Each day, about 37,000 vehicles pass by the Great Plains motel on O Street. Another 39,000 pass by on 27th Street. In April, the lives of two young couples intersected there. One coup
COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, October 16, 2008 7:00 pm
The young man from Michigan checked into the Great Plains motel on O Street in April.
Tim Orean paid for seven nights. He came with a secret plan. Or maybe it wasn’t so secret, looking back now.
He left three days early.
“He looked like a white guy, no spots on his face. A good face.”
Another young man owns the motel. He’s from India. He can’t forget Tim Orean.
He was this tall, Dennis Patel says, holding his hand high above his head. He had muscles, as if he liked to go to the gym.
“His fitness was too good. He looked like a hero.”
He didn’t know Tim Orean’s story. He didn’t know a Michigan newspaper had written about Tim a few years ago, and also used that word. Hero.
A girlfriend and her friend came with him. Dennis remembers Tim asking him if it’d be all right if his girlfriend hung out a lot. He said it’d be fine, and handed Tim the gold key to Room 206.
The two young men talked each day. He was too friendly, Dennis remembers — he kept leaving his door open.
Dennis warned him about that: You don’t want anyone bad coming inside.
Room 206
Tim Orean dropped his bags and backpack in a corner.
He flopped on the double bed and found a horror movie on TV, something with evil puppets. The girls made fun of it. He grew annoyed. Soon, his girlfriend drove her friend home, leaving him alone.
The room smelled of cleaning products and cigarettes. Over the four days of his stay, it took on his smell — Marlboro reds and Axe aftershave.
That first day, the 20-year-old placed his black toiletries bag on the ledge of the sink and his black leather Bible on the nightstand to the left of the bed.
Josie Laws remembers seeing them there. She is 19. She works at the Amigos at 48th Street and Leighton Avenue. She met Tim when he worked there, too. He’d lived in Lincoln for a few months in 2007, then returned to Michigan because he missed his five younger siblings.
He was their hero.
“He was everybody’s hero,” says his mother.
He was Josie’s, too.
She was thrilled when he said he wanted to come back to Lincoln, that he wanted to get his job back at Amigos. He needed to get back on his anti-depression meds. But he couldn’t afford them, he told Josie, without a job and insurance.
He loved her, she knew that. He loved Zelda, the video game, too. So she took her Nintendo 64 to Room 206 and Tim hooked it up to the TV.
She went over when she wasn’t working. They laughed a lot. They got in fights when his mood turned dark, which it did sometimes.
But usually it was this fight:
I love you more.
No, I love YOU more.
They had this weird game: They measured their love in elephants.
I love you more because my elephants are bigger than yours.
On the second night, he sat in a chair at the foot of the bed and looked over at her. She was on the bed. He pointed to the built-in wooden room divider a few feet inside the door. The divider is solid, the way they made things in 1960.
What would you do, he said, if you found me hanging off that thing?
In the basement, July
Dennis is 28. He lives in the basement of the Great Plains motel with his 26-year-old wife, Namrata, and their baby girl, Disha.
Their quarters — rooms on either side of a dim hallway — smell of the spices of India. Cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper and cloves …
The kitchen is across the hall from this large room, their main living space. This room has a double bed, a TV, a couch, a baby swing, a rug on the floor where they eat their meals. It has a statue of a Hindu god on the microwave, a deity that resembles an elephant.
Dennis’ parents live in another part of the basement. Sometimes other relatives live down there, too.
Dennis came to the United States eight years ago. He worked long hours at a gas station to save for the down payment. He bought this red brick motel three years ago for $775,000.
He works harder now, he says, sometimes 18 hours a day, a lot harder than he worked even in India when he farmed sugar cane and rice.
Two years ago, he was ready to find a wife. His uncle in Tennessee knew a good girl, so Dennis drove nonstop from Nebraska to meet her. She worked at a Jack-in-the-Box.
Dennis smiles.
“We got about 10 minutes to decide, after when we see and when we talk.”
