A Game with Death

Actress Mary Tyler Moore loses her son

In the film Ordinary People, she plays the part of an excessively reserved and poised matron who proves incapable of helping her 18-year-old son, who has attempted suicide. After the movie was released last month, Actress Mary Tyler Moore, 42, acknowledged that she prepared for the part by drawing on her experiences in raising her own son from her first marriage, Richard Carlton Meeker Jr., 24. Said she: "I was kind of a perfectionist mother, and I demanded a lot of him. I think I was responsible for a lot of alienation. I brought some of that to the part." Indeed, only in the last few years did Meeker, who worked as a bit-part actor and mail-room clerk at CBS television studios, become close to his mother. Said she: "I have a new friend."

In Los Angeles last week, Meeker died in circumstances that uncannily echoed his mother's film. According to Judy Vasquez, 21, who shared a house with him near the University of Southern California campus, Meeker was chatting with her about his girlfriend, Linda Jason, 21, of Fresno. He casually plucked from the wall over his bed a short-barreled .410 gauge shotgun. Sitting with legs folded in the lotus position, Meeker rested the butt of the gun on his ankles, pointed the barrel at his face and began loading and unloading a shell.

Asked Vasquez: "Do you think she's in love with you?" Replied Meeker, tilting his head to the right: "She loves me." With a click, he unloaded the gun and tilted his head to the left. Said he: "She loves me not." There was another click as he loaded the gun and said: "She loves me." Click. "She loves me not." Click. Meeker stared intently at Vasquez and shouted: "She loves me!" A blast ripped into Meeker's face, and he fell dead.

Relatives and friends insisted that the shooting was accidental. Said TV Producer Grant Tinker, Moore's estranged husband and Meeker's stepfather: "Both Mary and I had talked to him that day. He was never more 'up.' " Said Linda Jason: "I know it wasn't suicide. He was the happiest he's ever been." According to friends at work, Meeker bought the gun to hunt rabbits. Said his father Richard, a TV executive in Sacramento: "He just liked guns. He had them all over the place. It was just one of those things."

Still, some friends portrayed young Meeker's early years as hectic and troubled. The only child of Moore and Meeker, he was six when his parents were divorced in 1962 after seven years of marriage. He lived first with his mother, then moved in with his father at age 15. He attended a string of schools, started high school late and dabbled briefly in drugs. But friends said that in the past few years he seemed to be on track. Said Janet McLaughlin, 22, another housemate of Meeker's: "Richard wasn't emotionally troubled. He was in love. His job was good." Insisted Grant Tinker: "The movie has absolutely nothing to do with this. There are no parallels." Police were not so certain. They planned several weeks of investigation before attempting to decide whether Meeker killed himself by accident or by design.

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