San Martin native Gabe Sandoval takes over as new rural crimes
deputy, says knows area and issues
Gilroy – No, says Deputy Gabe Sandoval, answering his cell phone. No, this isn’t Doug, but can he help?
He listens, leaning against the door of his white pickup truck. The woman is frantic, worried that sheriffs will confiscate one of her horses on a neighbor’s threat. It’s Sandoval’s first day on the job as rural crimes deputy, and the bar is set high. The coveted spot was recently vacated by Doug Vander Esch, a farmer’s son with an easy smile, the “dream deputy” who won over wary farmers and ranchers last year. A promotion to sergeant plucked him from South County to work in San Jose. But when people call, says Sandoval, they still ask for Doug.
Over the chaotic calls of hundreds of roosters, tagged in a recent cockfighting bust, he reassures the nervous woman. “I’m not going to take your horses,” he says gently. “Not without calling you.”
Filling Vander Esch’s shoes won’t be easy. But Sandoval already knows South County: he can name each winding back-country road, and the ranchers who wave affably from their pastures.
“When I’m in South County,” he says, “I’m home.”
Raised in San Martin amid his mother’s Arabian horses, he rode a pony at age 4; as a teen, he butchered cattle after school for credit. Sometimes, he said, girls would point out the stains on his Wranglers, the muck he’d forgotten to clean off his elbow.
“Oh,” he’d say casually, “that’s blood.”
A rural crimes deputy has to know that steaks don’t sprout peaceably in Safeway’s freezer section, has to relish recovering a stolen tractor the way other cops savor stopping a speeder. And Sandoval wants this job: he’s applied for it four times, and finally edged out six other applicants to get it. When Vander Esch applied, there were only three.
“I credit that to Doug making the position attractive,” said Jenny Derry, executive director of the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau, and a member of the selection committee. “He showed how committed and active you can be, working with the agricultural community.”
Like Vander Esch, Sandoval will track fuel-filchers, horse thieves and poachers; like Vander Esch, he’ll urge farmers and ranchers to tag their equipment, via the Owner-Applied Number program. But he also brings his own expertise to the job. After a flurry of recent cockfights, he’s offered to train deputies in how to distinguish a fighting bird from your garden-variety rooster, and learned the ins and outs of the bloody sport.
“He’ll probably do a better job than I did,” said Vander Esch. “He’s got much more experience going into this position than I did, and he’s taught me things. He knows the lay of the land.”
Sandoval has worked the day shift, night shift, jails and transportation. He first joined the sheriff’s office at 21, urged by K. W. Klaver, the butcher he’d apprenticed himself to. When he joined, he worked in the jails, a far cry from South County’s rolling hills, where he’d spotted coyotes, bucks, “things other people don’t see.” Something spoke to him out there: the distances, the quiet. When he grew up, he thought, he wanted his own place in the country, just like that.
“I still can’t afford my 2,000 acres,” says Sandoval, “but at least I get to work out here.”
Today, he lives in Gilroy, with his wife Lanna and son Nico, 14, a Gilroy High School football and basketball player. Daughters Jessica, 20, and Karlie, 18, have left the nest for college; Jessica to study nursing at Dominican University in San Rafael, and Karlie for Boston University, where she’s still playing field hockey, as she did at GHS. One of the advantages of the job, Sandoval says, is that he hasn’t had to miss many games.
Still, “he knows it’s going to be challenging,” said Derry. “He gives his cell phone number out freely, and I give it out, too – to anybody.”
As he inspects a rooster, its comb cropped for fighting, the phone rings again. Pretty soon, they’ll be asking for Gabe. But Sandoval’s ego doesn’t deflate when farmers ask for Doug: it was never inflated in the first place. As a kid, he was one of three Gabes in the family, like his father and grandfather before him. He got used to answering to a nickname, and he’s not hung up on what people call him.
“I don’t care if they know me as Gabe,” he said, “or just the deputy that’s out there, looking out for them.”
