Lori Delgado sat outside the Hilo courtroom Wednesday after a brief hearing for Izaiah Shields, the man accused of smuggling the fentanyl into Hawaii Community Correctional Center that killed her husband, Steve Delgado.
Her eyes revealed the emotional burden she’s shouldered since receiving news of her 56-year-old estranged husband’s death on Jan. 5.
“I’ve always believed that as long as people are breathing, there’s hope for recovery,” she said. “But there’s always a possibility when you’re using fentanyl that there’s going to be a poisoning. I don’t call it an OD; I call it a poisoning.
“I’m sure my husband didn’t know (it was fentanyl) — even though he’s been a drug user for awhile. It was a poisoning.”
Another inmate, 33-year-old Dwight Gardner, also was found unresponsive in the jail cell, but was saved by naloxone, also known as Narcan, an emergency antidote to an opioid overdose.
Gardner allegedly told police that Delgado discovered the drug in Shield’s mattress after Shields was taken to court in Kona on Jan. 4. Gardner said he believed the drug to be cocaine before ingesting it.
Lori Delgado, who still sometimes refers to her husband in the present tense, said there was another side to him than the one being reported by the news media.
“He lights up a room when he comes in,” she said. “When he’s clean, he’s generous, you know, very charismatic. He loves his family.
“He never gave up thinking he was going to be able to come home. I mean home, clean and sober. He wasn’t allowed to come home while he was using. And I don’t feel like this would’ve have happened had he been on the streets.
“He’s an addict. He’s been struggling with it for awhile. (Fentanyl) wasn’t his drug of choice. He used methamphetamine.”
Delgado knows a lot about addiction from personal experience.
“I was a longtime user. I’ve been clean for 27 years,” she said.
The Delgados met in 1996 while in treatment on the mainland. They were married in Hawaii in 1997.
Steve Delgado’s Facebook page describes him as a yard maintenance worker.
Asked if her husband had a lot of friends, Lori Delgado replied, “He does.”
“He has a lot of enemies when he’s using, but there’s a lot of people who will tell you he’s a good guy,” she said.“I knew he was back in jail. But he’s never done anything violent. He has stolen stuff, and the community was upset. Rightly so.”
Steve Delgado’s death is the second fentanyl fatality in her family. The first was 31-year-old grandson, Julian Gonzales of Waimea, an artist and designer.
“We lost my grandson a year ago in December to a fentanyl overdose on the mainland,” she said. “We struggled trying to get him into detox here. He found a place in Portland (Oregon). He left that, and they found him in the library, unresponsive.”
Comparing her husband, whom she described as artistic and musical, to her grandson, Lori Delgado said, “They both loved life when they were clean.”
“In the last year, after my grandson died after he had relapsed, I had to have (Steve Delgado) leave the house because it was unbearable to have any drugs around my daughter or my grandson’s sister,” she said.
Lori Delgado said she would have her husband cremated and will hold a celebration of life here — “and then, I’ll take half of him home to his family.”
“He cared about people. He was generous,” she said. “When he had gone to prison and he had to be on a medical ward, I can’t tell you how many letters I got … from the men, saying he would wash their sheets and carry them to the shower and help them.
“That’s who he was. His joy in life was helping people.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.