In the end, the dope just would not set him free.

Five months ago, a photograph of a despondent, heroin-addicted homeless man sitting on a scrap of cardboard near the Embarcadero appeared in The Chronicle. In Ohio, the man’s brother saw the picture and called the reporter who wrote the story.

That’s Tyson Feilzer, his brother Baron said. I haven’t seen him for nearly a decade. Please help me find him. I want to save him.

Baron raised $40,000 for rehab and flew to San Francisco at the end of April. After a daylong hunt though the city, Baron, the reporter and a drug interventionist found 40-year-old Tyson — and, reunited with his brother, he took Baron’s offer of help. He entered rehab, settled into a group home near Baron’s Ohio home, got a job and stayed clean.

It seemed a joyous ending, the kind yearned for by families all over the country who have relatives in the grip of heroin.

But it wouldn’t last.

Last week, Tyson Feilzer wound up back where it had all gone wrong: in San Francisco. On the same block where his brother had found him in April. Homeless again. Shooting up heroin again.

And that’s where he died from an overdose early Tuesday morning.

“I really thought that in a week or two he’d call and say he’d made a mistake and come back,” Baron, 38, said by telephone from his Peninsula, Ohio, home. He choked back tears. “I can’t imagine why he would walk away like that. His life was good here. He was sober. He had a future.”

Baron’s sorrow is echoed across the nation, with more than 40,000 drug addicts dying every year from overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In San Francisco, 177 people accidentally overdosed and died from opioids in 2018, a 31% increase over the year before. It’s not uncommon for addicts in recovery to relapse — the rate is as high as 60%, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Tyson was doing well until Sept. 11 — when he texted Baron that he’d caught a bus back to San Francisco.

It took until last Sunday to reach the city. He then went straight to the same Turk Street spot where the addicted street pals he’d hung out with were and copped a hit, according to his friend Shawn Swanson, more commonly known as Seven. The first two times he shot up one-tenth-gram hits of heroin, his body was so unused to it he overdosed, and Seven said he had to revive Tyson with Narcan.

The third time, Tuesday just after midnight, no one was around to revive him. A passerby found his body on the sidewalk near the grim corner of Willow and Larkin streets.

“Baron did everything a brother could have done,” said Seven, who’s been Tyson’s street pal for years, scoring heroin with him, watching his back while they scouted out spots to sleep at night. “He loved Tyson, and Tyson loved him.

“But the drugs,” he said, voice catching. “It’s so hard on your soul, so hard to shake. The heroin just wouldn’t let him go. It’s such a shame. Such a waste.”

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That quickly, the promise that had been rekindled after seven years of homeless drug addiction in San Francisco was gone. So was the ready wit that had flickered back after getting clean, living in a sober house near Baron and working in a delicatessen. Gone was the relationship he’d built with his niece, Baron and Tasha Feilzer’s 4-year-old daughter, Penny, the little girl he’d never met until shaking dope.

“He just decided to reject normal life, and that makes me mad and frustrated,” said Baron, an industrial plant operations manager. “I don’t think he wanted to do the work of moving forward. It didn’t have to be that way.

“It never had to be that way.”

Tyson had grown up with Baron in the Contra Costa County suburb of Danville, the privileged son of a real estate agent and an accountant. After studying at Chico State University, he’d worked as a salesman and mortgage broker in the East Bay. But upon losing his job during the 2008 recession, he slid from alcoholism to heroin use, and then to the streets of San Francisco.

The last time Baron had seen his brother was seven years ago, at his wedding to Tasha — until The Chronicle published a story and photo about shelter plans on the Embarcadero that quoted Tyson.

It took 12 hours and 6 miles of walking for Baron, the Chronicle reporter and drug interventionist Vicki Lucas to find Tyson in April. They drove him to a hotel, where he learned that Baron had raised enough money on GoFundMe to pay for his rehab. Lucas had been hired to route him to a facility if he was willing, and Tyson immediately snapped up the opportunity. He went first to a center in the Sierra foothills, then to one in Mississippi, and finally to the sober house in Ohio.

A month into his recovery, Tyson began posting upbeat comments on Facebook, with photos of peaceful forests and of himself smiling. More than 100 friends and relatives cheered him on.

“Love the updates,” one friend, Brendan Reed, posted on July 2. “So proud of you buddy. Stay strong and I’m here if you need anything!”

