STORY IS NOT ABOUT JJ: Coach spoke about suicide

Louis Cypher · 02-17-2005, 07:58 PM

By John Aguilar, Rocky Mountain News
February 16, 2005

Girls basketball coach Rick Lopez apparently told family members just hours before his jailhouse suicide that he was planning to harm himself, but corrections staff never were alerted.

In a letter sent to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office on Monday, District Attorney Carol Chambers said that family members presumably didn't think Lopez would follow through on his threats.

"Apparently, the family members did not believe the threats to be serious and did not convey them to the Douglas County Sheriff's Department," she wrote.

The letter from the district attorney's office, which is a summary of a more extensive multi-agency investigation of Lopez's death, was released Tuesday.

Lopez was being held on 55 felony counts of sexually assaulting three of his female basketball players, two of whom allege they were younger than 15 when they first had intimate relations with the coach.

He was arrested in New York in July and was extradited to Douglas County in August.

He denied he had ever done anything illegal with his players, many of whom he groomed for top university basketball programs through a regimen of vigorous practices and intense competitive play.

Lopez wasn't on a suicide watch Dec. 26, the day Chambers said he formed a noose with fragments from prison-issued bedsheets.

Investigators say Lopez placed his neck in the noose, let his body go limp and asphyxiated himself under his own body weight.

Chambers wrote in the letter that Lopez "had not exhibited any behaviors nor made any comments to jail staff that would have alerted them to the fact that he needed to be on suicide watch."

Furthermore, she wrote, Lopez had covered the window to his cell with tissue and the location of the vent from which he hung himself would not have been visible to detention personnel from their "pod control booth."

Lopez had made repeated claims in a secretly recorded conversation with one of his accusers that he would kill himself if he was arrested. That tape was played at a preliminary hearing in early December.