Mary Orzel said her son was doing well — living on his own, holding down a job and trying to stay out of trouble. But he wasn’t five months out of a drug addiction treatment program before he died of a suspected heroin overdose.
“He was a great guy,” Mary Orzel said of 45-year-old Robert Orzel. “He had a really, really sad life.”
Robert Orzel, known as “Uncle Robert” to the children of his next door neighbor and friend Christopher Gammon, was found dead Jan. 15 in the bathroom o his Hernandez trailer off Rio Arriba County Road 1, according to Sheriff’s deputy James Lujan. Lujan said Robert Orzel was lying on the floor in the fetal position in front of his toilet with a spoon, lighter and two syringes sitting nearby. The deputy estimated Orzel had been dead for longer than half a day by the time he was found.
Lujan said the death is a suspected heroin overdose, which can only be confirmed when the state Office of the Medical Investigator rules on a cause of death. Typically, such autopsy and toxicology reports can take several weeks to complete. A message left Monday at the Office was not returned.
Robert Orzel was found by Gammon, whom he met in the Delancey Street drug treatment program Robert Orzel left Sept. 1, Gammon said.
“I made a lot of friends there (in Delancey),” Gammon said. “Rob (Orzel) was my best friend.”
Gammon said he lives with his four children and fiancée in the house next to Robert Orzel’s trailer. Gammon brought him a fried chicken dinner the night of Jan. 14 and found Robert Orzel’s dog outside and the lights on inside the trailer. When Gammon called his friend, he could hear his phone ringing inside the trailer. He opened the door to the trailer and called for Robert Orzel, but Gammon assumed he was sleeping when he didn’t get an answer. He said he put the chicken inside Robert Orzel’s microwave and left for the night.
“Never in a million years would I have thought he used or was using,” Gammon said.
But Gammon said he realized something was wrong on Jan. 15 when he saw his friend’s truck still sitting in the same place. He went inside again and found him on the bathroom floor. In a moment he described as surreal, he saw his friend’s head lying on top of a towel and assumed he was sick. Gammon reached down to shake Robert Orzel.
“He was ice cold,” Gammon said.
Gammon sent his fianceé and children away to McDonald’s while he called the police.
Mary Orzel, of Albuquerque, said people, herself included, see someone dying of a heroin overdose as “seedy” but she said her son was a “great guy when he was off of drugs.” She said he lived with her in Albuquerque for a few years and helped her around the house, and he loved fishing. Gammon remembered Robert Orzel as someone who liked to make people laugh, even if it was at his own expense. Gammon said his friend was a fan of baseball, a follower of the New York Yankees and someone who was gifted with a “wicked fastball.”
But they said Robert Orzel started using methamphetamine a decade ago and, though Mary Orzel thinks her son would still be alive if he never made the jump to heroin, she said meth got her son started on a life of petty crime and prison.
“He was a prisoner,” she said when asked what her son did for a living. “Honestly. Honestly he’s been a prisoner.”
Robert Orzel was in prison twice between 2002 and 2008 and alternated between being clean and using drugs, according to his mother.
Mary Orzel said her son was released from jail most recently in 2008 and she remembered driving him to the bus station in Albuquerque so he could enter the treatment program at Delancey Street.
“I admired him for having the guts to do that,” Mary Orzel said. “He was so happy there. He was happy.”
Gammon remembers becoming fast friends with Robert Orzel soon after he entered treatment. Gammon was there receiving treatment for a methamphetamine addiction, hoping he would one day be able to get his four children out of Child Protective Services in Arizona.
At Delancey, Gammon said, everyone in treatment essentially admits they can’t help themselves and that they “don’t know how to live a decent, normal life.” Robert Orzel’s attitude exemplified this, Gammon said. He said his friend felt as though he let his mother down and wanted to make things right.
“He wanted to make her proud,” Gammon said.
Through the program, Robert Orzel got a job working in the warehouse at a food distribution center for the Eight Northern Pueblos of Northern New Mexico, Mary Orzel said. At night he worked as a cab driver for Capital City Cab in Santa Fe.
Mary Orzel said her son enjoyed his time in treatment but ultimately left, telling her it was because he couldn’t get cigarettes. She said the program used to provide cigarettes to residents, but stopped just before he left. A message left at the treatment center was not returned.
Gammon said Delancey began weaning residents off cigarettes starting in January 2010, and banned them later last year. He said Robert Orzel couldn’t kick his nicotine habit and would be punished with chores, called “dishes” by the residents, when he would get caught smoking.
But Gammon thought the cigarettes were ultimately an excuse Robert Orzel gave his mother. Gammon said he witnessed his friend struggling with the decision to graduate from the program or stay on for another year. Gammon said Robert Orzel didn’t think he was ready to leave, but he had an “itch” to get out on his own and earn money and visit his mother.
When her son left Delancey, Mary Orzel bought him fishing equipment as a gift, she said. He moved in next to his friend, starting out on his new life with three months of pay Delancey saved for him, along with furniture for his new home, which also came through the program, Gammon said.
“He came out on top of the world,” Gammon said.
Mary Orzel said Gammon became a friend of the family. Part of Robert Orzel’s reason for staying near Española was to be close to the probation department while he was serving out the remainder of a prison sentence, she said. He recently got off parole and was still on probation, and Mary Orzel assumed her son was clean during this time.
Gammon said Robert Orzel rekindled his relationship with a woman he saw in Albuquerque before his last incarceration and with whom he allegedly used heroin. He called Gammon one day and said, “I’m in love, man!”
Gammon said he didn’t know if his friend was using drugs during this time. He thinks he would have noticed if his friend’s drug use had been going on for a while. Gammon said it seemed as though Robert Orzel never stopped working, never stopped running back and forth to Albuquerque to see his mother and his girlfriend. He said Robert Orzel seemed to be very tired during the last few months of his life.
Mary Orzel said she learned about her son’s death from the woman with whom he allegedly used heroin. Mary Orzel said the woman called her in a panic after she had called Robert Orzel’s cell phone and Gammon answered with Lujan at the crime scene. He bought heroin to use with this woman two days after Christmas, she and Gammon said.
But Mary Orzel said didn’t find that out until later and that she had no idea her son was using drugs again until the day his body was found. She said Tuesday she felt the decision to use heroin was his choice, but she thinks it killed him because his body was not used to it.
“When a person is clean for a while and they go back to drugs, their body can’t handle it,” she said.
Gammon thinks his friend may have decided to do heroin as a reward to himself. He held onto his jobs and had a girlfriend after completing what he said was a difficult treatment program and wanted to treat himself. That was a fatal mistake, Gammon said.
Mary Orzel said she was grateful for Lujan and for medical investigators who spoke to her after the death. She said she wanted people to read about what happened to her son.
“That’s good,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to wake this world up.”
Just a few days after her son appears to have succumbed to the drug addiction she thought he won out over, the mother took comfort that his death wasn’t painful. A heroin overdose slows a person’s breathing until it stops, so it’s like going to sleep, she said.
“He’s at peace,” Mary Orzel said. “He’s at peace. He’s in a better place.”
Gammon said he’s worried about what to tell his children about “Uncle Robert.” Gammon told them his friend was with Jesus now and wanted them to do well in school, keep up their good work and make him proud.
“That’s the longest he’s been clean and sober,” Gammon said about Robert Orzel’s time in Delancey. “That’s the longest time she (Mary Orzel) had her son back.”
Gammon said he kept his friend’s New York Yankees baseball cap and put it on display in his home.