his school KNEW he was killed and said nothing, and all the so-called adults there are more interested in re-living their teen years than keeping their children safe. You don’t care about the dead kid, just that no one start to ask you and people like you take a little responsibility for themselves and stop acting like children.
First off, the statement that the kid makes is bogus. It’s way too risky and stupid to grow outdoors in a small town. If anyone knew what this kid apparently knows, the plants would be stolen or the growers would be arrested. He was just getting caught up in the hype. If you want to believe him, go ahead. Being 8-10 years younger than Tim and Mike, I doubt he has anything to add about them, the real subjects of the article.
As far as I know, no one (other than those immediately involved) had any knowledge of what happened to Tim. Everyone was confused and concerned, but most figured he ran away or got in some sort of drug related trouble.
What liberal policies turned your neighborhood into a hell hole? Name one, and if you can, name a few. I didn’t call “liberal” safe. I said Yellow Springs was safe. Read. Please. More than anything else, that middle paragraph of yours is ridiculous. ARE YOU SERIOUS!?!
You’re deciding the kid’s statement is bogus because you don’t like what he’s saying.
As for liberal policies that make inner cities unsafe, how about no self-defense protection, light sentences for drug crimes, probation for domestic violence cases, no arrest orders for drug possession, etc. All these things work together to produce high crime. I lived through it, I know.
Yellow Springs wasn’t so safe for Tim Lopez was it?
You talk about people in Yellow Springs lacking morality. What is morally correct about exploiting the pain and suffering of a town still grieving over the horrible series of incidences described above? I understand your point that drugs are bad and can lead to violent acts, but why personally attack the individuals that have been most adversly effected by this reality? People in Yellow Springs know all to well that drugs can lead to violence, because it happened in our community. Bill and Jennie have been through enough, why not leave them out of this discussion? You must be an outsider looking in on this issue, but please realize that this trajedy has had a profound impact on the people of Yellow Springs. You can’t read a couple of newspaper articles and be qualified to write on this multi faceted issue. I invite you to visit Yellow Springs, and then form opinions. I’ll take you on a walking tour of Yellow Springs backyards and you can see for yourself if marijuana grows freely. Most, I’d like to see you sit down and tell Jennie and Bill the way you feel about them face to face as opposed to hiding behind a keyboard and mouse. Only then would you know the pain that making uninformed comments about serious issues can cause. Good writers write about what they know. Good reporters do actual research. If you’re wondering why you don’t have a job at with an actual newspaper it’s because your not doing either of these things.
The person most “adversely effected” by this is Tim Lopez. You know the person who actually died.
Sorry Sam but you aren’t a victim, at best.
Jennie smoked pot with a minor. Jennie shares morally responsibility for Tim’s involvement in the drug culture. Jennie should have told a young impressionable boy to stay away from drugs and drug dealers but she didn’t and now he’s dead.
I don’t have a job at a newspaper because I’m not a reporter. I have a degree in Comparative Religion and Masters in Liberal Arts. I don’t present myself as a reporter looking for work and Red Alerts (along with several other sites) is actually my job. It’s a business. This is how I make my money.
If you’re high on research maybe you should do some yourself. Blogs aren’t trying to take the place of newspapers; they serve a completely different function. Red Alerts comments on the news, it presents opinion. We don’t send out investigative journalists because we aren’t a news agency. Since you haven’t “investigated†blogs does that mean you aren’t qualified to post your opinion?
You can attack me if it makes you feel better about your own moral culpability in Tim Lopez’s death, I don’t care. But I’m the only person not exploiting Lopez to make myself look like a victim like the people of Yellow Springs are shamelessly doing. That boy died because you and people like you refuse to grow up, you refuse to accept the responsibility adults have to guide children and want to be eternal children yourselves. Tim Lopez paid the price for your immaturity and lack of character, and yet you’ll still not look inward and change.
If you want me to come to Yellow Springs send me a ticket and book me a nice room. I’ve been alcohol free for a decade and drug free for longer than that and I’d be happy to tell all you people how to clean up your lives and act like adults. But why should I waste my own money traveling to talk to people who won’t listen and don’t care?
I find it totally insulting and rather naive of you to make general statements about my town. You admitted yourself that you’ve never even visited the village, so who are you to throw uninformed statements around like you’re an expert?
Look at the statistics. There has been 2 drug-related murders here in the past 10 years. T-W-O! Yes, there are kids experimenting with drugs here, as well as a few adult users, but there’s no chance you’ll find a town in the entire country that doesn’t have teenagers trying them out and the occasional burned-out hippie pothead. You hinted that you’ve done drugs in your past, so don’t come out as Mr. Clean “Kids shouldn’t experiment” now, and don’t say you’ve never met a pothead.
So if you have in fact met a pothead, and did experiment with drugs, all of this occurring OUTSIDE of Yellow Springs, how is Yellow Springs this horrible, drug-infested community that you claim it to be?
