Garry Hill battled mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness. After he died, his mother refused to give up looking for answers to basic questions about his death. She has met resistance from the Seattle Police Department and silence from Garry’s alleged drug dealer in her attempt to solve the mysteries that surround her son’s early demise
It all began with a message on Priscilla Hill’s answering machine.
On June 21, 2014, around 6 p.m., when Priscilla, 72, returned to her small North Seattle apartment, she listened to the recorded voice of Geraldine Hill, her daughter-in-law. Geraldine, 46, began with long rambling remarks related to a storage space and ended by saying that Garry Hill, Priscilla’s 45-year-old son, was in the hospital. Priscilla called Northwest Hospital and learned that Garry had been in the emergency room and the intensive care unit for more than 26 hours.
The shock nearly tore her apart.
On May 17, 2014, after decades of battling mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness, Garry moved into the Aloha Inn, a transitional housing facility. He had stopped using drugs for the first time in decades. He was attending drug treatment programs and was determined to rebuild his marriage to Geraldine, who had left him for another man.
“May 17, it was the happiest day,” recalled Priscilla. “We were hoping he would have a real good life once he graduated from Aloha.” Instead, Garry was gravely ill and soon after would die.
How did this happen?
Over the next year, the mystery of Garry’s death took over Priscilla’s life. She began investigating it on her own, and in December 2014, she called Real Change seeking assistance in her queries. From December to June, Real Change conducted more than 30 interviews trying to recreate Garry’s last day of consciousness.
Real Change also acquired over 200 pages of records related to Garry’s last days from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Washington State Patrol, the Seattle Police Department, the Seattle Fire Department, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, Northwest Hospital and King County Superior Court. Real Change’s investigation ranged from homeless camps under the Northgate bridge to federal offices in Arlington, Virginia, and from the observations of recovering heroin addicts to the fine points of anatomic pathology with medical specialists.
Throughout this investigation, two figures, on opposite sides of the law, refused to release any information about Garry’s death: Seattle Police Department (SPD) Detective John Lamp, the police officer that Priscilla talked to most frequently, and Judy Sanchez, Garry’s alleged drug dealer, caretaker and family friend.
According to Priscilla, Geraldine and Garry’s older brother, Jeff, Sanchez served multiple roles in the lives of the Hill family.
They all allege that Sanchez is a heroin addict and was Garry and Geraldine’s heroin dealer; Jeff, 48, also alleges that Sanchez sold him crack cocaine and dealt drugs out of his apartment. (Sanchez did not respond to requests to be interviewed by Real Change.)
They also say that Sanchez was a friend of the family — helping different family members run errands and even doing a stint as Jeff’s caretaker for several months due to his multiple sclerosis. Sanchez gave family members rides in her car since none of them owned a vehicle.
In fact, on the night that Priscilla found out that Garry was in the intensive care unit at Northwest, she reached out to Sanchez for a ride to the hospital.
It took around two hours for Sanchez and Geraldine to arrive at Priscilla’s apartment and take her to the hospital.
When Priscilla finally got to Garry’s hospital room, she found him in a coma. “When I seen him, I almost collapsed. Merciful God!” she said. “His eyes were rolled up in his head. I kept asking the nurse what was wrong with him. ‘Why is he jerking around like that?’”
The nurse explained that Garry’s involuntary spasms were due to the brain damage he had sustained from an overdose of opiates. It was likely that Garry had shot heroin one last time.
Sanchez refused to enter Garry’s room, Priscilla recalled. “She was really shaken.”
Priscilla asked the hospital employees where Garry had been found. One of them told her Garry was found in the roadway at 312 N. 85th St., a busy intersection in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. This added to her distress and confusion: Why was Garry alone and unconscious in the middle of traffic? Had someone dumped his body there? She had the employee write down the address, because she wasn’t sure she could remember it.
Priscilla stayed at Garry’s bedside until the early hours of the next day. “They were packing his head in ice to reduce the swelling,” she remembered.
Over the next few days, Priscilla spent all of her waking hours at Garry’s bedside. She talked to doctors — including a neurologist and a cardiologist — and nurses about her son’s prognosis. All agreed that Garry would never come out of his coma. He would spend the rest of his life in a permanent vegetative state.
Poverty, meth and heroin
Garry’s coma was the latest tragedy in a life of hardship for Priscilla. She spent most of her adult life in California as the single mother of four children. Poverty practically suffocated the family. Priscilla even became homeless for one year and lived in the back of a pick-up truck.
