By Matt Day
Almost every day, Andrew James “AJ” Hanlon would buy a cup of lemon chamomile tea at the Silver Creek Coffee House in downtown Silverton, a popular spot for teens and twenty-somethings. Frequently, Hanlon would linger for the
conversation.
Hanlon, an Irish citizen, arrived in Oregon in June 2007 planning to spend a few months living in Silverton with his sister, Melanie, and brother-in-law, Nathan Heise.
Blanche Blumenthal, who works at the coffee house, met Hanlon on one of his many visits to the shop.
“One day when AJ came in, I just went and sat with him,” Blumenthal said. “At first, he was kind of quiet, but once he got going we talked forever.
“We had a lot of those kind of conversations. He was so easy to talk to. He was really smart, when he opened up it was clear that he was brilliant.”
Barely a year after his arrival, Hanlon was shot and killed six blocks from the coffee house by Silverton Police Officer Tony Gonzalez who was responding to the report of a burglary.
The Heises, Hanlon’s only family in the area, had hosted him during two previous visits to the United States at their former home in New Mexico.
“We were kind of like surrogate parents while he was here,” Nathan Heise said during an interview Wednesday. “He looked up to us and took interest in what we did.”
“We were always so close,” Melanie Heise, 32, added. “We did everything together. We were soul mates.”
Nathan Heise credits himself and Melanie Heise with getting Hanlon switched to herbal tea. “We got him off that black tea he drank,” he said with a smile.
There were other transitions for Hanlon as well while he adjusted to a foreign culture at an age in which most people are still trying to find themselves in their own.
Nathan Heise said Hanlon was cited by police for underage drinking early on in his time in Silverton He laughed at it,” he said. “AJ said, ‘They let them go off to war but they can’t drink?’”
Jessie Blade, another friend of Hanlon’s, said he wasn’t taken with the celebrity fixation in the United States. “He told me ‘I think America is really, really beautiful and I’d like to see more states, but it seems like you guys are really obsessed with entertainment and Hollywood,’” she said.
“He was a little different culturally,” Blumenthal agreed, emphasizing the social adjustments he had to make. “In Ireland, if you have differences, you settle them more openly. You have more fistfights. Here, people are indirect, people talk behind each other’s backs all the time. AJ wasn’t used to that.”
Despite the differences between Ireland and Silverton, Hanlon didn’t have problems making friends, Melanie Heise said.
“He loved the kids here, and they loved him,” she said. “He came over and felt at home. He wasn’t even here a month and he just went down to Town Square [park] and met the people there.
“He was cool and interesting to them because he had a different outlook, and a different accent, and he was so handsome.”
Gina Sterling, a friend of Hanlon’s, said she can’t get his image of her mind. “I just have this mental picture of AJ smiling huge,” she said. “He was sitting on a bench downtown, and I came up to him, and we talked. He was so happy that day, he’d been learning to play guitar.”
Melanie Heise said Hanlon’s willingness to meet and talk to people wasn’t limited to his age group.
“I introduced him to a middle-aged woman,” she said, “And later he saw her when he was biking and he stopped his bike in the middle of the road and had a conversation. She came up to me later and said she’s not used to young people being so willing to talk to her.”
Blade, who met Hanlon at Fratello’s Restaurant where both had worked, noticed the same trend. “He would just strike up a conversation with anybody who would strike his fancy. He was extremely cultured, he had traveled and he knew a lot. He would have no problem striking up a conversation with anybody.”
Five months before Hanlon died, Nathan Heise said he began noticing that something wasn’t quite right.
“He’d get this look like he didn’t know exactly what was going on,” he said. “The way he would see things didn’t line up with reality.”
He said Hanlon became convinced that his coworkers were talking about him behind his back.
“It was especially noticeable by those who were close to him,” Nathan Heise said, adding Hanlon began to have episodes in which he would become angry that people weren’t “letting him in on what was going on.”
The Heises decided to try to help by bringing in an outside authority. About three months ago, they called the police during one of his episodes.
“[AJ] wasn’t too happy with it,” Nathan Heise said. Police took him to the Marion County Psychiatric Crisis Center in Salem. He was released after a screening, but Nathan and Melanie brought Hanlon back to the center in the weeks that followed.
“Little did we know how ill-equipped the mental health system is here,” Nathan Heise said. During his multiple visits to the center, he said, Hanlon never saw a doctor who was qualified to diagnose patients or prescribe drugs. He said that the center has a limited number of doctors responsible for all of Marion County and that overcrowding made it impossible to get Hanlon past screeners.
“He just fell through the cracks,” Nathan Heise said.
A couple of weeks before he was killed, Hanlon began to make progress, Nathan Heise said, adding his brother-in-law had enrolled in a counseling program in Salem.
“He was trying to build trust with somebody,” Nathan Heise said. “But he didn’t want the stigma that went along with having mental issues. He was skeptical.”
Blade said she and Hanlon grew closer as he was going through spells of mental illness. “We really confided in each other,” she said. “He would come to me and ask ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ I never told him he was crazy. I encouraged him when he was going through his mental bouts to use his art and his creativity.”
Hanlon spent the year before arriving in Silverton in Montpelier, France, at an art school. Friends say Hanlon’s art helped define him.
At Hanlon’s 20th birthday in April, Blade said, most of the gifts he received were art related. “He laughed a little and asked us ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
“He really wanted to connect to people through art,” Blade said. “He found out that I liked mermaids and he came up to me later with a beautiful picture he’d drawn of a mermaid on a rock.”
Nathan said in addition to figure drawing, which was his focus in art school, Hanlon was gifted with clay, painting and woodworking. Melanie Heise said Hanlon had planned to return to France to finish art school.
“He was not out to be a criminal or a drug abuser,” Blade said. “He was an artist, and he was lost. He needed some help from the system.”
