Fat Crack’s Death and His Family’s Funeral Preparations

Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz’s death gathers his family and friends around the practical and communal work of mourning. Wanda Ortiz arranges a Presbyterian funeral despite her husband’s Christian Science beliefs, while his sons and their companions dig his grave at Ban Thak. The preparations make his absence immediate, but also show the relationships and shared obligations that continue after his death—and take place as Brandon Walker returns to Roseanne Orozco’s long-unresolved case.

Death and the First Arrangements

Wanda Ortiz was the one who told Lani Walker that Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz had died. Lani understood what Wanda meant without asking for clarification. She said she would return home, first calling her parents, then arranging the practicalities of leaving her studies: contacting professors, making arrangements for her finals, having her belongings packed and shipped, and booking the only available flight, which would bring her to Phoenix the following afternoon. The news thus draws Lani away from her immediate life and back toward her family at a moment when her presence is needed.

Brandon Walker learned of the death indirectly. After an interview, he switched on his phone and saw missed calls from home, Lani, Davy Ladd, and Gabriel Ortiz’s home in Sells. He drove straight to the Ortiz Compound. The number of cars outside the family’s three houses told him, before he went in, that Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz had died. He had known that his friend was nearing death, but the news still arrived with a shock sharpened by the sense that it had come sooner than expected.

The family was already gathering. Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz’s sons, Leo Ortiz and Richard Ortiz, were there, and Brandon brought the cooler of homemade tamales and tortillas Wanda had given him earlier. When Delia Ortiz initially appeared ready to turn him away, Wanda called from the living room and invited him in. Brandon offered his condolences; Wanda answered that her husband had been ready. Her calm acknowledgment does not diminish the loss. It establishes the terms on which she is meeting it: his death was expected, but the family still has to decide how to honor him and care for one another.

A Funeral for the Living

Wanda set the funeral for four o’clock Monday afternoon in the high-school gym, with a Presbyterian minister conducting the service. She planned to bury Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz at Ban Thak, where his parents and his aunt Rita Antone were buried. The choice connected his burial to family history and place rather than treating the funeral as a private or purely formal act.

Brandon was surprised that a Presbyterian minister would lead the service, because he had thought Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz was a Christian Scientist. Wanda confirmed that he was, then explained why she had made a different choice for the funeral: Christian Scientists do not believe in funerals, but she had grown up Presbyterian and did believe in them. She understood the service as being for herself, the children, and the community. Her decision makes a distinction between what the deceased may have wanted and what the bereaved need. It is not presented as a resolution of that difference; it is Wanda’s choice about how the living will gather and say goodbye.

The arrangements also extended beyond Wanda’s household. Richard called David Ladd, Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz’s godson, to tell him of the death and funeral. Leo and Richard planned to dig the grave the next day and asked David to help. For David, the invitation carried a particular weight: he understood grave-digging as an honor, and the Ban Thak cemetery was where he had once helped bury Nana Dahd. The request made a place he already associated with mourning the setting for another act of service to family.

Digging at Ban Thak

On Sunday morning, five men gathered at Ban Thak to dig. They arrived in four vehicles as the sun cleared the Tucson Mountains. The work was physical, but the scene is also described as a time of remembrance. Ban Thak had few remaining buildings: a feast house, a small chapel, crumbling adobe houses, mobile homes, and a cemetery on parched ground. Some graves had maintained headstones or crosses decorated with plastic flowers; others had become difficult to identify, their names worn away on leaning crosses. The different states of the graves place this burial within a landscape where remembrance is actively maintained, but can also fade.

Leo Ortiz and Richard Ortiz unloaded shovels, pry bars, and a wheelbarrow, and brought a yellow-and-red water cooler close to the cemetery. The grave was dug before the day became hot. Brandon Walker arrived after dropping Diana Ladd at Wanda’s mobile home in Sells; Davy Ladd was already there, and Brian Fellows arrived shortly afterward. Leo was down in the grave working with a pickax while Richard stood above ground leaning on a shovel. Brandon joined the task, and Richard told him to take a shovel so they could work in turns. The grave was not simply prepared for a later ceremony: digging it was itself a shared act of care, carried out by the men who had come to honor Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz.

Afterward, the men drove into Sells for breakfast, eating tamales and hot tortillas. Brian Fellows and Davy Ladd left for Tucson once they had eaten. Visitors, mostly women, came and went from the house to pay their respects to Wanda, while Leo and Richard gathered men outside around Richard’s blue 1983 Ford F-100. They discussed its chromed engine details and its unusually low-powered V6, and marveled that anyone would buy such a truck. The ordinary conversation does not replace the mourning; it shows how visitors and family shared the day through both condolences and familiar social exchange.

Diana Ladd remained inside helping prepare food, wrapping corn husks around uncooked masa filled with meat. The work of feeding people sat alongside the grave-digging and the visits to Wanda. Funeral preparation in these scenes is distributed across tasks and relationships: the sons make the grave, visitors pay their respects, and food is prepared for those gathered.

Loss, Continuity, and the Unfinished Case

The grave-digging recalls earlier family bonds as well as the immediate loss. Years before, Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz had insisted that Leo and Richard share the Peace Smoke before Leo’s wedding to Delia Ortiz, helping the brothers move past their conflict. Richard had since married and had children of his own. As he and Leo now worked together at their father’s grave, the narrative presents Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz’s influence as a bond extending through his sons and into the next generation. His death ends his presence, but not the family connections that his earlier actions helped preserve.

The funeral preparations unfold beside Brandon Walker’s return to Emma Orozco and the investigation into Roseanne Orozco’s murder. Brandon remembered that a grant from Arizona State University had digitized Sells Indian Health Services Hospital records dating back to the 1950s, including records that might contain Roseanne’s July 1970 appendectomy. He also knew that the existence of records did not mean he could readily obtain them. His recollection of the case’s jurisdictional history was shaped by the different treatment of murders on and off reservation lands: Roseanne was presumed to have been killed on the reservation, where investigations involving Native victims and suspected Native perpetrators fell to federal or tribal authorities. Brandon recalled the Papago Tribal Police Force’s lack of training, equipment, and money, and that the investigation had come to nothing.

Emma Orozco’s decision to reopen the search carried its own costs and risks. Brandon understood that direct questioning could be impolite in Tohono O’odham interactions, and read her willingness to discuss her daughter’s death with a white stranger as an act of courage. Later, Emma explained that obtaining tribal-council permission to exhume Roseanne’s baby would take too long, so Sam Tashquinth and her grandson had dug up the remains after dark. Brandon thanked her, while recognizing that the unapproved exhumation compromised the chain of evidence. These events do not form part of the funeral itself, but they place it in the same period of family loss and obligation: Brandon moves between mourning his friend and helping a bereaved mother seek answers. The contrast is consequential. At Ban Thak, the family can prepare a grave and gather openly around a known death; in Roseanne Orozco’s case, the family’s search for evidence must contend with an investigation that failed and with the requirements of a future legal case.