Portrait of a Teen Tragedy : Most Everyone Said That Ed Makielski Was Caring, Loving, Happy, Handsome...and That He Was Hooked on the Horror of Drugs

Ed Makielski was the kind of teen-ager you could have wrapped with dozens of “Just Say No” ribbons and paraded before the world as a living example of the horrors of drug abuse.

Since age 14, he had been in and out of drug treatment programs, Juvenile Hall, and psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ offices.

At 18, he still had no driver’s license, yet he rode motorcycles and drove cars, sometimes driving while drunk and sometimes crashing.

His most recent drunk driving arrest came in November after a police pursuit that started in Irvine and ended in El Toro. To escape jail, he entered a new county program that requires youthful drunk drivers to meet with victims of alcohol-related accidents, to spend a weekend in a hospital emergency room and to tour the coroner’s office.

So 11 days ago, Makielski reported at 8:30 a.m. to the coroner’s office in Santa Ana, not far from the apartment that he shared with his girlfriend.

His already-fair complexion paled as he stared transfixed at the five autopsies in progress: a saw, emitting a high-pitched whine like a dentist’s drill, cut away bone around the brain of one of the corpses; huge pincers tore ribs from chests; tubes siphoned off blood; gloved hands removed body tissues and put them in jars.

Witnessing an autopsy is supposed to impress upon young offenders the possible consequences of their actions. And to observers, Makielski seemed impressed.

He said the tour “made me see that (death) could happen to any one of us at any time. It was pretty sad, you know, people are dead like that.”

He was asked what kind of strategy would work to keep youngsters off drugs.

“Scare the kids,” he replied. “Scare them. You can talk and talk and talk for 3 hours, talk your lungs out. It’s not going to do anything to them. . . . It’ll be in one ear and out the other. That’s how I was. I heard it, but it didn’t soak in. I think you should scare them.”

But apparently, even the sight of an autopsy didn’t scare Makielski enough. Two days after witnessing the horror of the coroner’s office, Makielski was back there as a corpse. Dumped in a hospital parking lot in Tustin by persons unknown, he was pronounced dead a short time later--the victim of a drug overdose.

Why Edward Makielski? Why did this seemingly normal teen-ager, a guy with a pet dog and a girlfriend, a youth who loved his family and was loved in return, why did he turn to drugs over and over again, and finally die from them?

Officially, Makielski’s life and death caused little stir. A file was closed in the County Probation Department. Another was opened in the Tustin Police Department.

In today’s Orange County, a teen-ager with drug problems is not unusual. Even 6 years ago, a survey of the county’s junior and senior high school students found that more than 40% of them had smoked marijuana and almost 20% had used cocaine. The percentages are thought to have risen since then.

Nor was it extraordinary that his body was just dumped. “We find it routinely, especially when there’s drugs involved,” said Richard Rodriguez, a senior deputy county coroner. The shorthand in his office is “O.D. (overdose) dump.”

But for a small group who knew him, the death was a shock.

It surprised the deputy county coroner who ushered Makielski and other youths in the drunk driving program through the morgue--and who was called to the hospital to identify the body. It shook a reporter who had been talking with him in the week before his death, preparing a story on the drunk driving program as viewed by the teen-agers who went through it.

It stunned his parents, who thought he had been off drugs for several months. Why their son?

Edward Allan Makielski was born May 11, 1970, in St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, the youngest of three children. Six months after his birth, his father left the family. Two years later, his mother, Mary, remarried, and the family moved to Irvine, living in the same house on a quiet cul de sac where they live today.

Makielski’s childhood was much like that of the other kids on his block: elementary schools, Little League baseball, summers spent with a cousin in San Clemente where he developed a love of surfing. He was a good-looking boy who grew into a handsome teen.

