Friendship

because of his drinking.

“At this point he was starting to see the efforts made on his behalf, people were willing to put in time and effort and care to try to get him help,” Rodriguez said.

O’Neill was admitted to an assisted-living facility in Plantation, paid with his Social Security checks that he had been using until now to survive on the street.

Rodriguez dropped in, in those early days to see him in the cafeteria, and ask “what are you up to?”

He looked good. He was happy. And he loved it when the police popped by to check on him.

“It was a totally different human being. Before you might have thought you were dealing with [someone with] limited mental capacity because of how drunk he was, now you saw the light on, it was so rewarding. He cut his hair, shaved, gained weight, he looked healthier.”

O’Neill told him he was going to Sunday church services.

“That’s awesome, man,” Rodriguez told him. “I hope you know you’re valued.”

In response, he got a smile.

Trusting him with his life

One day, in the height of the pandemic, Rodriguez got a call from the assisted-living facility to tell him that O’Neill had caught COVID. It felt quite random.

“I didn’t understand why they were calling to tell me that,” he said.

“Is he asking for me?” Rodriguez asked. “No, we’re just giving you an update,” he was told.

“I didn’t understand the ‘why’ at that point,” he said.

But last month, another call came. This one more urgent, more direct: Call the facility back. Now.

O’Neill was admitted to a Plantation hospital. He had an infection and two days later went into cardiac arrest. But he hadn’t

Steven O’Neill, who was homeless in this undated photo, ultimately accepted help from a Davie police officer: O’Neill was admitted to an assisted-living facility in Plantation.

regained consciousness and was on a ventilator. The outlook was growing increasingly bleak.

“We’re trying, but it’s not looking good,” hospital staff told Rodriguez.

And now, the fate of O’Neill was yet again in Rodriguez’s hands: O’Neill had named him as his health care surrogate.

Until now, Rodriguez had no idea that the homeless man he had befriended had so much faith in him to do the right thing that he was put in charge of his very life. “I was floored, really,” Rodriguez said. The hospital wasted no time: “We need you to answer some questions, give us some direction.”

Rodriguez dove into the

details of O’Neill’s medical condition, trying to understand it all, so quickly: O’Neill now had kidney failure, liver failure, a massive infection streaming throughout his body, which may have affected his heart and been why he went into cardiac arrest.

“We suspect he has cancer in the lungs as well but we cannot do further testing because of the infection,” Rodriguez was told.

Making a final decision

Rodriguez has long ago left the streets as road patrol and community outreach. For the last two years, he has worked in training at the

Davie Police Department and as he focused on new job responsibilities there was “not as much opportunity to see him,” Rodriguez said of O’Neill.

“I regret that.”

For two days, O’Neill showed no brain function.

“They wanted to know what to do, how far are we going to push this.”

“So you’re telling me I have to [decide whether] take him off life support and they said yes.”

He prayed to God. He talked to his wife. He called Russell. And he reached out to a woman widely regarded in Broward as the “guru of homeless outreach.”

“If anybody might have been in this situation it would have had to be her,”

Rodriguez said of Lorraine Wilby, now retired as the chief executive officer of TaskForce Fore Ending Homelessness. “Tell me you’ve experienced this before,” he told her.

Well, no, she hadn’t. “That’s not normal,” she told him.

Wilby remembers Rodriguez calling her over the years to find help for O’Neill.

She said Rodriguez took his job “real serious” and “there was real caring and real concern and real desire to get them off the street for their own well being, not necessarily because government wants people off the street.”

She thinks Rodriguez sensed that, the profound sense of caring. Police officers may not typically be the ones who the homeless seek help from, and Rodriguez’s and O’Neill’s relationship stood out for that reason.

“It was real.”

Saying goodbye

Rodriguez said the hospital told him if he couldn’t make a decision about O’Neill’s medical options, it would go to a panel who would decide for him.

But Rodriguez didn’t want strangers who didn’t know him to be the ones to decide. He wanted to honor O’Neill’s request of him. So he took the words of everyone he had consulted with who had urged him to consider O’Neill’s quality of life and to “think about him and what he would want.”

On Dec. 10, the following day, Rodriguez went to the hospital. O’Neill was unconscious, lying alone with a tube in his throat.

“It was hard to see him there. It was hard to see Steve. It made me wonder how he had been in the year leading up to [this]. It makes me feel guilty not checking in on him more. My heart broke for him.”

He sought more direction from the medical staff: “I just needed to know, am I putting him in another ...” His voice breaks.

“Am I going to make him suffer again?”

On that day, with their blessing, he signed a do-not-resuscitate order. Later that day, about 6 p.m., O’Neill died. He was 67. O’Neill was cremated. Rodriguez said he would do it all over again, those four years of effort to make a difference for such a short period of time.

Seeing Steve-O at the assisted-living facility “he was very grateful,” Rodriguez said. “It was better than the last 20 years he had ever had.”

“Him smiling was foreign. To see him like that, it was a big difference.”

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@ sunsentinel.com. Follow on Twitter @LisaHuriash

SCOTT RUSSELL