Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

The ex-junkie's name is Robert Lopez, and against all odds he arrived at his 45th birthday one day after Kennedy was officially presumed dead.

Lopez seems as stunned as anyone that he would survive a life of drugs and crime and prison while a golden young man who exhibited only grace and goodness would die before he even reached 40.

"I'm actually very fortunate," Lopez said yesterday.

Lopez now stands as breathing proof that young Kennedy's spirit lives on in the rippling good works he supported and inspired. Lopez has no doubt that without The Doe Fund's Ready, Willing and Able work program, he still would be in the downward spiral that governed his adult life.

"I couldn't stop," Lopez said. "I just could not stop."

Of his earlier years, Lopez clearly recalls the afternoon at Public School 155 when his fourth-grade teacher stood, stricken, before the class.

"I remember him saying President Kennedy was dead," Lopez would later say. "I remember him crying."

Lopez watched the funeral on television. He liked to draw then, and he sketched the coffin-bearing carriage that John-John saluted.

"I remember drawing all the horses," Lopez says.

By the time he was 19, Lopez had abandoned drawing for drugs. He went into Central Park on the afternoon of May 15, 1974, desperate for heroin money. He picked up a tree branch when he saw a boy approach on a shiny bicycle.

"Get off that bike or I'll kill you," the police report quotes him as saying.

Lopez was in a sweat when he arrived back at his East Harlem apartment. His pregnant wife, Miriam Lopez, saw that the bicycle's rear rack held a tennis racket. She admired the yellow and gold frame and the black strings.

"I said, 'This is nice, whose is it?'" she remembers. "He said, 'I stole it from somebody in the park.'"

That was bad enough without the news flash on the television that night. Thirteen-year-old John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been robbed of a bicycle and tennis racket in Central Park.

"Robert jumped up and said, 'Oh my God, that was me!'" Miriam Lopez says. "We had to think about things for a couple days. 'What are we going to do? What are we going to do?'"

Miriam Lopez called the 23rd Precinct and asked if the person who had robbed Kennedy could get help with a drug problem if he surrendered. A detective gave his word, and the couple walked into the stationhouse.

"They said, 'We'll take it from here,'" Miriam Lopez recalls. "They didn't want to hear about a drug problem. The next thing I know, I am seeing Robert on TV."

Two months after the birth of his son, Robert Lopez was sentenced to two years in prison. Miriam Lopez went with the baby and her mother to Jackie Kennedy Onassis' building on Fifth Ave.

"We were going to tell her he's sorry, we were going to ask her to forgive him," Miriam Lopez says. "The doorman wouldn't let us in."

Not that Robert Lopez felt his sentence was unjust.

"I was deserving of what I got," he says. "You have to have laws."

He came out of jail with a high school diploma, but he soon fell back into drugs. He continued to break laws and get the punishment he deserved.

"I was really out of my mind, and I want to tell you I remained out of my mind," he says.

Through 1997, Robert Lopez did not spend an entire calendar year out of jail. He parted with his wife and he was contemplating suicide when somebody guided him to the Ready, Willing and Able work program.

"I was so desperate," he says. "They said they would give me a chance if I gave myself a chance."

Honest sweat proved to be a magic elixir. He remains drug-free and works as a phone technician.

"My day just flies by," he says. "I get caught up in my work."

Robert Lopez was unaware that his one-time victim had even indirectly supported the program that saved him. Lopez had admired from afar this prince of promise who was all the more remarkable for being so unassuming.

"Classy," Robert Lopez says. "That's the word for him. He was a very classy guy, from a very classy family."

On Saturday, Lopez again saw a news flash about John F. Kennedy Jr., this one reporting that he had vanished. A quarter of a century after the encounter between a prince and a junkie in Central Park, fate had decreed Lopez to be the one who survived to mark his 45th birthday.

"I just happen to be one of the lucky ones," he said yesterday.