Jessica Newburn saw his text appear simply as she turned on her phone that autumn morning at 5:54, and with the message came relief. Her all-time friend was notwithstanding alive.

"I don't know whether I should give thanks you or hate you for getting my blood brother," wrote Ruben Urbina, a floppy-haired honor-gyre student who, at 15, was and then slight that he looked more than like a middle-schooler.

The night earlier, on Sept. 14, Ruben had attempted to hang himself, and now he was trying to describe it to Jessica.

"I'1000 just more worried about the feel I felt before I was most to laissez passer out," he continued. "I never felt anything like that. I was in the most panicked country ever."

The two lived in the same Northern Virginia townhouse circuitous, just 12 doors down from each other. They'd met 2 years earlier attention Pace West, a Prince William County schoolhouse that helps kids with emotional disabilities, and they'd bonded over the torment that led them there: anxiety, depression, self-harm. At a time when American teenagers are killing themselves at historic rates — with nooses, pills and, increasingly, guns — they became essential to each other'southward survival.

Ruben, a sophomore, had especially struggled in the three weeks since their render to schoolhouse from summer interruption. Jessica, a junior, spotted cuts on his arm and confronted him, but he wouldn't talk nearly it.

Ruben Urbina. (Family photo)

Right earlier he tried to hang himself, they had a fight and he lashed out, insisting in a series of texts that he didn't want to see her anymore. Amid the anger, though, he also voiced his despair.

"I've had all these thoughts pile up in my head now that I tin can't fifty-fifty think anymore," Ruben wrote. "I want it to stop."

"Are you okay?" responded Jessica, sixteen, because she knew where those thoughts could take him. He had nearly ended his ain life with pills several weeks earlier.

"Don't do anything stupid."

She sent him a featherbrained meme of a fat guy sitting on a bench next to the title "Breaking Benches," a play on the Television show "Breaking Bad." She'd used it before to brand him feel better when he needed it most, merely this time, information technology didn't work.

"I'one thousand just glad I finally take the assurance to kill myself," he wrote. "See ya :)."

"Yo wtf," she responded, before texting his older brother, Oscar, that Ruben needed assistance. She messaged Oscar'due south girlfriend, too.

"Stop him. Call the cops for endangerment of himself or something," Jessica wrote her. "Only don't let him kill himself."

Ruben's eighteen-year-onetime sibling rushed home and sprinted upstairs, screaming and slamming on his blood brother's locked door until the boy opened it, crying. Oscar, whose girlfriend assured Jessica that they'd made it in time, couldn't find whatever Ruben had strung effectually his pharynx.

"I'm likewise scared to experience that again," Ruben texted Jessica the next morning.

"What all happened," she responded as she got ready for school and headed to the bus.

"I'm not going to talk about it now."

"Okay."

"Why couldn't you lot simply do naught near it," he asked.

"Considering I'm a man being and I have sympathy."

"Information technology doesn't matter," he connected. "I'll effort over again another day."

She was still mad at him for the hurtful things he'd messaged the dark earlier, and she told him and then.

"I'chiliad not sure if I should get some serious help or if I should leave information technology be," he texted.

"Become aid," she pleaded.

"I just take a f---ed up brain."

He apologized.

"I don't know how to explain what happened. Can nosotros please talk after school," wrote Ruben, who had decided to skip that day.

"Sure."

Jessica Newburn, Ruben's sixteen-year-old best friend, in her sleeping room in Haymarket.

Her bus pulled upwards at Pace and she told him farewell, then turned her telephone off.

She understood his suffering because Jessica — who, with her father'southward permission, talked nearly her relationship with Ruben and shared hundreds of their texts with The Washington Post — had already endured what she hoped was her worst moment. The teen had once spent three days in a hospital subsequently slicing open her thighs and swallowing more than twoscore Benadryl, but she'd come up a long way since then, proof in her mind that Ruben could, as well.

"I've gotten better," she would tell him. "You can get improve."

And Jessica would tell him again that afternoon, she thought. When either of them felt pitiful or overwhelmed or but bored, the friends would take walks together, frequently to a favorite spot in the wood of suburban Haymarket, where they'd sit on a bench and stare out across a pond. And then, Jessica figured, they'd go on some other one of their walks after schoolhouse, make each other express mirth. He'd phone call her Jess, she'd call him Wooben, and they'd fall back into their version of normal.

But at the end of the day, when her bus pulled into their neighborhood, she saw police cars lining the streets.