“You people are so awesome,” Tyson posted on July 14. “Thanks for being so supporting. I really do appreciate it. Every thumbs up and comment means so much to me. Thanks to Baron Feilzer and Tasha Feilzer and Penny for lunch today.”

The praise turned to a torrent of sorrow after Baron and Tasha posted about Tyson leaving, and then about his death.

“I’m telling this to you all not so you lose faith in helping people like Tyson,” Baron wrote on his GoFundMe page on Sept. 13 to inform the 192 donors to Tyson’s rehab that he’d left for San Francisco. “I’m telling this to you all so you know that we did what we set out to do. We pulled Tyson out of the street, got him free from drugs and gave him a new lease on life. Tyson chose to give it away ...

“I love my brother and hope that he finds his way back to society again,” Baron wrote. “You are all amazing people and I hope this doesn’t discourage you from helping others again.”

He held to that sentiment after his brother’s death.

“I would definitely do it again — go find him, bring him here to Ohio, help him get clean,” Baron said. “There are different ways of looking at it, but here’s how I see it: I got to show Tyson what life could be like. We got to have some good times, and he got to meet his niece. That was good.

“There’s also a part of me that says if I hadn’t gotten him clean he might not have ODd,” he added quietly. “I’m going to have to think about that.”

Mirroring most rehab experts, the American Addiction Centers says heroin addicts who relapse “often overdose because they don’t realize their tolerance is lower than before.”

The struggle to stay clean radiated in a letter Tyson wrote to himself as part of his rehab program on Sept. 10, the day before he left Ohio: Tyson: If you’re using again you’re lying to people you love and your life sucks. You were homeless ... I can’t believe you would do that to yourself. Get your ass to treatment ’cause you’ll likely end up dead.

Baron said Tyson gave no real indication of abandoning sober life until Sept. 11, when he texted, “I’m on a bus on my way to S.F.,” and turned off his phone for several hours.

In later texts between the brothers, Tyson radiated resigned anguish as his bus wended its way to the West Coast.

Baron: What triggered you?

Tyson: Just couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Baron: Really? How could you not? You were going to get a car and that would get you a better job. You had a path forward.

Tyson: Path forward isn’t happiness.

In another exchange, Baron suggested Tyson come back for Suboxone or another rehab medication and try again. Tyson’s response: “No, it’s not medicine that’s gonna fix me. It’s me.”

Lucas, the interventionist, said Tyson was doing well until early September, when he stopped taking Vivitrol, a medication to prevent relapse. He told his family he was feeling depressed and thought ditching the medication would help.

Baron and Tasha said they would learn by looking at Tyson’s medical records that he had actually stopped taking other prescriptions as well, including meds for a bipolar condition he’d been diagnosed with. It’s a common mistake of people in recovery.

“The disease — that need for the drugs — started talking to him again,” Lucas said. “He had been so upbeat before, wanted to work with me after getting clean. But it was the disease. It’s just devastating.”

Tyson was already riven with regret for leaving Ohio when his bus pulled into San Francisco, his pal Seven said.

“Right from the start, he felt horrible for what he did to his brother,” said Seven, who is living in a city shelter. “He seemed depressed, and said he just wanted to get high, and I told him, ‘Look, we’re happy to see you again, even though we’re not happy to see you again. We’d really hoped you’d get clean, but at least you came back to people who loved you, to a place you also consider home.’

“I don’t know what was in that last hit, maybe it was fentanyl — that’s killed so many of us out here,” Seven said. “Whether it was just heroin or not, it was too much.”

The San Francisco medical examiner’s office did not respond to requests to confirm the cause of death, but Baron said one of the police investigators told him it was a fairly obvious narcotics overdose. Drug paraphernalia were found at his side.

Back in Ohio, Baron and his wife are planning to plant a tree and install a bench near their home in Tyson’s memory. They also want to repurpose Tyson’s GoFundMe page into a fundraiser for a sober living home in his name.

They haven’t figured out yet how or when to tell Penny about why her fun uncle is never coming back. In his few months there, he got to watch “Frozen” with her, got to play in the sand with her. Got to remember what the promise of youth looked like. And for a little while, she had an uncle.

“At first Tyson didn’t know how to act with Penny, but then he started playing with her and cracking jokes,” Tasha said. “At the end, he got along really well with her. I texted Tyson when he left, ‘Please don’t do this to her.’ He didn’t answer back.”

She paused for a long moment. “There’s just nothing you can say,” she said quietly. “There are no words.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron