You couldn’t help but like Doug Stevens. It was that smile:
electric, mile-wide, melting all resistance.
Gilroy – You couldn’t help but like Doug Stevens. It was that smile: electric, mile-wide, melting all resistance.
“The smile wasn’t just a smile,” recalled Noel Provost, a Gilroy detective who’d worked with Stevens, a Sheriff’s sergeant and longtime South County deputy. “It looked like it meant something.”
Too soon, that smile has been snuffed out. Stevens died Monday night at age 48 after his second bout with melanoma in a decade, devastating friends, coworkers and family who recalled the Sheriff’s sergeant with a firm handshake and a quicksilver mind, the Little League coach who put fun over runs, the father who flung himself behind his kids’ passions.
“He lived the way we all say we’re going to live,” said Rhoda Bress, a longtime family friend. “We fill up our lives with noise and distractions. He lived a different way.”
At the Sheriff’s Office, he was known as a whip-smart investigator with an easy manner, the guy even the crooks wanted to chat with, said Sheriff’s Lt. Dale Unger. He spent most of his 24 years with the Sheriff’s Office in South County, his home, and plugged new ideas such as the anonymous Tip Line and Paint and Skate, a graffiti wipe-out that mobilized 55 kids and 20 parents and coaches. “Law enforcement can only be effective,” he once remarked, “if we have a bond and a partnership with the community.”
In January, a few months before his relapse, he was tapped for the Sheriff’s Internal Affairs Unit – an elite spot entrusted only to the best.
“You don’t get picked for Internal Affairs unless you have a very, very good reputation,” said Lt. Unger. “Doug was tenacious. He knew all the players. He’s one of the hardest-working detectives I ever met.”
Outside the office, Stevens didn’t slow down. Year after year at the Garlic Festival, he donned a yellow vest and an ‘ASK ME’ button, pointing visitors towards garlic bread and scampi; at Odyssey Theatre, he hammered, sanded and painted sets, the backdrop to his daughter’s stardom. He ran in the Relay for Life, backing cancer research, and cheered on Orchard Valley soccer players and the Gilroy Gators swim team. Coaching kids at Little League, he let any kid play any position, with gleeful disdain for the final score. Win or lose, every game ended in a pile-up, dusty ballplayers swarming around Stevens.
“He made every child feel like a star, that they could do what they wanted to do,” recalled Bress, whose son insisted on playing on Stevens’ team. “I don’t have to tell you how many games we lost. But the kids always showed up, all excited to play. He brought joy.”
His practical jokes were legendary. Noel Provost once left the District Attorney’s office in San Martin only to find his driver’s seat missing, completely removed from his locked car, and spent two hours at the Sheriff’s Office trying to report it before a deputy snickered, unraveling the ruse. After a few rounds of tricks, the Gilroy detective had already been put on “practical joke probation” by his department, he said, and couldn’t get back at Stevens.
“Then again,” said Provost, “I don’t think I could have beaten that.
“But I felt special that he went to that extent, to play that joke on me,” Provost added. “It meant that I meant something to him.”
John Zekanoski, who met him playing roller hockey, felt the same way when he saw Stevens patrolling his rural road late at night, his headlights flashing across the hills: The same way that Unger felt when Stevens knocked on his office door, bearing a cup of coffee, ready to lend an ear to Unger’s on-the-job frustrations. The same way his friend Chipper Perkins felt, watching Stevens mingle at Friday night barbecues, ensuring that everyone was happy and fed. And the same way that San Jose police officer Mike Smith felt, both times Stevens saved his life.
“We were in Tahoe. We both went swimming out to this buoy, several hundreds yards off shore. I was ready to go down – but he grabbed me, and held on,” Smith remembered. “The second time, I was getting chest pains. He drove me through town to Saint Louise [Regional Hospital]. I’d had a heart attack. If I’d waited another half-hour, I wouldn’t have made it.”
To friends, he seemed almost superhuman, a natural at any sport. When he first started skating, Zekanoski recalled, he slipped and flailed wildly. A year later, he’d mastered roller hockey, jostling shoulders with the best in Gilroy’s so-called “Old Farts League,” Perkins said. He loved baseball, and rooted fiercely for the Sharks and the Giants; when his daughter Megan, a Gilroy High School valedictorian, accepted a spot at the University of California – Los Angeles, he became a diehard Bruins fan. When son Michael decided to follow her there, Bress remembered, Stevens dubbed him “baby Bruin.” Bress called him “everyone’s cheerleader.”
“He was such a picture of health,” said Zekanoski. Unger remembered him as a “health nut,” whose favorite lunch spot was the salad-heavy cafeteria Fresh Choice. “That’s what bothers me. This big, strapping guy, a terrific athlete. For him to get so sick, so fast … It just seems unfair.”
Stevens fended off melanoma years ago, said Smith, but suffered a relapse this spring, when the cancer spread to his liver. How long Stevens was sick, Smith wasn’t sure. The Stevens family declined to speak with the Dispatch Tuesday, preferring to spend the day privately with friends.
“I always thought, ‘He’ll beat this,’ ” Smith said. “Just another little speed bump in the road. He’ll overcome this. But then it got more serious. He was still positive, though. He kept telling me, ‘I’ll see you at the ballgames soon.’ ”
When he watched his son Michael playing baseball, said Chipper Perkins, he glowed. Stevens poured himself into his family, and touted his kids’ accomplishments with pride: daughter Megan’s writing prowess and law school ambitions, son Michael’s 4.3 GPA and his ballplaying skill. And Jackie, his wife, a Morgan Hill elementary school teacher who has tirelessly fought to improve Gilroy schools.
“He gave at least four lifetimes of love to his family,” Perkins said, growing teary.
“Nobody had anything but positive things to say about Doug,” said Gilroy Police Sgt. John Sheedy, who remembered seeing Stevens a decade ago, the glossy-magazine-picture of a cop, grabbing a midnight cup of coffee at the 7-Eleven on First Street. “He probably got called home for a good reason – but far too soon.”
