Ricky Nguyen escaped the fall of Saigon, a capsized boat in the South China Sea and, after making landfall in America, reality.

He stood 5 feet 2 inches and gulped vitamins because he wanted to be tall. He had AIDS and schizophrenia. He sold his jewelry to friends to pay the bills, then bet the money on the lottery trying to get rich.

His casket measured 6 feet 8 inches long. Three of the six pallbearers who lugged it to a pauper's grave at Allegheny Cemetery hadn't heard of him until he was shot dead by a city patrolman on an Oakland street May 23.

In the years, and months, and weeks and days before he waved a meat cleaver at the cop who shot him down, Ricky smashed vases to kill the demons hiding inside them. He answered the telephone by screaming, "Shut up." He prayed to Buddha, Moses, Mother Mary and Jesus, switching allegiances seemingly on the hour. He left behind no writings because he could not read, and the friends who loved him in the face of his madness are still sorting through the contradictory life stories he told.

"He was a little guy with big fears," said Allen Wolk, an electrical draftsman and designer from New Kensington. He met Ricky on a Friday night more than 15 years ago at a support dinner for persons with AIDS. Mr. Wolk came as a favor to two friends, and he felt lonely and awkward. The only guy in the room who looked lonelier was this tiny Asian guy.

Ricky told Mr. Wolk this story: His name was Nang The Nguyen and he came from a town called Thu Duc outside Saigon. He slipped out of Saigon in 1975 as the North Vietnamese Army closed in, then boarded a boat that capsized on the high seas. A military helicopter picked him up.

He spent time in California and Albuquerque, N.M., with his sister Kim and her husband. It was around this time he started calling himself Ricky. He dropped out of high school and moved out on his own: Roswell, N.M., Detroit, then Pittsburgh. He'd been a welder, a street kid, and a cook. His father, still in Vietnam, had three wives, and Ricky had dozens if not scores of siblings; he was a vegetarian and wanted to become a monk; and, by the way, he'd just been released from Western Psych.

"He was kind of a throwaway," Mr. Wolk said.

After driving him home, Mr. Wolk kept in touch, and Ricky became a focal point for a group of people who intersected throughout the next 15 years. Charles Moore, a Ph.D. from the North Side who worked in a factory, got to know the small, sometimes frantic man who cooked vats of freezable Chinese and Vietnamese dishes, sold them to Mr. Moore, then followed up with 5 a.m. phone calls.

An ideal sidekick

Mr. Wolk introduced Ricky to a friend, Dan Gamble, and the pair moved in together. Ricky sewed a pillow embroidered with a cat and gave it to Mr. Gamble, who kept cats, although Ricky claimed an allergy to them.

For the Rev. Howard Cherry, a Methodist clergyman Ricky later came to know through Mr. Gamble, Ricky sewed another pillow embroidered with a cat, because he knew the Rev. Cherry liked cats.

Ricky was an ideal sidekick -- a wiry, energetic little man whose English malapropisms charmed and whose loose-ends way of life -- spending money he didn't have on elaborate vases and jade jewelry, a flowers-before-bread philosophy -- suggested a reach for happiness that elevated optimism to the level of bravery. With his rent, he was on time. With other bills, he sometimes struggled, asking friends to buy his jade jewelry "or I'm a dead duck."

He sold Mr. Moore his favorite pieces -- a small oval, and a large, jade pendant necklace. "He said, 'One day, when I have money, I'll buy them back from you.' "

Once, he asked to have his photo taken in front of Mr. Wolk's car.

"I'm gonna send it home and show them I'm doing OK," Mr. Wolk remembered Ricky telling him. "He didn't want to be a failure."

Until getting into a fight with Mr. Gamble, Ricky hadn't shown his madness to his friends.

Another time in the early '90s, Mr. Wolk found him shouting and in a rage.

"He had this steely, cold gaze and I don't remember if he threatened me," Mr. Wolk said.

One day Mr. Moore came to visit.

Ricky had thrown away his HIV medicine. Evil spirits had taken up residence inside him -- at one point he claimed as many as 14 angry ghosts.

Mr. Moore spoke to him and Ricky "closed his eyes and he said, 'God's talking to me.' "

What was God saying?

"He said God granted him three wishes. One thing, he wasn't going to be HIV positive anymore. Another thing, he was going to hit the lottery. God told him he was going to hit the lottery," Mr. Moore said.

"There was a third thing, but I can't remember what it was."

