Richard Ortiz

Richard Ortiz, called Baby Fat Crack or simply Baby, is Fat Crack Ortiz’s older son and Leo Ortiz’s brother. His story is built from acts of patient attention: learning about Delia Ortiz’s car, helping care for her father, and working beside Leo when they dig their own father’s grave. The understated quality of those actions also shapes his place in the family: Richard is reserved, but his loyalty is tangible and sustained.

Identity and Family

Richard is two years older than Leo. The brothers grew up working together in their father’s tow-truck and auto-repair business, beginning when they were old enough to hold a wrench. They also played together in Four Winds, a modestly successful chicken-scratch band, from their high-school years onward. Their shared work and music give their bond a long history; by the mid-nineties, other people joked that they were so closely joined neither would leave room in his life for a woman.

That closeness is shown not as an abstract sentiment but as a practiced way of doing things. At the cemetery, the brothers work without needing much conversation. Richard helps unload the tools and carries a watercooler toward the gravesite, while Leo and he continue the physical labor of preparing their father’s grave. Their ease together has been learned through years of shared tasks, not announced in speeches.

Courtship and Delia

Richard remembered Delia from first grade at Indian Oasis School. When she reappeared years later in a Saab 9000, his shy, reticent approach to courtship was to learn everything he could about the car. He replaced its turbo when it failed and later repaired its air-conditioning compressor. Those repairs were his way of attending to Delia, but she was preoccupied with other concerns and did not recognize what they meant to him.

Leo pursued Delia differently. He made himself indispensable as she took on the care of her father, Manny Chavez, who needed constant supervision after being left paralyzed. Delia’s brother was often unavailable because of his drinking, so Leo helped with her father’s care: moving furniture, building a wheelchair ramp, finding a caregiver, and arranging transport to medical appointments. Delia noticed Leo’s steadiness, so different from what she had known with Philip Cachora, and fell in love with him. Richard’s attentions to the Saab went unnoticed, and Delia and Leo eventually announced their engagement after her divorce was final. Only then did the meaning of Richard’s devotion become clear to the three of them.

Brotherly Reconciliation

The disappointment over Delia could have become a lasting division between the brothers. The night before Leo and Delia’s wedding, Fat Crack brought his sons together and insisted they share the Peace Smoke. The ritual gave them a way to acknowledge the hurt and move forward; afterward, they were able to let bygones be bygones. Richard’s reconciliation with Leo is therefore not separate from their father’s influence. Fat Crack acted to repair the bond, and the brothers’ later closeness shows that the repair endured.

Richard went on to find a partner of his own in Christine. By the time he and Leo were digging their father’s grave, Richard and Christine already had a young daughter and were expecting another child. The passage from rivalry and hurt to family life does not erase the earlier disappointment; instead, the narrative places it within a wider account of kinship, reconciliation, and the next generation. Fat Crack’s influence continues to hold his sons and their children together even after his death.

His Father’s Death and the Funeral

When Richard learned that Fat Crack had died, he called David Ladd at the law firm where David worked. Identifying himself as Baby, he told David that his father had died that afternoon and passed on the family’s funeral plans. The call makes Richard a bearer of difficult news beyond the immediate household, extending the family’s announcement to someone connected to their lives.

On Sunday, Richard joined Leo and three other men in Ban Thak to dig their father’s grave. They arrived in separate vehicles as the sun cleared the Tucson Mountains. The village had only a few remaining buildings, including its feast house and chapel, and the cemetery held both tended graves and old markers worn into obscurity. Richard and Leo unloaded shovels, pry bars, and a wheelbarrow; they also carried a yellow-and-red watercooler to the cemetery fence. These details make the burial preparation both practical and communal: the men bring the tools needed for the work, while the brothers’ familiar silence recalls a lifetime spent working side by side.

Brandon Walker arrived after the brothers had already dug to knee level. Leo worked in the grave with a pickax while Richard stood above, leaning on a shovel. Their father’s funeral is thus presented not only as a ceremony to come but as labor undertaken by his sons, surrounded by family friends and the remembered history of the village. The grave gives physical form to a relationship that persists through work, ritual, and the obligations the family continues to share.

Narrative Role and Community Context

Richard’s appearances connect the domestic life of the Ortiz family to the broader community around it. His family gathers at the Ortiz Compound after Fat Crack’s death, and Richard helps ensure that David Ladd is informed; the next day he joins the men preparing the grave in Ban Thak. The narrative places those family acts in a setting where community custom and institutional authority both matter, but it does not present Richard as an investigator or assign him a role in the Roseanne Orozco case.

That distinction is important in the surrounding story. Roseanne’s murder was presumed to have occurred on the reservation, where responsibility for investigating a Native person’s murder by another Native person fell to federal or tribal authorities. Brandon Walker recalls that the tribal police lacked training, equipment, and money, while investigations of such cases could be cursory. Decades later, computer records from the Hospital at Sells could potentially help reconstruct Roseanne’s medical history, but having records available did not guarantee access. Emma Orozco and her family ultimately chose to exhume Roseanne’s baby without waiting for tribal council permission, a decision that helped them act quickly but compromised the chain of evidence. These events are not Richard’s actions; they establish the difficult institutional and communal circumstances within which his family’s life unfolds. Against that backdrop, his most defining contribution remains close to home: he shares responsibility, repairs a strained bond, and stands beside his brother at their father’s grave.