Las Vegas shooting victim celebrated
Stacee Rodrigues Etcheber ‘gave more than she ever received’
It was not lost on anyone at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco that Stacee Rodrigues Etcheber was exactly the kind of person the Bay Area needs at a time like this.
With the disastrous Wine Country wildfires blowing smoke and ash over her funeral Mass on Thursday, the 50year-old mother of two from Novato was recalled as someone who wouldn’t have thought twice about volunteering and doing what
she could for the thousands affected by the flames.
A consummate cowgirl, she would have been “the incident commander” in getting the area’s horses to safety, the Rev. Michael Quinn chuckled to the hundreds who packed the church.
Etcheber lived to help others, and her family believed she died doing just that. She was one of the 58 victims killed when a gunman opened fire at a Las Vegas concert on Oct. 2, injuring more than 520 others in the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s modern history.
Her husband, San Francisco police Officer Vincent Etcheber, told her to run while he stopped to aid the wounded. But like her husband, she wouldn’t have been able to leave while others needed help, loved ones said.
“They had an understanding — we help people. That’s what we do,” Quinn said of the couple.
Though she was not a sworn member of the city force, police officials said they considered her a member of the San Francisco Police Department family and provided the honors typical of an officer’s funeral. Bagpipers played as officers with the department’s mounted unit stood their horses at attention outside the cathedral.
Some attendees wore orange ribbons — orange being Stacee Etcheber’s favorite color — but many more, police officers like her husband, were in uniform. Several members of the department had rushed to Las Vegas in the hours after the couple had gotten separated in the chaos, searching hospitals in hopes that she was among the missing, not the dead.
But within 24 hours, they would confirm the worst had occurred.
On Thursday, little was said of the tragedy that took her life, with Quinn briefly saying a “crazy person, personifying evil, did a terrible thing to many people.” The focus instead was on the woman Stacee Etcheber was, someone who put her whole being into everything she did, whether it was decorating the house for the holidays or attending to clients as a hairstylist.
Vincent Etcheber remembered his wife of 13 years as a loving and enthusiastic woman who “gave more than she ever received.” After they met in San Francisco, the couple married and moved to Novato to start a family.
Stacee Etcheber doted on her 13-year-old daughter, Alivia, and 10-year-old son, Vincent Jr., her husband said, going to their sports games and making a racket.
“She would whistle and cheer louder than any mom,” he laughed. “Her clap was so loud you could hear it across the field.”
Quinn said that as he was talking with the family to prepare his sermon, Alivia told him that she had scored the winning goal at her team’s first soccer game after her mother’s death.
“Alivia informed me,” Quinn said, “with a smile that was just like her mom’s, ‘I know my mom was there.’ ”
“They had an understanding — we help people. That’s what we do.” The Rev. Michael Quinn on the Etchebers