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Name: Keno
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Subject: RE: RE: One last thing on Richie (nsc)
Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Time: 1:53:03 PM
Remote Address: 66.243.196.97
Message ID: 245434
Parent ID: 245418
Thread ID: 245336
Your link to that page at Wikipedia just got me to look up to see if there was any info on Richie Diener there, the kid I talked about who had the movie made of his short life. It does, here, and it talks mainly about the movie, and they called it a true story. I never saw that page before and never knew that info was up there. In case any of you read that page, here is the truth behind all of that.
First, something minor, I'm sure that movie didn't premiered on the NBC in 1977, because the only time I saw it was before I left NY for good, and I was gone by '77. [EDIT: 24 hours later... After thinking it over, that page says it premiered Jan 10,'77, and my first visit back to NY was for Xmas of '76. I remember this bit well since it was the frist time my ex met my parents. We stayed to around my birthday, which is in the end of Jan, so yes, I could have seen it while there, even though I was no longer living in NY by that time.]. In fact, it very well might had been in '77 when it was shown for a second time on TV. I recall one nite it was on again. I was in Colorado with my first wife, we were staying at a youth hostel in Breckenridge, and that movie was on TV that night. Somebody put it on and I said "that movie is real bad" and me and Sue left the room. Sue asked me why I didn't tell them that I knew the kid, but I didn't feel like talking about it back then. As it was I was escaping from NY and all of that crap, I wanted to forget about East Meadow, NY by then. (Also, but not noted on the web page, the movie was set in California, not NY)
That Wikipedia page talks about how the movie starts out with a car being driven wild by Richie's friend, Brick, with Richie and another friend in the car, and how that lead to Richie's problems with his father, George. In real life, that car accident was the beginning of the end for Richie. First, I to this day I still know Brick - his first name in real life is Lenny. He was Richie's best friend and fingered by George as the main reason Richie turned out to be the way he was. First, Lenny was nowhere as crazy as Richie and I found him to be an okay dude. Second, Lenny was not driving the car that day (as is noted at that page), Richie was, and no warning was given to the driver, either. Richie was arrested on the spot, because he drove the car up into this fence and hit this kiddie pool on the lawn next to the fence (thank goodness the kids who live in that house were not in the pool).
Richie mother was described perfectly. She was one of those common housewife's of the '50s, '60s and early '70s, who did as her husband told her to do. She seemed to have no personally at all.
Richie's brother Russ was several years younger than he. I always felt bad for the kid, it was very clear he had problems too, as he was known around the neighborhood in part because he was homosexual at a very young age (preteen, which is why I'm not using the word "gay" here). In the year after Richie was killed, Russel called my home asking me for drugs. I was a user then, true, but I never dealt drugs in my life, and after his second call I had to tell him to never to phone me up again, and he didn't. Heck, I was 4 years older than he as it was, and his dad used to tap their phone on Richie, so the last thing I needed was Russ calling me for something I didn't even supply. The last I hear about him was in the early '80s, and I was told that he was shooting up H big time by then.
That page talks about how father loved his son. George never, ever was close to Richie. In fact, Richie's real name was actually George (Jr), but he hated that name and had all of us call him "Richie". He hated his dad, I mean the few times I did hang with him, that was one thing he would talk about, how his old man abused him as a kid and how he hated him.
Now, on what was shown in the the movie and claimed about how the killing took place, in self defense. Only Richie and his parents were there when it happened. So nobody knows Richie's side of the story - except one thing. In real life, Richie was not in the basement when he was killed, only his parents were. Richie's body was found at the top of the stairs which lead to the basement. I was in that house a few times. Richie's room was next to the stairway (we talked about garage's in this thread, his room was where the garage was and made into a bedroom). But their house was just like all of the other houses in the neighborhood, they all had that same long and deadly stairway. I say "deadly" because two other neighbor's, including one of my closest friend's father, were killed falling down those stairs (my friends Paul and Brian's dad - he came home drunk in the middle of the night and fell down them, hitting his head. The other neighbor was an old woman who also fell and die). Anyway, they did find scissors in Richie's hand, which I guess he was holding when he was shot, and knowing Richie, I'm sure he was threatening his father with them. Like I said earlier in this thread, he was not a good kid. But, as the police report went, he threaten his old man from the top of the stairs, and his father was at the bottom of the stairway. There were about 12 steps from top to bottom, the distance was not like he was in is father's face, as the movie showed. They had to be at least 15 feet apart, with George looking up at him. There was no way George was in any danger. Yet not only did he shoot him, but he was a marksmen, if he really felt like his life was in danger, he could have just shot in the air, or at the worst, aim for his son's foot. But he shot him the first time directly in the chest, and then shot him a second time in the arm. The fact that Richie's body didn't fall down the stairs means he had to had been standing back from the stairs as it was.
Now I totally understand if you look at the days' events, and what happened that morning, no question that Richie's parents were in a very bad way over all of that. When things like that happen, sometimes parents can take it worse than their teenage kids will. George worked for the police department and I'm sure was embarrassed by what happen with his son that morning, so I'm sure he wasn't in the right frame of mind that night. But still, he killed his son and knowing that house, there was no way it was in self defense from where he was standing.
Under the "Additional Information" they note in that web page. George didn't die in '82, it was '80. Also, about the very last note about "two of Richie's friends". The first friend is Lenny, and the second one is me (but again, I was not a friend of his, we didn't like each other, doing drugs were our only connection with each other). Those two reviews noted on the Wikipedia page, which me and Lenny wrote, are no longer up on the Internet Movie Database page any longer. I was back in touch with Lenny because of that IMD page, as he wrote me after he read my review there. It's been about a year since I last heard from him, he's in bad health, on methadone, and still living in East Meadow with his wife and kid. Both of our reviews were taken down a few years ago because both of us wrote about how false (and bad) the movie was and talked about what really happened in real life. We both gave the movie one star. IMD claims we didn't write enough about the movie - that we only wrote about real life events, so that was why they took it down. That account was total crap, as what I write here just above, is about 95% of what I wrote in that review, and this is why I just re-wrote. They can censor the truth if they want to, but I knew Richie and I knew his family. I was also outside of the house the night his killing happened and a police officer threaten me and my friend with arrest if we didn't leave the area. All we simply did was asked this cop what happened and he went off on us. Back in those days, most of the cops around there was pigs. We might have been druggies, yes, but we still were just teens and didn't deserve to be treated in that matter by them (we were always treated that way by the cops and some of us were in time busted by them). Yes, Richie was a mean kid, but none of the other kids on the street were that way at all, we were mainly just drugged out teenage hippies. But back in the early '70s in East Meadow, it was a crime to be a hippy.
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