Crime & Safety

Family Mourns Loss After Fatal Drug Overdose

Shawn Ropel died Dec. 2 after using heroin, but his family was trying to get him into drug addiction counseling.

Shawn Ropel's family sought help for his heroin addiction hours before he overdosed on a combination of drugs that left him brain dead.

The 30-year-old Waukesha man's family paints a picture of a bright man who'd found success before succumbing to his addiction. 

“He was a good kid until he got mixed up with this God-damned drug,” said Rick Ropel, Ropel's father, in an interview with Waukesha Patch. 

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Ropel had been in trouble with the law because of his drug addiction and had lost several jobs for not showing up. So Rick Ropel took his son to the Addiction Resource Council to find him help.

“I thought everything was hunky-dory,” Rick Ropel said in an interview with Waukesha Patch.

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But everything wasn’t hunky-dory. Shawn called a woman he knew to drive him to Milwaukee hours later where they purchased and used heroin, according to court records. At 2:34 a.m. on Nov. 29, police responded to 2702 Summit Ave. They found Shawn not breathing after overdosing on a mix of heroin and Vicodin.

Ropel died Dec. 2 at after being on life support. His memorial service will be held at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at RiverGlen Christian Church.

“I just can’t believe it has happened. It hasn’t sunk in,” Rick Ropel said. “… He will be very much missed.”

Shawn Ropel’s aunt, Kari Ropel, has known him for about 12 years since she married into the family.

“To me he just wasn’t another addict who died of an overdose,” Kari said. “He was somebody’s family member.”

Kari said her nephew had a fun personality and, while he was facing legal troubles, he was trying to make it better.

“It is just really tragic that it had to end that way,” Kari Ropel said. “He was trying to get clean and made a mistake.”

Ropel attended school at Lowell Elemetary School, Butler Middle School, Waukesha North High School and eventually Milwaukee Area Technical College. After going to MATC for electrical engineering, he had a decent job and a great apartment in Pewaukee, Rick Ropel said.

“He lost everything,” Rick Ropel said about his son’s addiction. 

But when Ropel was younger, Rick Ropel helped manage Shawn's baseball team. It wasn’t long, though, before Shawn was introduced to marijuana in middle school.

"He was just a super kid that got hung up with the wrong people in high school," he said.

Kari Ropel said their family is trying to understand how and why his death happened. They loved Ropel despite his drug problems and have a lot of what-ifs from that night, such as what if the woman who shot up heroin with him hadn’t answered her phone or driven him to Milwaukee and what if authorities had been alerted earlier about the drug overdose. Police are not releasing specific details to the case as it remains under investigation until a toxicology report is finalized, which can take months to be completed.

Nearly a Dozen Fatal Drug Overdoses in Area

Kari Ropel said she is well aware of the amount of drug overdoses in Waukesha County, as Ropel is not the first person she has known to overdose in the past few years. The Waukesha Police Department has investigated 11 fatal overdoses involving opiates this year, including six dealing strictly with heroin, according to Capt. Ron Oremus.

There are several reasons why heroin overdoses have increased in the area, according to Oremus, including the price of the addictive substance. Heroin is cheaper than other opiates like oxycontin. Oxycontin also has changed forms over time from a pill that can be crushed to a gel form to keep it as a time-release drug to prevent its abuse.

“The switch to heroin becomes easy,” Oremus said.

The purity of heroin can vary from drug dealer to drug dealer, which can lead to more overdoses if drug users are used to a lower level of heroin and then use a more pure form.

The purity of heroin has increased, so it has made it much more easy to overdose on,” said Oremus, adding that is a generality because of the differences between dealers. “That goes over a period of years.”

While Waukesha has had nearly a dozen drug overdoses this year, Sgt. Jerry Habanek, who leads the police department’s drug unit, said there have been more overdoses that have not been fatal. That’s because drug kits that include clean needles and Naloxone, a substance that reverses the effects of heroin in an overdose, are given out to local addicts.

A good resource for those dealing with addiction, Habanek said, is the Addiction Resource Council.


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