When he was 10, his parents decided it was time to tell him that the man he thought was his father was really his stepfather. He said the knowledge confused him, made him “wonder where my real dad is and if he thinks about me.” Years later, he met his real father, even stayed with him briefly but then returned to his mother and stepfather, whom he said he loved and thanked for having “stuck around.”

It was when he hit adolescence and began junior high school that Makielski’s life started to disintegrate. Added to all the normal problems of a teen-ager--peer pressure, grades, the gropings for self-esteem, the relationships with parents, brother and sister--there were the drugs.

He was 13 and at a friend’s house, where the youngsters found a stash of marijuana, pipes and other paraphernalia under a parent’s bed. They tried some.

“I don’t really know why I started taking drugs,” he said a few years later. “Just to experiment, I guess.”

After marijuana he tried alcohol, then methamphetamine, then LSD, cocaine, heroin. Baseball was forgotten. School became a problem; he dropped out. He shoplifted booze from supermarkets. He broke into homes to get money for drugs. When he was 14, he wound up in Juvenile Hall for burglary. The next 4 years were a maelstrom of drug treatment centers and Juvenile Hall, occasional attempts to continue his education, weeks clean and sober followed by months back on drugs, a continual quest to learn if his life had any meaning. He would perform acts of kindness for others but not for himself.

Until he was 13, “he was always a very happy boy . . . just happy and loving,” Makielski’s mother, Mary Gaddy, said this week. But then he turned to drugs, unknown to her, and in later years “Ed seemed to be always reaching out.”

“I just assumed he was going through that teen-age stage where they put up a wall and the parents know nothing and they know everything,” she said. “I also feel that we had our eyes shut. I wasn’t aware of drugs a lot. I knew they were around, but I wasn’t aware that they were all over Irvine.”

At age 15, his parents sent Makielski to a drug treatment center in Tustin. After he got out and started using drugs again, he went to a similar center in Pomona. Tustin again. A psychiatric hospital in Santa Ana. Tustin again.

“It seemed like . . . after he got home, in two weeks’ time, he’d start up again,” said his stepfather, Warren Gaddy, a supervisor for the Irvine Ranch Water District, who estimated that the family and insurers had spent nearly $300,000 on drug treatment programs, lawyers and fines incurred by his stepson.

At one point, Makielski tried to continue his high school education in an independent study program in Irvine, where students meet with a teacher 1 hour a week and do 20 hours’ work at home.

He stayed in the program for 3 weeks but left for more drug treatment in October of 1986. In November, he was back at school again but lasted only 2 months.

His teacher the second time, Billy Harmsen, said she and Makielski’s parents made a “joint effort in trying to get his life straightened out. His parents were very supportive. My heart goes out to them. It’s rough for them. They certainly did everything possible for their son.”

His girlfriend, Marisa Cantrell, tried to help too.

They met as patients at the Tustin drug treatment center in the summer of 1986 and began dating in the fall. Last August, after two more stays at treatment centers for Makielski, he and Cantrell got an apartment together in Laguna Beach.

Makielski took jobs here and there when he could, but because he couldn’t get credit it was his girlfriend who bought the motorcycle he loved. Makielski managed to come up with the $180.83 monthly payments on the chopper, but he totaled it in an accident last October.

On the day after the funeral, Cantrell, 19, spoke of the couple’s constant money problems, of being unable to afford the Laguna Beach apartment after 4 months--because Makielski spent one rent payment on drugs--and of then moving in with her relatives.

There were fights over his drug use. Cantrell, herself treated for alcohol abuse in 1986, said she argued with Makielski over his drug use because “I couldn’t stand to see him hurt himself. . . . He was doing (drugs) because he didn’t have any answers for himself. That was one thing Ed could never do, forgive himself and go on.”

When he was bored or when he was especially confused, Makielski would disappear for days on end, “binge-ing” on alcohol and drugs, as Cantrell put it. He would try to stay away from his drug-using friends in Irvine, but periodically he would go back to see them. When he did, he would be away for 3 or 4 days from Cantrell or his mother or whomever he had been staying with.