They show photos of their wedding in India. Tears cover Namrata’s face in one photo: She’s holding hands with her parents during a ritual, saying goodbye.
How did you know he was the one?
“I just like his eyes. They are sort of what I dream — a very handsome guy, intelligent and honesty.”
They brought a small bottle of holy water from India with them to the Great Plains motel. The water came from the Ganges River, the holy river that flows down from the Himalayas.
A few drops, Dennis explains, keeps evil spirits away.
After high school, a struggle
Tim was alone the final day in Room 206.
Josie had gone to visit a friend, and she was out of cell phone range.
She thinks about what he might have been doing.
He was an insomniac, so he probably went out walking early, early in the morning.
He probably turned on the TV by the window, sat in the black chair with his feet up and watched MTV or VH1.
He probably heard songs in his head, wrote lyrics in the notebook he’d brought with him to the room.
Tim loved music. He played almost every instrument his Michigan high school band had. He taught himself guitar. He played Taps at soldiers’ funerals.
After high school, he struggled. He was depressed. He feared people didn’t like him. He didn’t have any hope.
He wanted to be a Marine but never enlisted.
A friend’s mom who worked at Perkins tried to get him a job there, did all but sign for him on the dotted line. He didn’t follow through.
He lived with two grandmothers in Michigan — his dad’s mom, Susan Doyle, and her mother. Susan remembers Tim listening to music inside his bedroom, door shut.
Before coming to Lincoln, he wrote the first suicide letter, to his grandmother Susan. He didn’t give it to her. She saw it later.
It instructed her to call 911. It begged her not to open the door to the garage.
Black threads
The double bed takes up most of one side of this basement room of the Great Plains motel.
Namrata sits on the bed, singing in their language to the baby.
That song doesn’t make any sense at all, Dennis says, if you try to translate to English. It’s the only way she can get the baby to take her medicine.
The baby wears a ruffled shirt and a diaper. Black thread is tied around each wrist, each ankle.
A Hindu custom, Dennis explains, to keep evil spirits away.
“What they call it over here — they believe on Halloween like that. But on our side, it’s been real. One woman can go into another body. If you don’t give them anything, or they think you are so mean for them, he will catch you.”
That’s why they brought the little bottle of holy water.
The song works.
The medicine drops go in the baby’s mouth. Namrata kisses her.
Namrata cleans rooms, launders sheets. She knocks on door after door before entering. Her English is improving.
This morning in July, before she serves a breakfast of biscuits and Indian tea, her face turns sad.
She doesn’t like to talk about Room 206.
‘Maybe you could see light’
Here is what Tim’s grandmother told him not long before he came to Lincoln. She said:
Timmy, you know, if you would see somebody, talk to somebody, maybe you could see light at the end of the tunnel. … Timmy, you know you have been loved, by everybody, from the gitgo …Maybe he was sobbing in Room 206 that final day, like he did that day back in Michigan in his grandmother’s arms, telling her he saw no way out.
Maybe he heard Josie …
Everybody loves you …
In Room 206 that final day, he got out the notebook and wrote a second suicide note.
He must have thought about his family, because he wrote that he loved them.
He must have thought about everybody in the world, because he wrote a line to them.
… I love you, even if I’ve never met you, I love you…He might have felt some guilt, because he wrote that he was sorry.
He might have thought about his final conversation with his grandmother.
She saw him sitting outside the house in Michigan, with his bags, waiting for a taxi to take him to the bus station.
I’m going back to Nebraska, he told her.
Tickets aren’t free, she said. Where are you going to get the money?
From you, he said.
I don’t think so.
I already used your credit card, he said, matter-of-factly.
Susan Doyle remembers going inside, stunned. She remembers him coming inside and wrapping his arms around her and saying he loved her, then walking back out the door.
A lucky date
Before getting engaged, just to be sure they would have a happy life together, Dennis and Namrata consulted a man who looked at their horoscopes, studied their birth dates.