Her father and stepmother were waiting in their SUV.

"Daddy, what's going on?" Jessica asked.

An officer, he told her, had shot someone at Ruben's home.

At starting time, they thought it was his older brother, only when she called Ruben'south telephone, he didn't reply. When she texted that she was pitiful, he didn't respond.

It was then that Jessica noticed the messages he'd sent her earlier, when she'd been at school with her telephone turned off.

In i: "I'k just some kid who has major depression disorder and astringent feet who'southward probably bipolar too."

And after that: "Simply look at the people that do stupid s--- like me and don't follow in their footsteps."

And finally: "Emotions are only temporary. Don't allow information technology have over you like it did to me."

An 60 minutes subsequently, Jessica heard something on TV that she didn't want to believe.

"The news is saying a 15 year sometime was shot and killed," she messaged her best friend. "Delight don't be you. Please."

Photographs and mementos of Ruben at his dwelling.

Simply before 11 that forenoon of Sept. 15, Oscar had woken up to his mother's screams.

Ruben was exterior, she said. He had a knife.

Past then, he'd already dialed 911.

Calmly, police said, Ruben told the Prince William Canton operator that he had a flop strapped to his chest, even though he didn't. He insisted he was holding his mother earnest, fifty-fifty though he wasn't. He warned he had blades and suggested he might go a gun, fifty-fifty though he couldn't.

He claimed, investigators said, that "he did non want to live anymore."

Then he hung up.

Moments subsequently, Oscar and his girlfriend found Ruben in the garage, wielding a three-foot-long crowbar.

"I chosen the police," Ruben said, "so they tin kill me."

The ligature marks on his neck from the night before were yet raw.

"Everything's okay," Oscar said, trying to convince his brother that whatever he was feeling would pass, just every bit it had before.

Both boys, the family unit said in interviews, had long contended with suicidal thoughts, undergoing years of therapy and taking antidepressants. It was Oscar, though, who had always been the violent 1, getting into bloody fights, even serving time in jail. Ruben had one time been hospitalized later trying to overdose on Zoloft, just he was never aggressive. Intensely shy at times, he liked to skateboard and play video games, study the history of the Soviet Matrimony and read the work of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He made A's and B'southward. He wanted to get a graphic designer when he grew upward.

Police force cars line the streets in Ruben's townhouse customs. (Kristi King/WTOP)

Oscar could run into little of that gentle child in the dark, anguished optics of the boy standing before him. He considered tackling Ruben, just 5-foot-2 and 120 pounds, but his brother threatened him with the crowbar.

"Become away from me," he told Oscar and his girlfriend.

Ruben moved outside, in front of their home, just as police drew near. At ten:58 a.m., two officers parked downwardly the street, aware of the flop threat. It was a balmy 75 degrees, but Ruben still wore a heavy grey North Confront jacket, making it hard to tell whether he'd concealed something inside.

Oscar ran toward the police force, trying to intervene, but they told him to back away.

Just so, Ruben swung the crowbar at Oscar's girlfriend, striking her on the dorsum. He turned and headed toward the officers, passing an American flag mounted beside the family's front door.

Ruben, withal 10 months shy of being eligible for a driver's license, raised the crowbar with both hands, according to police force. They said one of the officers ordered him to drop it. He told him to stop.

Ruben kept coming.

The officeholder fired two rounds, and the teenager collapsed.

From left, Oscar Urbina, his older son, Oscar, and his married woman, Rosaura, grieve during services for Ruben at a Northern Virginia cemetery in September.

The mourners filed toward the funeral home's white double doors, some of them in black suits or dresses and others in orange T-shirts, because that was Ruben'south favorite color.

Equally they passed, a woman handed out copies of an open letter that Ruben's father, Oscar Urbina, had written to Officeholder Robert Choyce, the seven-year veteran of the police forcefulness who shot his son.

"A Letter Of Forgiveness," it was titled, but most of what came next was laced with fury.

"Regardless of the circumstances surrounding my child decease....he didn't do anything wrong...you did," wrote Urbina, who'd been traveling when Ruben was killed. "The difference between y'all and us is that...yous are GUILTY. Our baby is innocent."

Urbina contended that the officer, who didn't respond to a request for annotate, should have used a Taser or pepper spray to finish Ruben. His older male child, Oscar, agreed, but he also believed the encounter ended exactly the mode his blood brother intended information technology to.

