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By John C. Ensslin
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
Richard Steinmetz's eyes well with tears when he talks about Melvin Washington, his murdered friend.
"I'm lucky that I'm not dead," said Steinmetz, a 44-year-old Denver native who has lived on the streets intermittently for the past 12 years.
He spent most of his nights on the streets of LoDo, until alarm over the seven homeless homicides drove him to shelters and other parts of town.
"If I had been down there drunk as a skunk, it could have been me. It could have been anybody," Steinmetz says.
"In fact, I feel really guilty about it, because all these years, he (Washington) would come up and panhandle me. And I never gave him a dime. And now they beat him to death. I wished I had a million dollars to give him."
Music begins to play in a coffee shop for homeless men. Steinmetz brushes back a tear.
"But he's in a better place. He doesn't have to worry about the clowns no more."
"Clowns" is the term Steinmetz uses to describe the homeless teen-agers who live in a wary co-existence with older transients.
"They've assaulted me three times for nothing," Steinmetz says.
In September, before the string of homeless homicides began, Steinmetz tried to bum a cigarette off one of the teen-agers outside a 7-Eleven. They beat him and stole his bag.
"Society knows them as 'mall rats,' but they're clowns. That's what they deem themselves to be."
Steinmetz began living on the streets shortly after being paroled from prison, where he served 11/2 years of a three-year sentence for vehicular assault and leaving the scene of an accident.
For all his anger at the "clowns," Steinmetz says he does not believe they are responsible for the two slayings in which the victims were beheaded.
"I really think it's someone psychotic," he says. "It takes a lot. It's one thing for someone to be drunk or talk trash, but for somebody to cut off somebody's head like that? Not even in my drunkest dreams."
A homeless woman missing several teeth and dressed in gypsy garb overhears Steinmetz and blurts out:
"There was some guy who was supposed to take off my head. God told me in a dream and I know who it is. There's a $100,000 reward, but God told me not to tell anybody. Ha ha ha ha ha!"
November 28, 1999
