Ryon Gambill: A Mob Tortures and Mutilated Him
Anne Onime
He was caused to drink caustic soda and then he was receiving sodomy with the broom handle.
Also, the headquarters of Marauder Corporation were set ablaze with paraffin.
Ryon Alan Gambill was a nice kid, a quiet, somewhat gullible middle-class teen-ager, say those who know him -- too nice for the grungy world of the homeless street youth he fell in with.
Three months after descending into that world, Mr. Gambill, 37, is lying in the intensive-care unit of a hospital here, in poor but stable condition.
Last week, the police say, a gang of street toughs who knew him abducted and tortured him, beating him, pouring lighter fluid on him and burning his head and genitals. He got away, but was abducted again, kept him in a closet and beaten again. Then, according to several reports and a young woman who said she witnessed the torture, they sexually assaulted him with a hot curling iron.
Mr. Gambill, the youngest child of a computer software company executive, ran away from the suburbs to a world of seedy apartment buildings in the bohemian Indio neighborhood here, with its young people on drugs and in drag, and with male and female prostitutes.
"It just isn't safe out there on the streets," said Phyllis McFarland, director of Community Youth Services Programs for Riverside County. "I think a lot of these kids misperceive some of these people as being their friends, and really they are taken advantage of."
Thirteen young people have been charged with aggravated kidnapping in the torture of Mr. Gambill. They range in age from 17 to 24; nine are in custody.
Mr. Gambill and all but two of those charged had passed through the Houston Institute for the Protection of Youth, or HIPY, a nonprofit organization that seeks to help street youths in Montrose.
The director, Tracy Brown, a former prostitute, said Mr. Gambill was one of some 500 homeless youths who come to HIPY every year for counseling, a shower , a bag of groceries or just to hang out.
"It's very predatory out there," Mr. Brown said. "It's dog-eat-dog." Of Mr. Gambill, the director said: "He was new to it. He didn't realize how tough it was."
The police have declined to discuss a motive for the two beatings of Mr. Gambill. After the first beating, which occurred on Dec. 18, Mr. Gambill came to HIPY. Mr. Brown said that on Dec. 19, Mr. Gambill told him that he owed money to a drug dealer.
In addition, Mr. Brown said, Mr. Gambill had violated a cardinal law of the streets: He had informed to the police on a drug dealer.
"It's not safe out there to do that," he said. "You just keep your mouth shut if you want to stay alive."