Already, Prince William County Commonwealth's Chaser Paul B. Ebert had ended the shooting was justified considering, he said, Ruben "was ready, willing and able to inflict expiry or serious bodily harm upon the responding officers." Ebert said he considered it a archetype "suicide by cop," the simply one involving a juvenile he could recollect in his 52-year career equally a prosecutor.

"You wouldn't retrieve a young person would want to commit suicide past cop," Ebert said. "He had to be thoughtful, extremely premeditated."

Ruben's death wasn't officially counted equally a suicide, because he didn't pull the trigger, but its unusual and public nature drew national headlines — and rare attending to one teenager's apparent effort to terminate his own life.

On average, one child nether the age of 18 committed suicide every six hours concluding year, according to a Post review of new data released Dec. 21 by the Centers for Illness Command and Prevention.

Nearly half of those children died from hanging, strangulation or suffocation, while 41 percent used guns. The total number — i,533 — was the largest in at least a decade, most doubling over that period.

7 of them were nine years old.

Those who report youth suicide, and seek to curb its connected surge, focus on prevention. Show shows, co-ordinate to the CDC, that teenagers are more probable to act on impulse if they have quick access to "lethal means," particularly powerful drugs or loaded firearms. Just equally important, experts say, is effectively treating kids' underlying mental affliction, and it was this point that had lingered in the listen of Ruben's mother, Rosaura Urbina, after he was killed. Her son had already tried and failed to overdose and to hang himself, and they didn't have a gun in their domicile. Only Ruben, she realized, had devised a different mode to access lethal ways.

She believed the officeholder used unnecessary strength, simply Rosaura too couldn't grasp what fabricated "my dear Ruben," as she called him in Spanish at the funeral, want to die. Decades agone, she and her married man had both immigrated to this land from Mexico. They'd each come with naught, but the couple, at present U.S. citizens, said they'd done the best they could for their troubled American-born teens. Oscar, 55, worked as a Verizon technician and Rosaura, 43, as a McDonald'due south managing director, and together, they saved enough coin to move from a mobile dwelling house in Fairfax County to their ain neatly furnished, iii-chamber townhouse in Haymarket.

After Ruben'south killing, though, Rosaura couldn't help but question the choices they'd made.

He had never showed signs of depression before the motion, so what if they had never left? What if they'd let him cease taking his antipsychotic medication after he'd complained that information technology disrupted his moods? Were his exemplary grades a false indicator that his listen had finally quieted? Should they accept taken him to the hospital that night, later he tried to hang himself, instead of waiting?

She'd woken up early the side by side morning and called Ruben's psychiatrist for guidance. Someone in the doctor's office said they couldn't get her son in that day, so she should take him to the emergency room.

And that was her plan, fifty-fifty after Ruben had come downstairs and shared fried eggs and bacon with her.

"Are you lot okay?" she'd asked.

"I'm fine," he'd said.

Minutes later, afterward he got the knife, she learned that he'd chosen the police. Rosaura was relieved. They would calm him down, she idea. With the officers en route, and her older son trying to comfort Ruben in the garage, she dashed dorsum within to go ready to take him to the hospital.

Then, every bit Rosaura changed dress in her bedroom, she heard ii pops.

A law spokesman declined to discuss what Rosaura said happened adjacent, when she ran outside to discover Ruben dead on the ground. She asked Choyce why he'd shot her son, and this, she recalled, was the officer'due south response: "Because he asked me for it."

Jessica hangs out at a neighborhood playground in Haymarket afterwards Ruben's death.

Jessica stood in the shade of a tall granite slab, but behind a maroon tent where dozens of people had crowded effectually Ruben's urn at the cemetery.

She clutched a box of tissues in her easily, and from a string around her cervix hung a beaded bracelet Ruben had brought her dorsum from his summer trip to United mexican states. She dressed in an orange T-shirt, for him, and on her left wrist she wore an orange ring.

"We are Ruben," read an inscription along the outside. When a teacher had given it to her at schoolhouse that morn, Jessica sunk to the hallway flooring and wept.

Amid the groovy of grief, guilt had also begun to flicker in her mind. Jessica knew Ruben had a crush on her, and the teen wondered if possibly she could have said something to him that would have changed the class he took. But she knew, too, that there wasn't ever an answer — that sometimes people her age, or any age, wanted to die for inexplicable reasons.

