By Jondi Gumz
Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller died June 6, ambushed in Ben Lomond when he was responding to a call for back-up.
Gutzwiller, 38, who grew up in Aptos, is survived by his wife Favi, his 2-year-old son and a child due to be born.
Seating for the public will be limited due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The Sheriff’s Office encourages the public to watch the memorial via live-stream. KION and KSBW TV stations will live-stream the service, which also will be streamed on the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office Facebook and YouTube pages. KSCO radio will broadcast the memorial on 1080AM.
Those who attend in person are asked to carpool because parking will be limited. Parking for the public will be in Lot K above the football field. Gates will open at 9 a.m. for seating on a first-come, first-served basis.
A procession will begin in the City of Santa Cruz at 7:45 a.m. Wednesday and pass through Live Oak and Aptos.
More details will be available on Tuesday.
More than 1,000 people attended a vigil for Gutzwiller at the Sheriff’s Office on June 7. Here is what Sheriff Jim Hart and Sgt. Steve Ryan said at that vigil.
•••
Sheriff Jim Hart:
I can’t describe the sense of loss that I woke up with this morning. There’s a hole in all of our hearts right now…
Sheriff Jim Hart
I want to thank everybody for coming out today
I want to talk about Damon.
Damon was a good man.
He was a policeman, but he was a good man.
He was a father and a husband and a son and a friend and a colleague.
When I think about community policing, and how we police here in Santa Cruz County, Damon is the picture of community policing.
He was kind, caring, patient, empathetic.
He could take enforcement action when he needed to but he would rather communicate his way through any problem that was in front of him.
I went through his personnel file last night — not a single citizen complaint in 14 years and many, many commendations.
He was a good police officer.
Damon’s family is here with us today and I just want to tell them how sorry I am that this happened, and how much grief all of us are feeling, and how much he will be missed.
Damon grew up in this community. He graduated from Aptos High School. He understood Santa Cruz County, and that’s why he was such a good policeman. He understood the county and the community and he had a lot of great character traits that helped him become the policeman that he was and the man that he was.
I will never forget him.
I will always feel pain when I think about him. But I’ll also remember the good things about Damon too.
Sgt. Steven Ryan:
I often say there are lot of different cops you might encounter, cops that you want patrolling your neighborhood at night, cops that you want investigating your burglary, cops you want tracking down the missing grandma with dementia, cops you want to comfort a grieving a family member, cops you want pulling over your speeding family member because you know they will make them feel safe, and cops you want next to you when things go really, really bad — Damon was all those and a hell of a lot more.
Sgt. Steven Ryan
I never saw him have a bad day even if he was due one.
He was better than most of us.
He was incredibly patient, gentle in a way that is rare in this world but with the rock-steady confidence of someone who knows what the hell they are doing in nearly every situation they find themselves in.
In that way, he was hilarious, in how self-deprecating he would be, just to get a smile out of one of us, or someone in the public.
In 2008, he became my first beat partner and my beat partner every time I could swing it thereafter. I didn’t have a bad shift when I was with Damon. I loved going on calls with him.
I remember reading that he’d been promoted a year ago and I was shouting at the top of my lungs and pumping my fist in the air. Then I furiously began texting him and his wonderful fiancé, Favi.
He deserves every bit of that promotion four or five times over.
I don’t know if I was more excited when I got the word I was being promoted or when he was.
I have so many memories with this man. I could write for hours about Damon and still not scratch the surface of who he was what he meant to us. Maybe I’ll try some day.
I love you brother.
The beautiful woman he leaves behind, Favi, wanted me to tell you “Damon, You were the heart of our little family and we love you.”
•••
Mike Pruger, a retired sheriff’s deputy who sits on the state board of the Peace Officers Research Association of California Central Coast, started an online “Fund a Hero” campaign to raise $750,000 for Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller’s family.
“I was wanting to help,” Pruger said. “We’ve raised over $600,000 at this point.”
It’s a lot of money, but he’s sure Damon’s wife would give it up if she could have Damon back.
“I’m not sure you can put a price on being a husband and a father,” Pruger said.
That Peace Officers Research Association of California started the ”Fund a Hero” program through its 501c3 foundation a year ago as a way to avoid problems that have arisen with other fundraising options.
The often-used GoFundMe.com takes a percentage off the top, Pruger said, while the Fund A Hero campaign allows 100 percent of the money to go to the family.
Another problem is when multiple fundraising sites crop up, confusing donors.
Pruger said GoFundMe was required to shut down two sites for Sgt. Gutzwiller.
Confusion led to hard feelings and lawsuits in 2013 over fundraising for the families of two Santa Cruz police officers who were killed responding to a call.
“I knew both those officers,” said Pruger. “Everybody did what they thought was right … We’ve learned from our mistakes.”
The last time a deputy sheriff was killed in the line of duty was Michael Gray in 1985.
The softball field at the county’s Juvenile Probation complex on Graham Hall Road in Felton is named for Michael Gray.