Ricky did not shed his HIV, nor did he accumulate the wealth he heard God promise. His relationships were on-again, off-again, and the spirits haunted him, the voices continued.

A world of evil spirits

Pennsylvania law makes it difficult to force someone into psychiatric care. The standard is that they must present a clear and obvious danger to themselves or others. Ricky's shouts and screams, his conviction that the ghosts of others were stalking him, didn't meet that standard. On the occasions he would go, he received shots of anti-psychosis medication at an outpatient clinic in Oakland.

One night, he heard the floors creaking and summoned Mr. Wolk.

"I'm sure his mind turned them into spirits," Mr. Wolk said. "He slept on the couch as he would, and I slept in the bed, listening for spirits."

Nothing.

Another time, Ricky sent to his family in Thu Duc for spells. He once burned a photo of someone who had angered him, buried the ashes with the incantation, written in Vietnamese.

"He was a little guy," Mr. Wolk said. "He needed ammunition to protect himself. This would give him power."

Ricky had a sister in California and family in Pittsburgh's eastern suburbs. Neither group had much to do with him. There were no visits and only occasional phone calls. Ricky's friends figured he had worn them out with his impossible mind and undisguised homosexuality.

Sometime after 2000, after Mr. Gamble died, Ricky, accompanied by a friend, traveled to Braddock, a place where empty storefronts and abandoned offices are sometimes reincarnated in ways that would confound the steel families that once filled its streets.

Upstairs, in a building that bears the faded words "Harold Loan & Finance Corp. Loans to $3500" a Vietnamese monk named Tan Van Nguyen prays daily in a walkup that has been turned into the Chon Nhu Buddhist Monastery. Vietnamese travel there to pray on weekends, and issue their bequests to the spirits that have gone before them.

Mr. Nguyen, unfamiliar with how AIDS is spread, asked Ricky to come when others would not be there.

Ricky told the monk that the spirits of "two American ladies" inhabited him.

Mr. Nguyen's theology holds out the possibility, even with Ricky's madness, that such a haunting is possible.

"Maybe, maybe," he said. "We believe that some souls of some people, they don't go to hell ... but they come to somebody they like."

Ricky prayed at the temple. Mr. Nguyen gave him a Buddhist prayer book. Ricky later told him the spirits had seized it and thrown it away. Mr. Nguyen sent a replacement.

Falling apart

Over a 10-year stretch, Ricky lived upstairs from Oriental Super, a Korean grocery run by Chong Kim at 366 Atwood. When he was flush -- that is to say, when his government disability check met his costs -- he lived on the second floor. If money ran short, he moved to the less expensive apartment on the third.

"He was all the time broke," said Mr. Kim. "He bought a lot of daily numbers."

In later years, Ricky took Chong Kim through a triptych of his dissolving view of the cosmos, slipping in through the back door of the shop to announce his latest discovery.

"One time he comes and says, 'Hey, Mr. Kim, you know what? No more Buddha. Buddha is not good. Now, Christian. God told me what to do.'" OK, OK, Mr. Kim remembers telling him. "So then, the next day: 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no more, no more Christian. Buddha is strong, good.' I say, 'OK, OK.' He does this sometimes once a month, sometimes twice a month."

He was also breaking things. Ricky bought a chair and hacked one arm with a meat cleaver. He began smashing vases.

Charles Moore visited his apartment one day when Ricky was hurling vases to the floor.

"Why did you do that?" Mr. Moore asked him. "He said there were evil spirits in the vase and they wanted to go up to heaven and become God."

Ricky took his meat cleaver, the one with which he had served up delicacies for Mr. Moore. He chopped on an empty cutting board.

"He said he was cutting spirits up," Mr. Moore said. "One time he said to me that I was inhabited by a spirit. He said to me, 'Do you want me to cut the spirit's head off?' That sounded kind of dangerous. I said 'no,' and he said 'That's not you talking. That's the spirit talking.'"

In January or February of this year, friends found Ricky hurling himself to the floor of the apartment with enough force to declare him a danger to himself. He was sent to Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.

The last time Ricky visited the monastery in Braddock, he brought money -- a fistful, according to Tan Van Nguyen. Mr. Nguyen would only take $20 as an offering.

"The last time he came here, he bowed to Buddha beautiful," Mr. Nguyen said. "He prayed very, very good. I tell all the Buddhists who come here he is a very good Buddhist." Ricky's bow was not the traditional kind made by the Mahayana Buddhists of Vietnam. He glided to the floor effortlessly and lay prostrate and perfect after the fashion of the Tibetan monks.

