The apartment near 14th and E streets sits empty, its broken window repaired, a “for rent” sign planted in the front yard.

Its most recent tenants, a young couple with a 9-month-old baby, are gone.

The baby is in foster care, his 19-year-old mother broke and evicted.

Ricky Turco — new father, new husband, high-school dropout, accused felon — is in jail, leaving a trail of newspaper headlines, arrests and heartache.

Lincoln first heard of Turco when he floored his 2000 Chrysler Concorde until he said the speedometer climbed past 60 and it crashed headlong into a tree on the afternoon of March 26.

Turco and his three passengers were seriously injured. Five days later, 15-year-old Megan Churchill died, and prosecutors charged Turco with manslaughter.

But what brought the 18-year-old even more notoriety was his behavior since then: continuing to drive with no license, allegedly breaking into Lincoln High School twice, failing to show up in court.

His mother and others who know him say he didn’t listen when people told him to quit driving, to stay out of trouble.

“Everything’s going to happen to (him) that I said was going to happen,” said his mother, Bernice, who asked that her last name not be used because of publicity surrounding her son’s case.

Bernice said she has been worried for some time that her son was headed for trouble.

But what really set the spiral in motion, she said, was a combination of becoming a father, moving out on his own and having access to nearly $64,000 his wife received in a settlement from an accident when she was a child.

“The money had a terrible lot to do with it,” she said.

Ricky Turco, who declined a request for an interview, grew up in Lincoln with his mother and two half-sisters.

His father — also named Ricky Turco — and mother never married but were together for seven years before they split up when the younger Ricky was 4, according to court records.

Since then, his dad has been in and out of prison during chunks of his son’s life.

As a child, the younger Turco was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a court-ordered psychological evaluation, and got special education services in school because he stuttered.

When he started to talk, the stutter was severe, his mother said, but it improved once he was put on medication for ADHD.

He has faced challenges, she said, including being raised by a single mom, not having his father around and having his dad break promises to show up for school events.

But it wasn’t until high school that he began to get into trouble.

In February 2006, when Turco was 16, he landed in juvenile court for relatively minor offenses for which he would eventually be put on probation: showing up on school grounds after he’d been suspended, hanging out on property posted with “no trespassing” signs and smoking cigarettes.

Around this time, acquaintances say, he met a girl named Naomi Brock. Before long, friends say, she was pregnant. She could not be reached for comment.

“They barely knew each other,” said Lori Hein, whose son was friends with Turco and who let the couple stay with her around the time their son was born.

By December 2006, Turco had moved out of his mom’s house and dropped out of school.

Something else happened that fall: Naomi turned 19 and received the settlement that had been invested for her since she’d been in a serious car accident when she was 3.

In September, she got nearly $10,000, though her father had appealed to the court to appoint a guardian to oversee the money.

Darren Brock wrote in a letter to the court that his daughter was pregnant and rebellious, and he was concerned she wouldn’t be responsible with the money.

The court said it had no authority to appoint a guardian, and Naomi got the remaining $54,000 at the end of December.

The couple spent freely, friends and family say. They bought a 1988 Camaro, which they later sold for $300, and then bought the Chrysler that Turco drove March 26.

They bought a pool table, leather furniture and a big-screen TV and paid six months’ rent on their apartment, Hein said.

“Whatever he wanted, he went and got,” she said.

On Oct. 21, 2006, Dante Jordan was born, a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who in less than six months would be put in temporary foster care by the state amid allegations of neglect.

 After his birth, the couple stayed for a short time with Hein, who remembers lecturing Turco about being responsible.

“He’d say, ‘I’m going to be there for my kid,’” Hein recalled. “I’m not going to get locked up like my dad.”

But between October and March 4, Turco racked up nine convictions for driving without a license and got in three car accidents, accumulating enough points to lose the driver’s license he’d never gotten.

Although he hadn’t been going to school since December, friends say he often went back and, at one point, got a ticket for trespassing.

After school, he would often pick up his friend Austin Jones, who’d begun hanging out with Turco after meeting him in the lunchroom in ninth grade.

“We’d go to his house,” Jones said.

They would play pool and PlayStation 3 or watch TV. Other teens gathered there, too.

By February, juvenile prosecutors were asking to revoke Turco’s probation.

On Feb. 22, he and Naomi went to the courthouse to get married, even though Turco was just 17 and had to get the permission of his reluctant mother. They had a reception at the apartment, Bernice said.

Turco had planned to get his GED and talked about going to college, his mother said, but she thinks the money, being on his own and being a father was too much.

“He thought he could do it all and be a man, but he couldn’t,” she said.

And then, on March 26, he picked up Jones, Churchill and Joshua Rice, 17, after school.

Jones said Turco told them he’d jumped a hill near 19th and Stockwell streets the day before and asked if they wanted to do it.

Jones, sitting in the passenger seat, said he remembers seeing the speedometer hit 70 mph and telling Turco to slow down as they neared the top of the hill.

The next thing he remembers is being in intensive care. He remained in a rehabilitation wing of the hospital until June.

The day after Churchill died, Turco and Rice were released from the hospital. Turco was ticketed — but not jailed — on suspicion of manslaughter.

In the next months, he was in and out of court repeatedly on new and old charges, paying thousands of dollars in bond money.

After his injuries from the accident — a broken leg, bruised lung and torn liver — had healed enough, his mother said, he worked for a time because the money was gone.

Then, on May 29, police say they caught him and three others as they ran from Lincoln High School at 1 a.m., arms full of snacks and juice from vending machines. Inside, they’d allegedly used golf clubs to cause about $15,000 in damage.

John McCartney, a friend of Ricky Turco’s mother who was staying with Ricky and Naomi, said he thinks Turco has always wanted to impress his friends — with his own apartment and his own car — and he thinks they burglarized the school for “laughs and giggles.”

Turco was charged with three felonies — including one for a similar burglary at the school earlier in May. He remains behind bars at the Lancaster County Jail. He is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday on the manslaughter and burglary charges.

At the request of his attorney, a psychologist evaluated Turco to see if is mentally competent to stand trial. The psychologist concluded he was of normal intelligence and able to stand trial.

His mother said he’s a smart kid — and he does regret what happened March 26.

Since the accident, the young couple’s property has been vandalized and stolen, his mother said. Last month, someone threw a Corona bottle through the apartment window.

His wife is talking about divorce, Turco’s mom said. And his mom is the only one who goes to see him each week, she said.

He has talked to his father, too, but it’s hard because his dad, who was discharged March 14 from the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, is now serving a sentence in a Wyoming prison.

“Now, it just seems like everybody’s turned their back on him,” Bernice said.

She’s scared, she said, of what will happen to him if he goes to prison.

She remembers the boy who once brought home a plant from grade school, a small seedling he’d planted in a Styrofoam cup.

She planted it in a pot outside, and it grew for years. Until this summer, when it withered.

“I just took care of it,” she said. “I don’t know what got to it this year.”

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.