HOLLAND, MI (WXMI/CNN) - Members of a pizza shop gave a man a few extra days with relatives.
They say he was a longtime customer who ordered a couple of times a week, but when the calls suddenly stopped, they grew concerned.
"He was a really good person," Amanda Ortiz said.
Adrian van Nieuwland loved his pizza and was a regular at Hungry Howie's.
"He had one order, and that was his order every time. When it popped up on the screen, you knew Adrian ordered," Ortiz said.
He ordered a medium Three-Cheeser Pleaser with butter cheese crust several times a week.
"We got to know him very well over the phone and some of us as drivers. I did have the opportunity of going over to his house a couple times," Ortiz said.
Towards the end of May, and after years of regular orders, the Hungry Howie's crew noticed van Nieuwland had stopped calling.
"I tried to call him. It said his phone number had been disconnected," Ortiz said.
"My manager Amanda and ,I we decided to go to his house and check on him and see if he was OK. I knocked on his door for a good 10 minutes, and he always answers his door, so we knew something wasn't right," Raqib said.
The manager said van Nieuwland had fallen in the kitchen and had been on the floor for days with a dead cell phone.
He was taken to the hospital, and the Hungry Howie's crew wasn't far behind.
"Yeah, we went the night he went to the hospital. We went there a few hours after he got admitted," Ortiz said.
To help lighten the mood, the whole crew chipped in and bought him a Hungry Howie's gift card.
"He seemed to be doing great. We joked around. I gave him the gift card and said, 'You're probably hungry!'" Ortiz said.
"(We gave him) a card and some cookies in the hopes of him getting better and turning it around," Kelli Waldschmidt said.
Sadly, van Nieuwland would never make it out of the hospital. He passed away this past Friday.
"From my understanding, he had grown some infection in his stomach and chose not to have surgery," Waldschmidt said. "He ended up going into a coma and got taken off life support."
Hungry Howie's says they care about all their customers and that van Nieuwland was definitely a very special person who will be hard to forget.
"It's tragic and my heart breaks for him. But if anything I'm just happy that we stopped him from dying alone, on the floor of his house," Gabbe Raqib said. "Customers are more like family and friends now, you know, especially those ones like Adrian come multiple times a week."
The manager at the Hungry Howie's said the crew is sad van Nieuwland no longer around, but they are glad they were able to help him during his last few days.
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