"I don't know if he is studying from a Tibet monk -- I don't know. That is the way of the Buddhists of Tibet," Mr. Nguyen said, fairly beaming. "Very good. Very good. Very. Good."

In March Ricky called to say he wanted to visit again, but he couldn't get a taxi to take him to Braddock.

Mr. Wolk visited Ricky the fourth week of May. He took a cantaloupe. Ricky hadn't been eating well. Ricky answered the door in a rage, two streaks of dried blood on his head. He had none of his jewelry. Mr. Wolk asked him what happened.

"Those damned Mexicans!" Ricky said. What Mexicans? Mr. Wolk asked. Ricky said he'd been robbed.

Mr. Wolk left on a trip out of town. Other friends had been going through hell just contacting Ricky. Something was haunting him again.

He began answering the telephone with a scream: "Shut up!" He would slam it down. Eventually he threw the thing away.

On the afternoon of May 23, Chong Kim was in his store. Ricky slipped in through the back door. He was holding the meat cleaver, the one with which he chopped spirits. He grunted and strode toward Chong Kim.

"He holds the knife to come to me," Mr. Kim said. "I tell him he lost his mind. I say, 'I'm Mr. Kim, Mr Kim! Me! You know?' " Ricky grunted and kept coming. Mr. Kim ran outside. Ricky went back upstairs. Mr. Kim phoned the police.

'Drop the knife'

Police had been to Ricky's apartment before, Mr. Kim said, but every other time, they sent a few people to deal with him. This time, one officer showed up.

Ricky came back downstairs and this time, he started walking toward the patrolman. The cop backed down Atwood, toward Bates. Ricky followed.

"He keeps saying, 'Drop the knife, drop the knife,' " Mr. Kim said. "A couple more times he says it. At the corner of Atwood and Bates, in front of Mad Mex restaurant, the officer finally fired. Ricky crumpled to the ground with a chest wound.

Emil Lester was bicycling home to Point Breeze when he heard the shots.

"It looked like a boy, in a kind of contorted position, laying down on the ground," he said.

Two other officers arrived, turned Ricky over, face down, and handcuffed him. It was over.

Three weeks and a day after he died, Ricky Nguyen's friends buried him. He didn't want to be cremated, so Mr. Wolk paid for a casket, a local funeral director donated many services, and Allegheny Cemetery sold Mr. Wolk the gravesite at a discount.

Mr. Wolk spoke, sometimes humorously, about the strange little man who had upended his life. Charles Moore wore the big jade pendant Ricky was going to buy back someday. He rose and stood silent for a long time, choking for words. A trio of women who wouldn't give their names stopped.

Could they share some memories?

"We don't really know that much about his life," one said. "We were just friends."

Nghi Nguyen -- no relative, the Nguyen name is common among Vietnamese -- came unbidden. He is a doctor and wanted to represent the Vietnamese community in Pittsburgh which was shocked to read of the death, by gunfire, of a member.

"We asked everybody. Nobody knew him," Dr. Nguyen said.

When Mr. Wolk contacted Ricky's sister in California, requesting instructions and a contact for a nephew living near Pittsburgh, her husband e-mailed saying the nephew preferred not to be contacted. Nobody from the family would be coming to the funeral.

"The family is very appreciative of what you have done and are doing for Nang, but he has been out of their lives for 20 years and the distance they feel from him because of his behavior seems insurmountable at this point," he wrote.

When the time came to carry Ricky to the grave, Dr. Nguyen was called to help carry the casket. So was Emil Lester. So was a reporter.

Tradition holds that Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, gained enlightenment sitting beneath a tree. He tried to leave after the eighth day but was so overcome with bliss that he remained for 49.

At the temple in Braddock, Tan Van Nguyen keeps an altar, decorated with photographs and details of believers who have gone before. Two memorials stand out, because they are small, framed obelisks at the front of the altar. One is the name and date of passing for a 27-year-old Vietnamese woman found floating dead in the river in Beaver County.

The other announces the death of Nguyen The Nang -- Ricky. Tan Van Nguyen will pray over them for 49 days, asking a spirit to guide them from this world. The manner of death matters deeply here. A troubled death might mean a hungry ghost, prowling the world, maybe to haunt some other Ricky.

Soon, a group of monks will travel to Braddock to perform special prayers, to guide the pair on their ways.

For now, Tan Van Nguyen believes Ricky stays near an altar where fruit and food sit as offerings.

How can he know?

"I understand," Tan Van Nguyen says. "I don't need to see. But I understand."