Apr 12, 1967- May 23, 2014

Loving husband and father, athlete, government policy analyst David Eugene Stikkers of Grand Junction, Colorado died May 23, 2014 after a long illness. He was 47. Mr. Stikkers was born in Chowchilla, California on April 12, 1967 to Don and Pat Stikkers.

After attending Mark Twain and Albert Michelson elementary schools in Calaveras County, he attended El Roble Intermediate and graduated from Claremont High School in 1985. He played football for the Wolfpack and was on the 1984 CIF championship team. He received the league Scholar Athlete Award. He went on to Claremont McKenna College where he played football for the Stags. He received a bachelor’s degree in management and civil engineering from CMC and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

After a few years working for Sierra Pacific Power in Reno, he went on to receive a master’s degree and PhD in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He met Katherine Bahnsen in Pittsburgh and they were married there in 2001. Their son, Ryan, was born in Alexandria, Virginia on January 2008. Mr. Stikkers traveled to many far-off places over the years.

When at CMC, he spent several weeks in Italy with other NCAA Division III football (not soccer) players from around the United States playing Italian teams. He participated in an Earth Watch trip to Lake Baikal in Siberia for study of micro-fauna to establish water pollution baseline data. He took two trips to Alaska with Kurt Aluzas, a high school friend working there as a wildlife biologist. They took a weeklong canoe trip down a river in the Brooks Range in the Gates of the Arctic National Park. On another trip, they went kayaking on the inside passage near Wrangell, Alaska. Another trip found him backpacking in the wilderness in Tasmania.

After he married Katherine, she joined him on an Earth Watch trip to study rare foxes on the pampas of Argentina. Mr. Stikkers was a policy analyst at the Government Accountability Office in Washington, DC when he was diagnosed with Frontal Temporal Degeneration. He was also an Elder at the Farlington Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia.

Mr. Stikkers is survived by his wife, Katherine Stikkers, and son Ryan of Poughkeepsie, New York; by his parents, Don and Pat Stikkers of Grand Junction, Colorado; by his brother, Dan Stikkers of Anaheim Hills, and by his sister, Elizabeth Stikkers of San Francisco.

A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. on July 26, 2014 at Claremont Presbyterian Church, 1111 N. Mountain Ave. in Claremont. A reception at the church will follow. The family suggests that in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions be made to The Association for Frontal Temporal Degeneration by visiting www.theAFTD.org. 
 

~ Claremont Courier