In response to your last statement, I’d be happy to get you a nice room at one of the two smoking-free bed and breakfasts we have here in our town, and you can tell all of the drug-free citizens we have here in our community how to clean up their lives.
And if anyone needs to start acting like an adult, it’s you; hiding behind your keyboard, hurling insults at us. Hell, with your mindset, I’m probably sitting at my computer desk with a coke line in front of me, ready to blast off. Just remember, if you ever want to come talk to us in person, grab a room at the Yellow Springs Country Bed and Breakfast, 1-937-***-****, or the Arthur Morgan House Bed and Breakfast, 1-937-***-****. This is my personal invitation to you. Come see what our town is really like, instead of believing all the unreliable information you’ve been fed and the biased opinions you clearly hold.
A) Don’t leave people’s phone numbers on a blog
B) Learn to read. Tim Lopez matters. You “only” had two drug related murders? That’s two too many, right? Tim would be alive if you and your fellow hippies taught him the score. He died because of people like you pretending the drug culture is full of nice decent people. It isn’t. Drug users and drug dealers are greedy, selfish and often damaged people, just like alcoholics.
C) The “unreliable”information I use are the newspaper reports which contain quotes from your fellows. Were they misquoted?
D) If you’re paying I’m staying. But if you think I’m going to pay to vacation in some hippy backwater you have been given some unreliable information regarding Rob Taylor. I am, as I tell everyone, always open for public debate. Set something up and comp me, and I’ll appear in a puff of smoke.
E) Naive doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. Hudson telling people pot dealers don’t carry guns is naive. Me saying adults who don’t warn their kids that dealers are dangerous then being shocked when a dealer plugs some kid is simply me pointing out the naivete of others. I’m not naive about dealers.
F) I tried pot. When I was 14. It’s something people should have outgrown. People not growing up to raise their own kids is why Mike Rittenhouse turned out the way he did.
Use my contact form to make me an offer. I’ll get back to you after I remove these poor saps phone numbers from my comments.
Shame on you Rob Taylor.
Shame on you!
I grew up in Yellow Springs, and I still live here.
All of your assumptions on my town are ill conceived to say the least.
The comment the freshmen made was and remains complete bullshit.
There has never ever been pot growing in the backyards of a whole street.
That is just a moronic assumption; simply it would never happen in this town.
I could go into further detail about how wrong you are, but my emotional levels are running high do to how ignorant your take on the place I grew up in is, so I can’t think very clearly at the moment.
Shit happens! Drugs happen! People kill people.
What does that make Yellow Springs? No different than any other place on the planet!
Yellow Springs is easily the safest place to raise a child, and I am grateful I grew up in such an open minded and mature community!
Get real punk! You are a fool.
P.S.
pure libel. PURE LIBEL!
You don’t know what libel is do you?
By the way, I’m glad you’re so happy to live there, and that Tim Lopez and his avoidable death doesn’t bother you at all. Have fun in Hell.
Wow! How dare you.
To say that a horrible situation involving people I knew doesn’t bother me just proves you are ignorant.
You’re opinion on this subject is not credible because you know absolutely nothing about Yellow Springs and it’s community.
“In law, defamation (also called calumny, libel, slander, and vilification) is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image.”
I’m pretty sure your statements fit that profile, ass.
Libel and slander are different. Unlike you I actually have a lawyer, not a blockqoute from a website.
But YOU said this “Shit happens! Drugs happen! People kill people.
What does that make Yellow Springs? No different than any other place on the planet!” so how would anyone interpret that other than that you are unfazed by the Lopez murder. It doesn’t bother you.
Since you and your pot smoking dreg buddy think I’m defaming your town sue me. I dare you.
I don’t believe in lawsuits.
Just a quick question, do you drink alcohol?
If you don’t believe in lawsuits stop threatening people with legal terms. And no, I don’t drink and I quit smoking cigarettes about five ears ago. I’m effectively straight edge.
As an adult you should put childish things behind you (getting high) and that being a man means not having needing a crutch to lean on. While I’m not opposed to people having a glass of wine with a meal, of frankly the use of cigarettes in addiction recovery where people on heroin and other hard drugs have good luck curbing their cravings with tobacco, daily or chronic use of either is something you should seek to stop.
Well, I somewhat agree, although I think people have the individual right to do what they wish with their bodies regardless of what people think they should do.
Just because someone says I shouldn’t on their blog is no reason for me to rethink my whole position on how I choose to live.
So people with children have the right to abdicate responsibility for themselves, live in perpetual adolescence and burden society with their broods of cretin who were raised to by addicts?
You’re right in that society isn’t going to search door to door to see if people are living well, but certainly you don’t think people have a “right” to, let’s say, drive drunk. Alcoholics have no “right” to be employed as police officers, be hired as teachers, or indulge in behavior that goes hand in hand with alcohol abuse (studies indicate alcohol plays a part in many domestic violence cases) while we tolerate them.
