Tim’s Medical Leave / Ron Ortiz’ Passing
June 22, 2025
On Tues, June 17 our owner’s son, Tim, who has run the company for the past 3 years but been involved since our start 36 years ago, was diagnosed with two types of blood cancer: Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). It’s likely he has had MDS for over decade based on standard annual blood tests that had small changes and then AML more recently when his blood tests changed dramatically over the past 18 months. The only symptom were fatigue and a dull headache which also comes with running a small family business. 🙂
In addition, the Friday before, Ron Ortiz, our much loved employee and handler passed away after a year of liver disease that progressed into many other complicated medical issues. He dedicated his working energy for over 15 years to our company. Over that time, he did well over 6,000 dove releases for your families and handled all our monthly billing. He and his wife, Alma, were the couple that ran the operation when Luthor / Susie / Tim were on vacation. All your funeral directors that overlap with Ron enjoyed his humor and attention to detail. Ron and Alma were a great team, complimenting each other’s strengths and weaknesses so well. She appreciates the support from many of you that heard the news over the past week and reached out. And as she returns to work, she is approaching her 13th year taking orders and calling families. We know the love you have will help her get through this.
So it has been a very challenging week. We have existed as a business for over 36 years, with a mission to serve families with our doves, set up primarily to partner closely with mortuaries to do this. When we began in 1989, releasing doves at funerals wasn’t a tradition at all – in fact our first release was with normal blue bar homing pigeons for a member of Luthor’s church, but the symbolism was so strong it felt like it could become something. Over the past 3 days, Tim has met with all the staff to hand over the entire operation to them. We’ve been amazed by their passion, even in the midst of our grieving Ron’s loss, to keep the business going. They are focused and determined to get us through this season because of how much they believe in what we do, but they will need encouragement from you over the next year.
Tim’s medical journey will likely be well over 2-3 months inpatient at the hospital, first for his 7-day chemo at Kaiser Baldwin Park and later for his stem cell (bone marrow) transplant at City of Hope, Duarte. There is a cure for both cancers, but it’s a very risky process because his immune and blood system will have to be brought down to zero for both parts. If you want to help you can donate blood and sign up with “Be the Match” – nmdp.org – to get your bone marrow typed. Blood cancers can only be cured with the help of blood and bone marrow donors.
The services we offer mortuaries during this time will be relatively unchanged, however we will have to simplify the operation a bit – until further notice, we won’t be able to do releases at Pacific View Newport Beach, Harbor Lawn, Good Shephard, FL Glendale and FL Hollywood Hills but we have provided those mortuaries with responsible companies that are able to serve those locations. There should be no gap for them in providing this valuable resource.It’s hard for us to say that as their staff is very dear to us, but we have coordinated with them and other dove release companies to fill the gap. Additionally we might hit capacity issues on Friday / Saturday. If you have families that have dove releases as part of their tradition, we suggest they consider a Mon – Thur service. And although we are available to you for Sunday dove releases, we appreciate that the industry scales back operations significantly on Sunday – besides it’s their weekly bird bath. And the third thing we anticipate that could happen is that on days with multiple requests for Spanish symbolism we might need to coordinate with the family or officiant to handle reading the Spanish symbolism for us. We have a way of doing this that goes very smoothly.
During this season, it’s going to be a group effort to keep the operation going. Tami, Alma and Letty will be holding down the office and order taking operation and calling families. Larson will be coordinating our 20+ handlers and watching over the actual releases making sure we get to the right place with the right birds at the right time. Larson along with the help of his wife Priscila will be handling our accounts receivable. Sam on general bookkeeping. Rhiann, Anthony, and Elena taking care of all the birds. Elena will also be learning all the roles to fill in gaps wherever it’s needed. And being that the business is still run out of Luthor and Susie’s home in Hacienda Heights, Luthor will be around for issues that come up and use his expertise to help solve them.
If you would like to keep up to date with Tim’s journey, you can find a link at the bottom of whitedoverelease.com to where he and his family will be posting updates.
