Stephen Haugen has experienced more than his share of shock and grief.
He was just 9 years old in 1997 when his father, 13-year veteran Riverside County sheriff’s Deputy Michael Haugen, was gunned down with another deputy while responding to a domestic violence call in Whitewater.
Yet, as he prepares to join others in a San Jacinto park named for his dad, his heart will again be heavy.
A little more than four months ago, his 2 1/2-year-old son Tanner died from a series of medical complications that set in from birth. A tree planted in his son’s name at the park will be dedicated Friday.
“I take it a day at a time,” Stephen Haugen says. “I still have a family to take care of. I couldn’t just lay down and mourn. I did do a fair share of mourning when my son passed, but I still do have a fiancée and a daughter to take care of. I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.”
He will be joined by family members, friends and sheriff’s deputies when representatives of the Riverside Sheriffs’ Association dedicate the tree.
“It means a lot to us,” said Robert Masson, association president. “It’s not just honoring our fallen officers. It’s for the family. They have a lot of heartache, losing a husband, a grandfather – and now a grandson.”
Kylleen Coogan, a volunteer with the association’s spousal support group, said the Haugen family preferred a maple tree, but the association is going with a liquid amber.
“It looks like maple,” she said, “but it will handle the San Jacinto weather.”
Stephen Haugen, 26, lives with his fiancée, Sara Grady, and their 6-year-old daughter, Nevaeh, in their San Jacinto home a short drive from Haugen Park.
He works on a solar farm in Lancaster, spending weekdays staying with a friend there, so he has had little time to visit the park. But Tanner loved the park and went there often with his mother, so Stephen Haugen has vowed to make time for frequent visits.
You never completely get over the death of a close family member, he said, but the passage of time has softened the pain of his father’s death.
Michael Haugen “was a hero,” he said. “He was definitely my role model. He taught me just in the short time I was with him a lot about responsibility and how to treat people. It made me the man I am today.”
It is a small but important consolation, Stephen Haugen said, that “he died doing what he loved doing. He loved being a police officer.”
Stephen Haugen has stark, vivid memories of the day in 1997 when he walked downstairs one morning and found the house crowded with deputies.
“Our next-door neighbor, Omar Rodriguez, grabbed me and took me back upstairs,” he recalled. “He explained to me that God picks special people. He only chooses special people to take up to heaven and he chose my dad.”
Stephen Haugen felt sad, but “it didn’t really dawn on me that he was going to be gone forever. I thought he was going to come from the hospital. I asked a couple of times if we could go see him.
“I remember a couple of months later when I was with my mom, and she broke down and started crying,” he said. “That’s when she had to explain to me again that he was gone.”
Life was a struggle for Stephen Haugen’s son Tanner the moment he was born on Nov. 30, 2011. He had cerebral palsy. He had scoliosis, a curviture of the spine. He had an abnormality of his jaw and neck. He couldn’t straighten his thumbs. And his lower intestine was tied in a knot.
Tanner was rushed from the delivery room to a neonatal intensive care unit and visited doctors several times a month for the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, his father said, the boy was always in a good mood.
“He could brighten up a room with his smile,” Stephen Haugen said. “He was the happiest kid in the world. He loved to go places, and we found a way to take him with us wherever we went. He loved to ride in my new truck.”
Stephen Haugen was working in Lancaster when his son died.
That night, he was awakened by his friend and told to call his fiancée.
“She couldn’t stop crying,” Stephen Haugen recalled. “She just said ‘Tanner is gone.’ I said, ‘What do you mean Tanner is gone?’ She said, ‘He passed away.’”
The news “just hit me,” he said. “I didn’t want to believe it. It ran into me like a ton of bricks.”
Having been through the loss of his father may have made it easier to deal with another loss, he said, “but it was still very unexpected.
Comfort from the Sheriff’s Association support group and moral and financial help from the nonprofit Unforgettables Foundation was invaluable, he said.
Stephen Haugen said the only thing that kept him going was knowing he had to be there for his family.
When a friend’s child underwent heart surgery, he remembers offering advice.
“All I could tell him was, ‘Keep your head up. Your family needs you more than you could ever think,’” Stephen Haugen said. “‘You have to stay strong, stay rested, stay fed, because it will literally eat you from the inside out.’
“I know this from experience,” he said.
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