Yes, he tells them, you will be happy. They set a lucky date for the wedding, Jan. 1, 2007.
Sunday, April 20
Tim stuck a small rectangle of paper in his wallet, a fortune from a Chinese cookie: Your luck has been completely changes today.
He got it in the week before he went to Lincoln, his mother says. It was among the items she found later in the box of things he had with him in Room 206.
Tim had opened the cookie and laughed.
“He said, ‘That’s just my life. It doesn’t make any sense at all.’”
He must have thought of Josie a lot that final day and night, and probably was annoyed with her. He left text messages and voice messages. Some were angry. Some were funny.
His last one was happy.
The messages came all at once that Monday morning, after she got back into cell range.
You left me in the dark. So you’d better get a hold of me in the morning, so I know when I’m going to see you.
Then the police called.
He’d left her number on the note.
Behind the door
Dennis saw Tim the day before he left. Tim was walking near the office. He had just gone to a store to get Pepsi.
A guy with a happy life, Dennis thought, a good future.
That final day, Tim’s door was open. The man in the next room saw him sitting in the black chair in front of the TV, watching a movie.
At some point, Tim shut the door. The man heard some banging sounds, like something hitting the wall. So did the woman in the other room next to Tim’s.
Around 11 a.m. Monday, April 21, Namrata knocked on the door to Room 206. It was time for her to clean it. He didn’t answer. She phoned from the office. No answer.
She opened the door.
Fire
Seven years before Tim checked into the Great Plains motel, there had been a fire. He was 13. He woke up in his family’s Michigan home to smoke. An electrical fire had started in the wall of the house.
He found the fire extinguisher and put it out. But the fire started back up. He yelled to his step-dad to call 911.
“The whole place was back on fire. He woke everybody up,” says his mother, Jamie Lincoln, who lives in Michigan. “He carried his brother and sister down the stairs at the same time. He was only 13 at the time, when he did that. Then he ran back up to another sister’s room and got her out, too.”
The local newspaper wrote a story about Tim. They called him a hero.
911
He’d pulled off the white bed sheet.
He’d wrapped it to the sturdy wooden room divider, and around his neck.
Namrata saw this when she went to clean and ran to tell her husband, who called 911.
“I’ve been eight years over here,” Dennis says. “Been over here in the USA, and never seen like that thing. I saw him, and it was terrible. My feeling and everything was like, oh.
“I had to sit down two hours.”
The box
In Michigan, alone in her bedroom, Tim’s mother opened the box and looked through the items he had with him in Room 206.
Axe aftershave; Bic shaver; his wallet, with just three dollars inside along with the fortune-cookie fortune; his black leather Bible; his tennis shoes; the Hollister ball cap his sister had bought him; his clothes; his sunglasses; a brand new package of pencils; a pencil sharpener; and the notebook.
She read the notebook.
“I literally got sick when I was finished looking at it all.”
He also had a Superman sticker. She wondered about that. It hadn’t been peeled off yet.
A few days after he died, his grandmother says, she was working on her computer late one night. She was in the basement.
She smelled Tim’s aftershave. She whipped around, sure she’d see him again.
“It was just a couple of seconds. Then I realized. I said, ‘Well, I’m glad you stopped by. We love you and we miss you.’”
Josie says that some nights, when she’s closing up at Amigos, she senses him there with her, just like they used to be.
P.S. Someone must tell Josie that I loved her very much, and that though she may not see me, I’m always with her.
Finally resting,
Timothy Orean
They hope this story in the newspaper helps other young people. Maybe Tim can be a hero one final time. Maybe other young people will see themselves in this story, and know there is a way out of the dark.
Tim would have wanted to save them, even if he didn’t save himself.
A Hindu blessing
For days, Namrata wouldn’t enter Room 206. It remained empty, almost untouched.
On the morning of the 15th day, Dennis and his father entered the room. They opened the little bottle of the holy water and sprinkled it around the room, to cleanse it.
And they prayed for Tim Orean.
“For peace in the next life.”
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.