Now she is married to Ed Pinder, 66, a steady, gentle, retired mason, and lives modestly near North Seattle College. The couple’s favorite spot is a couch that they have bolstered with pillows to support their backs. At all of our interviews, they sat side-by-side in front of a big-screen TV that was broadcasting game shows or news reports. Large packages of tobacco and rolling papers sat next to them. The coffee table in front of them had two jumbo ashtrays, and the thick scent of innumerable cigarettes hung heavily.
Priscilla moves slowly and talks fast. She favors T-shirts and sweatpants, wears her gray hair cut short and has oversized eyeglasses with nearly transparent, pinkish frames.
She is uncomplaining about her own life, but she is fiercely determined that her son’s death will not go unmarked.
Priscilla doesn’t whitewash her son’s problems.
“Garry was a little hellion,” she said. “He received SSI [Supplemental Security Income, a federal program for the disabled] at an early age. He had suicidal and homicidal tendencies since he was 14. He was bipolar.”
In California, Garry became addicted to methamphetamine, and in Seattle he switched to heroin. In 2005, at Priscilla’s home, Garry assaulted his older brother, Jeff, who is disabled. As a result, Garry spent a year in jail and Priscilla got a restraining order against him.
After he got out of jail, he eventually became homeless. Priscilla kept in close contact with her son and would bring him food, do his laundry and give him money when she could.
Priscilla also remembers the good things about Garry. “He loved fishing, the outdoors and camping. He was an outdoors person,” she said. “No matter what they have done, they are still your children.”
As Garry lay in a coma, and she was faced with making decisions about his future, the memories of his whole life filled her mind.
The mystery deepens
At a family care conference on June 25, 2014, at 11:30 a.m., Geraldine and Priscilla met with a team of doctors from Northwest and agreed that Garry should be taken off life support. Geraldine couldn’t bear to watch her husband die and left the hospital. By 1:15 p.m., Garry’s breathing support was removed. Priscilla and Ed sat by Garry’s bedside until he died an hour later.
“He went into a deep sleep and he was gone. To watch something like that when it is your own child is just unbearable,” Priscilla said.
She arranged for Garry’s body to be cremated at the People’s Memorial Association on Capitol Hill.
On July 3, the state of Washington issued a death certificate that reaffirmed the strange circumstances of Garry’s demise: He was found unconscious in the roadway at 312 N. 85th St., due to opiate intoxication.
Although Priscilla grew increasingly depressed, she didn’t allow herself to become immobilized. Instead, she channeled her grief and anger into two missions: determining how Garry ended up alone and unconscious in the street and putting an end to Sanchez’s career as an alleged drug dealer.
She went to the SPD and demanded an investigation of her son’s death. She recalled being bounced around from Homicide to Narcotics, from East Precinct to North Precinct and back again.
In August, she went to SPD's headquarters and filed the necessary paperwork to get a copy of the 911 report to learn more about Garry’s death. Two weeks later, SPD responded that there was no 911 report. She began to fear some kind of cover up.
She made better progress on Sanchez’s alleged drug dealing. She received interest in Sanchez from SPD Detective John Lamp, a member of the Anti-Crime Team working out of the North Precinct (Lamp did not respond to Real Change’s request for an interview). Priscilla fed Lamp everything she knew about Sanchez: the names of her alleged customers, her car, her license plate number, her home address and her associates. She pushed Lamp to investigate possible links between Garry’s death and Sanchez.
Priscilla said Lamp affirmed that there was no 911 report about Garry.
They continued to talk on the phone. Finally, in December, there was exciting news.
An arrest and an autopsy
“Sanchez was arrested on Dec. 23,” Priscilla told Real Change on Jan. 5. “John Lamp made the arrest. He was on the case 24/7 for the last month! It took a long time to get the warrants they needed. We are going to be there for the court date. It’s not going to bring [Garry] back, but we want closure.”
Priscilla was still troubled about how Garry arrived at the hospital, however. She spun out various scenarios in her head, but none of them made sense. On Feb. 6, she called the records department at Northwest Hospital. “How did my son get to the hospital?” she asked. “[The records clerk replied] ‘By ambulance, I have the report right here. Would you like it?’”
As soon as Priscilla got her hands on the ambulance report, a lot of things suddenly made sense. For seven months, she had been chasing a chimera. The location she had been given by hospital personnel back in June contained an ambiguity and an error: First, the “roadway” where Garry was found unconscious was actually an alley; second, the address where he was found was 312 N.W. 85th St., not 312 N. 85th St.
Furthermore, Priscilla knew that Sanchez lived at 330 N.W. 85th St.