Friends agreed that he had a woefully low opinion of himself.

“I couldn’t understand how a great person like him had low self-esteem,” said Frank Hernandez, a 28-year-old computer programmer who met Makielski in a drug treatment program and put him up on the couch of his apartment for a month before the youth moved to Laguna Beach with Cantrell.

Hernandez said: “He couldn’t understand that Marisa really liked him. He couldn’t understand why Marisa wasn’t with someone better.”

Both Hernandez and Cantrell said that Makielski’s big dream in life was a Mercedes. But he was always in a hurry, and what he wanted, he wanted now.

His problems rebounded on his family too. Warren Gaddy was hospitalized for treatment of a nervous condition. Mary Gaddy sent her son off to live with his natural father in Westminster, but it didn’t work out. He stayed with his brother and sister for a while, with his girlfriend, sometimes with the Gaddys, with Hernandez and his roommate, then with Cantrell’s relatives.

Yet through it all, people loved him. And they used the same word to describe him: “caring.”

“He was everything to me,” Cantrell said. “He was good. He was such a caring person. . . . He had dreams, a lot of dreams, and he tried so hard. . . . He wanted his own construction company. He wanted lots of money so he could have fun. . . . He wanted to be bigger, to have more muscle. He wanted to marry me. I said: ‘We’re too young. We’ve got to wait.’ ”

The last week of Makielski’s life began uneventfully enough--work, a Friday night at home. But on Saturday night he got into a fight at a raucous party at a Santa Ana apartment that he was then sharing with Cantrell and her cousin, having lost their apartment in Laguna Beach. The police came and the landlord threatened them with eviction.

The fight worried Makielski’s parents because they thought that for months he had been off drugs and heavy drinking and was turning his life around. “I had seen a dramatic change in Ed over the last 2 or 3 months,” Warren Gaddy said. After the drunk driving arrest in November, Makielski spent a lot of time in San Diego, where Cantrell’s grandfather was dying. Warren Gaddy said the death “really shook him up,” made him more aware that life does not go on forever. Then Makielski’s own grandfather, whom he was close to, was hospitalized for emphysema. He died Jan. 23, 11 days before his grandson.

On the Monday after the party, Makielski went to his job as an apprentice roofer, a job his cousin had helped him get in January and which was bringing him $150 to $200 a week, with the promise of $300 a week soon, and more after that.

He dropped by his mother’s house in Irvine that day too, and told his parents and friends about his enthusiasm for the anti-drunk driving program that included the tour of the coroner’s office. On Tuesday, there was a mix-up and he didn’t have dinner with his family as planned, but he spoke to his mother anyway.

On Wednesday, he went through the morgue and, when Cantrell picked him up afterward, he excitedly told her what he had seen. He mentioned the autopsy on an elderly woman who had been found at her home after being dead for several days. He told “how he was one of the first in the group to go in each of the rooms (in the coroner’s office) because the others were too scared,” Cantrell recalled.

On Thursday, it rained and he didn’t go to work. Cantrell, hoping to break into modeling, went to Los Angeles with her portfolio. Cantrell said that Makielski’s brother, Bob, who had also been staying at the Santa Ana apartment for a few weeks, told her that in the early afternoon some friends came over and Makielski went out with them. As best Cantrell and others have been able to piece things together, he drank for a while, and then went with at least two other young men to take drugs.

The three checked into a motel. On Friday morning, according to Cantrell, a maid saw two men leaving a room with what appeared to be a body wrapped in a sheet. Soon after, Makielski was dumped in the north parking lot of the Healthcare Medical Center of Tustin, the same hospital where he had been treated three times for his drug problem.

He had no identification other than a check stub in his pocket and two business cards: one for a deputy coroner, one for a newspaper reporter.

Police said they are investigating who might have dumped Makielski in the parking lot.