My same criticism applies to pot smokers. Tim Lopez died because a town full of people have a culture of immaturity. He had a nanny in his teens, that nanny told him pot dealers aren’t dangerous, his murderer came from a culture where parents think getting high doesn’t effect teens mental state or psychological health. This is all nonsense.
And a quick point. You came here and attacked me because you thought I was saying you shouldn’t smoke pot. If getting high was such a non-compulsion, so harmless and didn’t have any ill effects on your mental state can you explain why you reacted like Tom Hanks in that Family Ties episode where he’s a drunk?
But don’t bother telling me, it’s something you need to work out for yourself.
test
Ok. Now that I know this thing works.
Thank you Rob.
Joe, Will, and Henry. Each of you live in Yellow Springs, each of you cherish Yellow Springs, each of you defend Yellow Springs. But where are you getting your information? In a given city grid of homes and a few businesses do you think it’s common to have 50+ felony drug arrests from the residents? Wasn’t there just a “grow” operation taken from the home of the Village Mediator who was reported to have children in the home? Do you know the amount of crime in your Village?
Yellow Springs is unique I’ll give it that. The villagers complained and cared more for a dog shot a few years ago than the officer that shot it. It was never reported the officer was in a foot pursuit and the man told his dog to attack. It was never reported the man (now in prison for beating a homeless man with a hammer in front of Art’s Theatre) was a drug dealer.
Which is another unique topic for Yellow Springs. The liberal paper. There’s a winner for best toilet paper. They don’t report on the real news because, as with many colleges, the real news would tarnish the tye dyed shine off your town. Was it ever reported a young man got his eyeball knocked completely out and was rushed to the hospital in a felonious assault at the Post Office. My god…if you only knew the stuff that happens in your little town. But you three are content with putting your heads down and pretending it’s fair weather all around.
Yellow Springs is the Community without consequence!!
How do you know that Tim Lopez was selling?
Because I read the article.
Could you link that?
Also, were those your interviews with the high school students, or could you link that too?
It’s the link at the top of the article. The one where the quotes are from.
I just found these comments, I hope there’s still a reader out there. Bad apples don’t just happen overnight, it takes a period of neglect. Tim often called to tell me how lonely he was. He often asked me to help him. The calls began when he was in the 3rd grade, but slowed and finally stopped when he was in the 7th.
Since he began living with his mother, Tim tried to injure himself twice, once with scissors, the other time trying to electrocute himself, he was just 6 years old. I often tried to get someone in Yellow Springs to listen to his cries, including among others his principal, Jennie Hudson, and Tim’s mother, but I was effectively prevented from doing so. His mother kept me, his father, out of his life by painting me as a monster. I wasn’t aware of the extent of her efforts until I found myself at first avoided, then finally ignored by the only people who could have effectively intervened on his behalf.
Barbara McQuiston’s assassination of my character was apparently complete. Jennie Hudson, whom I had attempted to recruit to help Tim, rejected all efforts, including the psychological testing and evaluation conduced by Dr. Robert Mackenzie. He wrote Hudson and McQuestion to warn that Tim was deeply troubled and needed help. Dr. Mackenzy even predicted that Tim would attempt to self-medicate and if left without care that he would almost certainly self destruct. I didn’t know the reason for her character assassination campaign until the Green County detectives informed me that she had faked her education credentials, that she had duped everyone, including her employer (YSI) into believing that she had a Ph.D.
The last two years of Tim’s life (from 16-18) Barbara McQuestion lived half of the year in California and the other half in Yellow Springs. Tim lived solely in Yellow Springs. The mother of one of his friends told me that Tim was often left to fend for himself, that his loneliness was palpable, that it caused her to feel that she had to care for him as his mother. She often make him meals, and treated his bumps and bruises.
Bad apples don’t grow on trees, that’s because the tree provides access to plenty of nutrition and sunlight. But if not picked in time however, the ripe ones will fall from the tree, and will only then, in time, go bad.
Disgusting. The boy needed help and no one in that town wanted to give it to him. If a neighbor saw this going on why didn’t they call cps?
Marijuana laws create criminals. Do you think his “pathetic hippie dad” or whatever you called him, is a hardened criminal? Do you think people who are adults and smoke marijuana are criminals? No. The criminals are the dealers who have been given their job directly by the U.S. Government because it believes that users of marijuana are criminals comparable to heroin junkies. If marijuana was decriminalized or legalized, it would be regulated and there would be no need for gun-toting pushers. Do you not see this? These dealers don’t come out of a vacuum. Are you honestly zeroing in on the town of Yellow Springs as if it’s a cesspool of drugs and murder? That is completely narrow-minded and completely misinformed. Yes, it is a hippie town, but it is not a breeding ground for criminals. You should be ashamed of yourself. You have no integrity. If I end up in Hell I’ll see you there.
Why would criminals get out of dealing weed? Did the mafia stop running bars and nightclubs after prohibition was repealed?