Jessica never could articulate why she'd attempted suicide that one night in eighth class, or why she'd felt so unhappy in the months before it. Her life was dandy, she said. She had friends, loving parents, skillful grades, simply none of it seemed to matter at the time.

Only after weathering months of failed group therapy and ineffective medications, damaging misdiagnoses and an unaccommodating insurer, did she at last begin to find a sense of calm. The move in 9th grade to Stride, with its small-scale classrooms and patient arroyo, had as well helped.

And then had Ruben.

He knew how to soothe her when she had panic attacks. It's merely in your head, he would say until she believed him.

He also knew how to make her express joy, especially the time he posted a picture of himself on Instagram, posing just like a female friend of theirs always did, optics closed, head cocked, hand below his chin, a crown of digital flowers wrapped around his head.

He tried, repeatedly, to teach her how to play one of his favorite video games, "Call of Duty," and then they could enjoy information technology together.

"There's and so many buttons on the controller," she'd complain.

Most of all, Jessica cherished their walks — the one when, after a rainstorm, he gave her a piggyback ride through the mud and nearly dropped her; and after that, when they came upon a big black snake and she screamed, and he thought it was hilarious; and in June, when they establish a baby bird on the basis and brought it dorsum, warmed it with a heating pad and fed it mushy dog treats, so took it to a wildlife eye and concluded their perfect twenty-four hour period with burritos from Moe's Southwest Grill.

Even after she knew Ruben was dead, Jessica texted his number.

She messaged once that she was releasing an orangish balloon into the heaven for him. Later, she sent a drove of his favorite emoji: a taco, a hammer and sickle, an Easter Isle head.

"I miss you," she wrote. "I wish yous were hither."

Jessica shows the final text messages she sent Ruben before, and after, he was shot.

1 afterward some other, the local Idiot box reporters had knocked at the Urbina family's front door, asking for comment, then over again and over again Ruben's father went outside and gave them one.

"We just don't know how we're going to survive this," he said.

"My kid was taken from us for no reason at all," he said.

Urbina still didn't know the precise details, because he couldn't stand to hear them, but he remained convinced that his son should nevertheless exist live.

In their living room, he and eighteen-year-old Oscar talked of how information technology had come to this.

"You and I know the medicine is not an consequence," Urbina said, referring to Ruben's antipsychotics.

"The thing is, I don't know that," Oscar said.

His begetter couldn't exist swayed.

"It'southward irrelevant whether he was in a state of mind," Urbina said, arguing that the officeholder should take but subdued Ruben. The teen, he believed, was likewise small to pose a existent threat.

For Oscar, the answer wasn't that simple.

"I can't assistance but, you know, try to find someone to blame," he said. "Should I blame me? Should I blame my parents? Should I blame the officer? I don't know who, because I simply feel like so many things went wrong that we could have done better."

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He struggled to empathise what had incited Ruben that morning, most of all because his younger blood brother had sent him a funny video game meme of Mario's head atop a futuristic warrior's body just 81 minutes before the shooting.

Oscar told his dad he knew the family didn't want to focus on Ruben's low.

"That's non the result," Urbina said.

"But you lot have to realize, that is the result, because that's why that happened."

"No, the issue is the determination that the guy fabricated," Urbina said of the officer.

Oscar Urbina grieves for his younger son, Ruben. He and others wore orange T-shirts because that was Ruben's favorite colour. Jessica and Ruben'south brother, Oscar, xviii, embrace during a memorial for Ruben.

Something adept, though, needed to come from Ruben's death, his brother maintained. People needed to pay more than attending to kids struggling with mental illness, and maybe this would help.

"Although somebody may seem like they're doing skilful — I know you don't want information technology to be about that," Oscar said, "merely no matter how good they may —."

"It's totally irrelevant," his dad interjected. "Considering whatever the case, we were — he had the help."

"I know he had the help, but no thing how much help, how many rehabs accept I — how many places take I been?"

"I know —," Urbina began. Oscar cutting him off.

"Let me talk. I've had assistance. I've been okay. Some points I've had where I've been okay for a long fourth dimension," he said, and so pointed at his head. "Just that doesn't change what's up here."

Ruben had used almost those aforementioned words the night he'd tried to hang himself.

He couldn't bear the anxiety anymore, Ruben told his blood brother. The unyielding depression.

"It's as well much."

Ruben's urn at a cemetery in Northern Virginia in September.

Steven Rich and Gabriel Florit contributed to this written report.

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