Seth Hunter Payne stepped in to save his friend and paid with his life.
“I’ll never forget what he did for me,” Russ Mills, 20, said before a candlelight memorial Tuesday night for Payne at a neighborhood park where he and his friends in Englewood had played as children.
Payne, 18, was stabbed to death at a campground in Douglas County early Saturday.
A third friend, Darius Leon Carey, 18, also was stabbed but survived.
Monday, Adrian Enrique Sanchez, 22, was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree assault and other lesser charges. His friend, Cristobal Alfredo Rios, 18, was charged as an accessory to a crime.
A party at the campground involving about 30 young people had waned with the morning hours.
About 4 a.m., Mills said, he caught Sanchez rummaging through a friend’s car.
Words turned to violence when Sanchez pulled a knife and grazed him across the chest, he said.
Payne stepped in to calm the situation, Mills said, but Sanchez plunged the knife into Payne’s throat, then stabbed Carey before running into the woods with Rios, he said.
Sanchez and Rios were captured hours later.
Tuesday night, dozens of teenagers representing the complete spectrum of high school culture – preppy student leaders to likely troublemakers, brawny athletes to shaggy kids dressed in black with piercings on their faces – filled Romans Park.
They signed the broad edges of a table-sized poster, around a picture of the wide-smiling, bright-eyed young man.
Payne, some said, never knew an enemy and made friends easily. They wrote inscriptions that seemed more appropriate for a senior yearbook than a last goodbye. They referred to him by high school nicknames, including “Sweet Seth” and “Dawg.”
“He was incredibly sweet; even guys talked about how nice he was to everybody,” said Tasha Davis, 19, a friend from Highlands Ranch. “He never did anything to anybody, and I never heard him ever say a bad word (about) anybody.
“It’s not fair.”
Jim Tucker, tennis coach at Englewood High, said Payne was a fun-loving student as well as a gifted athlete who brought his own cheering section.
“He had a lot of kids coming and watching him play,” he said.
He recalled Payne helping 7- and 8-year-olds learn tennis.
“He was a very caring individual,” Tucker said. “That is just the kind of guy he was.”
He called Payne’s death a “terrible loss” for Englewood.
“At such an early age, the whole incident is terrible.”
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
