
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 21, 1994                   TAG: 9402210048
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Orlando Sentinel
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

MAN SAYS SUICIDE, NOT ASSASSINATION, WAS ON HIS MIND

A Florida man charged with threatening to kill President Clinton said he packed a .45 caliber handgun and visited Washington and West Virginia last month, but it was to take his own life.

"That was to do away with myself," Ronald Gene Barbour, 45, said by phone Saturday from the Seminole County (Fla.) Jail, north of Orlando.

Barbour said he has been diagnosed as manic-depressive. He blames the events on a lack of his medication, Lithium, and on excessive drinking.

Barbour said he tried to kill himself Jan. 9 in his Orlando, Fla., apartment. He said it was then he decided to drive north to his hometown in West Virginia to commit suicide there.

"I was so out of my mind," he said. "I wanted to kill myself outside St. Mary's Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia, where I was born to kind of to complete the circle. Along the way, I decided to go to D.C. to live there and start over again."

Barbour denies surveying the president's jogging trail. He said he "played tourist" along the Mall in Washington for a few days.

by CNB