Garry “died footsteps from her house,” she said.
Priscilla became more determined than ever to confront Sanchez at her upcoming court date, yet she could not find out when Sanchez would be arraigned.
In fact, Real Change determined there was no record of an arrest of Sanchez by Lamp or any other member of the police department on Dec. 23, 2014.
Priscilla was furious and felt that Lamp had misled her. “Why would they lie about that?” she asked.
Sanchez’s earlier arrests and convictions
Sanchez had been arrested nearly 19 months earlier, on April 30, 2013, by SPD Officer Alan K. Richards for possession of heroin in an Arby’s parking lot in North Seattle. Sanchez was released from the scene, the case was turned over to Narcotics Detective Pete Lazarou and it remains open to this day.
Why would a simple possession charge remain open for more than two years?
“There was some follow-up done, but I can’t see to what end,” said an SPD spokesperson. “I don’t know if they are working with her or trying to [get] her into a diversion program.”
If the SPD is actively trying to get Sanchez into drug treatment or turn her into a confidential informant, would that explain Lamp giving Priscilla misleading information?
She confronted Lamp on the phone. He told her that the DEA arrested Sanchez on Dec. 23, 2014, Priscilla said.
Real Change contacted the DEA. An agency spokesperson emailed that there was no record of a federal court case against Sanchez anytime in the last three years.
When informed, Priscilla asked rhetorically, “Why would John Lamp lie like that? That’s a bunch of crap!”
She decided to contact the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) that handles citizen complaints about alleged misconduct by Seattle police officers. Since she taped an interview with the OPA in April, she has not heard anything more.
Real Change did find out more information about Sanchez’s criminal record, however.
In 1999, Sanchez, then known as Judy Ann Wika, pled guilty to the felony of delivering heroin and served two years in the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy. According to court documents, Sanchez sold 25 grams of heroin to an undercover Renton police detective in a buy-bust operation.
Subsequently, Sanchez also has four misdemeanor convictions, including one for possession of drug paraphernalia based on an arrest by the Lynnwood Police Department in 2007.
Is Sanchez dealing heroin again?
Other people told Real Change that Sanchez continues to deal heroin.
David Browning, 46, is a recovering drug addict who has links to both Sanchez and the Hill family. Browning first met Sanchez when they were both homeless and camping in the Northgate area. He freely admitted that Sanchez was selling heroin.
“She did what she had to do to keep her habit going,” Browning said. “It was all [to] friends. She wasn’t selling on the street. She always did it first.”
Browning met Garry and Geraldine on the street and even crashed at their apartment for several weeks.
They all used heroin together. Eventually, Geraldine left Garry to be with Browning.
Browning said that although Garry was a heroin addict, Garry wasn’t a good judge of how much heroin to use. “Judy would only sell a certain amount to [Garry],” he said. “There were many times when she said, ‘No’ to him.”
Browning had asked Sanchez whether she had sold Garry the heroin that was the cause of his overdose.
“She swore, ‘I didn’t sell him nothing.’ She didn’t usually lie to me.” Browning had heard that Garry was hanging out with a tall skinny guy and a little chubby dude on the day he overdosed.
So why was Garry found unconscious just footsteps from Sanchez’s apartment? Garry “might have been going [to Judy’s] to get help,” Browning said.
Geraldine agreed with Browning, her new boyfriend. “I know for a fact that [Garry] didn’t buy [the heroin] from Judy.” In fact, Geraldine claimed that she had received a call from the tall, skinny guy on the day Garry overdosed. The tall, skinny guy “was the one who stuck it in the vein. It was him who called up from [Sanchez’s] apartment. [Garry] dropped dead while he was trying to head over to Judy’s,” Geraldine said.
That explanation is hard to reconcile with the most common form of heroin overdose.
Dr. Timothy Williams, a King County Medical Examiner, performed the autopsy on Garry’s body (an autopsy is standard procedure for any drug-related deaths in the county). He said, “With heroin, it’s usually fairly quick. You get one big dose coming into the blood at one time. [The users] will pass out quickly.” He said that if users eat — rather than inject — heroin, the circumstances are different. “When somebody ingests the drug, it does take a while for the drug to be absorbed. They will be awake and they could walk around and ask for help.”
Williams said that the autopsy on Garry’s body did not reveal whether the drug had been ingested or injected.
“With heroin, the vast majority of the time, it is injected,” he said, “[but] people do snort and swallow it.”
Muscling and injecting
Geraldine said that Garry was in the habit of shooting up heroin. Garry couldn’t, however, inject heroin into his veins, she said.