On Thursday night, when Makielski wasn’t in the apartment, Cantrell said she “didn’t sleep until really late. Every little noise, I woke up. But he never came back.”

She said the coroner’s office told the family that there were two fresh needle marks in Makielski’s right arm, making her believe that he had injected heroin.

“I know Ed well enough to know that if he was using a needle, he wouldn’t waste it on cocaine,” Cantrell said. “He’d use a needle for heroin.”

What, if anything, could have saved Makielski?

His sister, Tina, 25, said that she too began using marijuana in the eighth grade. She progressed to alcohol and by senior high school was using cocaine and methamphetamine. She stopped when she was 18 “because I started working right out of high school (and) I just left the whole crowd I was around.”

She said she used cocaine again a few years later, but only for a few months, and has been off drugs, aside from an occasional drink, since her son was born 19 months ago. When she was in the hospital, awaiting the birth of her baby, Makielski would visit and read from the Bible he brought with him, she said.

“I’ve asked my mom . . . so many times,” she said: Why could she stop, when her brother couldn’t? “It’s so easy for someone not to (use drugs). I don’t know if it could have been avoided with Ed. I know he put a lot of pressure on himself, too much, that was uncalled for.”

Makielski’s mother said that soon after her son began using drugs, “all the symptoms were there, (but) I wasn’t educated enough to see them.” Her son started avoiding his parents, sneaking out of the house, hanging around with an older crowd. When her son was first hospitalized and she learned of his drug use, “I was totally shocked.”

Mary Gaddy, who works in the electronics division of a medical products company, said she was angry at the County Probation Department and at Juvenile Hall authorities for not helping her son more.

She also said she thought that parents were “real dumb” when it came to drugs. “You don’t realize it’s a problem until it hits home,” she said. “We need more education out there.

“The families and the parents have to be more concerned for their younger kids. Take time for them. It’s important, real important. You’ve got to take time for them. They need more than (parents) having a good job and a nice home.

“If I had to understand why Ed did this,” Mary Gaddy said, “I think I carry a lot of guilt, feeling I should have been there. I should have known.” And yet, the drug problem is “all over. If kids want to do it, they’re going to do it.”

Ella May Green, program administrator for adult and adolescent chemical-dependency services at the Healthcare Medical Center where Makielski was treated and where he died, said it is harder for young people to stop using drugs than it is for adults.

Although Green, citing confidentiality laws, declined to confirm that Makielski had even been a patient at the medical center, she said that, in general, teen-agers choose friends who do what they themselves are doing, rather than someone who will nag about drug use.

“Where adolescents get drugs and make contacts is at school,” she said. Yet, after they get out of drug treatment centers, “you can’t tell them, ‘Don’t go to school.’ With adults, we say, ‘Don’t go to bars,’ because a bar is a ‘slippery place.’ School is a ‘slippery place’ for adolescents, but they have to go. They may not have to return to that particular school, but schools are where the drugs are. . . . Within 3 days at a new school, kids know who has the drugs and who does not, and where they can get them.”

And yet, when it comes to quitting drugs, “it can be done and it is done,” said Green, a registered nurse. It requires changing friends, life styles, habits. It demands motivation, whether to return to school or to get a meaningful job. “It’s all tied up, too, in self-esteem, heredity, environment. It’s multifaceted. There’s no one thing that causes chemical dependency. That’s why some become dependent and others do not.”

Edward Makielski was buried Tuesday at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana. About 70 people, most of them young, attended the services. Teen-agers wept and embraced one another.

From the church, the mourners moved to the grave. Warren and Mary Gaddy, tears in their eyes, their daughter, Tina, their son, Bob, sat on folding chairs. Friends walked past, hugging and consoling them.

At least one person present remembered Makielski’s words on a tape he made for his family 2 years ago, after getting out of a drug treatment program. He talked of growing up in a society where “drugs are everywhere . . . in the schools . . . on the streets . . . everywhere.”

“I wish I’d never started taking drugs,” he said.