Man set himself on fire to protest Iraq war

A letter, a will, and a friend left coping with suicide
By BILL GLAUBER
bglauber@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Nov. 13, 2006

Bruno Johnson spreads the two-page note on the bar at his Palm Tavern in Bay View and stares at the worn paper, folded and refolded countless times, passed from hand to hand, friend to friend.

Bruno Johnson of Milwaukee holds a letter from his friend Malachi Ritscher of Chicago, which Johnson received a few days after Ritscher committed suicide Nov. 3. Ritscher set himself on fire to protest the Iraq war and sent the detailed letter to Johnson to help put his affairs in order.

Photo/Joeff Davis/www.joeff.com

Malachi Ritscher (center) holds a war protest sign during a 2003 demonstration in downtown Chicago. He posted a suicide note and self-written obituary online.

Without fear I go now to God - your future is what you will choose today.

- Malachi Ritscher,
in his online suicide note

Johnson stares at the words, instructions about bank accounts, credit cards, computer passwords, next of kin, a giant collection of jazz recordings and a neon-purple 1997 Plymouth with 107,000 miles parked north of Grand Ave. in Chicago. And that final chilling sentence, the one that still gets to Johnson: "sorry about the mental-illness thing, it's not something I would have chosen for myself."

"I had a sense it was probably explaining his death to me," Johnson says now, in the middle of the afternoon, his soft, melancholy voice matching the soft autumn light.

On Nov. 3, Johnson's friend, Malachi Ritscher, 52, of Chicago died of self-immolation near an exit ramp off the Kennedy Expressway in downtown Chicago.

Ritscher, according to a suicide note posted on a Web site, was protesting the war in Iraq.

But nobody heard.

Initially, the event was treated like an auto accident, which backed up rush-hour traffic, grist for live television coverage.

"As horrified Friday-morning commuters watched, a man apparently doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire along the Kennedy Expressway near a 25-foot-tall Loop sculpture titled 'Flame of the Millennium,' " the Chicago Sun Times reported the next day. Police told the newspaper that a "homemade sign was found near his charred body that read, 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' "

Only after Johnson received the note on Nov. 6, along with a set of house keys and a will, were friends and authorities able to put the pieces together, to match Ritscher with the unfathomable event.

The gesture wasn't just futile, or even drained of all meaning. For days, it simply did not register.

Finally, the Chicago Reader, an alternative newspaper, picked up the story, pointed to the suicide note, tried to make sense of what occurred.

But none of it makes sense to Johnson.

He is a big man, 6-foot-9, built like a tight end, with tattoos on his arms. But he is gentle, too. He doesn't understand what happened or why.

"I can't speak for him," Johnson says. "In a jealous sense, I feel cheated. I miss a friend."

They met 20 years ago, at some music venue in Chicago, Johnson recalls, brought together by a shared passion for punk music and jazz.

Ritscher, a maintenance engineer at the University of Chicago, became something of a fixture on the Chicago jazz scene. For years, he set up microphones and recorded gigs in smoky bars, Johnson says. If bands wanted the master, Ritscher gave it to them at no charge.

Johnson, who runs a small record label named Okka Disk, distributed some of the works.

Ritscher, who changed his first name from Mark to Malachi in 1981, lived a life filled with highs and lows, according to his self-written obituary, titled "out of time." A marriage ended in divorce. He was estranged from his son. He battled alcoholism but was sober for 16 years.

He explained his opposition to the war in a rambling "mission statement" in which he implored the reader to "judge me by my actions."

"When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed," he wrote.

Disturbingly, he claimed that one morning in 2002, with a knife "clenched in my hand," he passed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a Chicago street and "was acutely aware that slashing his throat would spare the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He didn't act.

He concluded, "Without fear I go now to God - your future is what you will choose today."

Johnson says the act "was futile."

But he wants to remember his friend. So do others.

Sunday night, at a music studio above a Chinese restaurant on the north side of Chicago, dozens of Ritscher's friends and family gathered. They ate cinnamon buns from Ritscher's favorite bakery. They looked at photos of Ritscher tacked to a wall, dark-rimmed glasses, dark eyes and a poker face. His parents, both in their 80s, appeared shellshocked, shuffling across the carpeted floor, greeting Ritscher's friends.

Some jazz was played. Memories were shared.

Johnson holds tight to those memories. He also has access to the recordings Ritscher made of jazz concerts in Chicago, some 3,000 of them over the years. Eventually, a committee will be formed, the collection culled, the best works turned into CDs in Ritscher's memory.

And Johnson has the note, folded so many times and handed to so many friends, instructions about books and tapes, the house with a mortgage, and the hot sauce in the refrigerator.

And there's not a word about the war.