“He had good veins but he couldn’t hit them,” she remembered. Garry “had everyone else do it for him.”
The people who injected him included Sanchez, said Geraldine. Sanchez “tried three times. Then she said,
‘You have to learn to do it yourself or muscle it.’ So then he started muscling it.”
“Muscling,” means to inject heroin into one’s fatty tissue without hitting a vein. The user gets high but doesn’t get as much of a rush. Overdose by muscling, snorting, eating or injecting heroin are all possibilities.
Geraldine doesn’t consider Sanchez a dealer. Sanchez “would have to find enough money to pay for herself. She’s got friends, that’s how she supports her habit,” Geraldine explained.
Yet Geraldine admitted that she bought heroin from Sanchez up until Garry’s death. “I’d go up to the Aloha [Inn] and [Garry] would let me take showers. I left Davy out at Northgate. Garry would give me money. I’d go get dope from Judy,” she said.
Geraldine assigned herself blame for Garry’s death. “I feel responsible because I talked to him the day he fucking died. It hurts,” she said, breaking down in tears. “I’m not doing heroin no more.”
At the time of her interview with Real Change, Geraldine was on methadone to help her kick her heroin habit.
Jeff, Garry’s brother, had also managed to stop using illegal drugs at the time of our interview. He is confined to a wheelchair and lives in a Meadowbrook nursing home.
Jeff met Sanchez through his brother. At the time, Jeff was living independently in an apartment and Sanchez was homeless. “I took her in,” he recalled. “She lived with me for about a year and a half. She had heart. She was cooking my meals. She kept the house very clean. But her habit — she got me in trouble — all the people coming in and out. She made money from her dealing. I didn’t mind that because I had done some dealing. [My landlord] threatened to evict me. It was heroin and crack cocaine here and there. I ended up getting involved in the crack cocaine myself. I got hooked on it. It was four years before I managed to step away from it.”
Dumped in an alley?
Chad Stewart lives on the same block as Sanchez, but he has never met her. Stewart is the man who discovered Garry unconscious in the alley behind N.W. 85th St.
On June 20, 2014, Stewart was driving home after running some errands. His apartment building’s garage is in the back, so he drove down the alley. “I seen a pair of slippers. It startled me,” he remembered. “I couldn’t figure out if he had been murdered and dumped there.”
Stewart called out the car window to the crumpled man. After getting no response, Stewart noticed that the apartment manager was walking up the alley. The two conferred quickly; Stewart went to call 911 and the apartment manager stayed with Garry.
Although a later blood test at the hospital determined that Garry had taken an overdose of opiates, Stewart did not see any drug paraphernalia on him or around him — no needle, no baggie, no rubber tubing or lengths of plastic. The Seattle Fire Department’s report also made no mention of drug paraphernalia.
Who removed all the drug paraphernalia after Garry overdosed, but before Stewart and the fire department arrived?
In April 2015, Stewart brought Real Change to the exact spot where he found Garry unconscious.
It turned out there had been even more errors in the reporting of the location.
First, the hospital gave Priscilla the wrong address.
Then the 911 operator and the fire department medic wrote that Garry had been found at 312 N.W. 85th St.
Stewart’s eyewitness testimony showed that those reports were also untrue.
Stewart found Garry in back of a little pink house at 328 N.W. 85th St. It is the house right next door to the apartment building where Judy Sanchez lives.
Peace, justice and unanswered questions
Priscilla said Real Change has answered many questions about Garry’s last hours of consciousness and the reasons for his death.
“[Real Change has] given this family some peace of mind and closure. Just knowing that in [Garry’s] last moments of life that he wasn’t alone,” Priscilla said. “I am at peace because of it.”
Yet there are still too many questions remaining for Priscilla or Real Change to give up now.
Did the SPD intentionally mislead Priscilla about Judy Sanchez? If so, why? What happened to the drug paraphernalia that Garry used to shoot up one last time?
How did Garry end up unconscious from a drug overdose right next door to Sanchez’s house? Why is Sanchez’s heroin possession case with the SPD still open after two years? Is Sanchez a confidential informant? If so, does that explain why she hasn’t been questioned in connection with Garry’s death? Is Sanchez getting a free pass on Garry’s death?
These are questions only Lamp and Sanchez can answer. And until they are, Priscilla Hill will not rest.
“I’m not blaming the Seattle Police Department for my son’s death, [but] the way they investigated was half-assed, “ said Priscilla. “I don’t feel justice was served.”