Rites Held for Deputy Turned Bandit : Crime: He is eulogized as a good family man. Meanwhile, fellow officers continue to puzzle over why he went wrong.

He was the kind of guy everyone likes to have around an office--a prankster and joke-teller who could dish out friendly banter while taking a joke played on him with a good-natured smile.

Looking back, his friends and colleagues say Detective Michael Stanewich was something of a local hero around the Sheriff Department’s Encinitas station. One year, he dressed up as Santa at an office party, clowning it up with fellow deputies as he asked what they wanted for Christmas.

A self-taught computer whiz, Stanewich was always ready to help secretaries combat frustrating office computer glitches. In return, they played along with his antics--using scissors and paste to make comic cut-outs picturing Stanewich in a variety of hilarious situations, like one in which he was run up a tree by an angry rhinoceros.

There was also a serious side to Stanewich --that of an ambitious deputy who was rising through the department’s ranks. Named a detective last fall, the former motorcycle officer and traffic investigator was assigned to the department’s elite narcotics unit a few months later.

That’s where the picture of the 36-year-old detective becomes fuzzy. Parts of the image just don’t fit the easygoing Arizona native, who seemed to step out of character by conducting an unauthorized drug stakeout, for which he was recently reprimanded.

It also includes the shocking events of last week, when Stanewich was shot to death by another deputy as he was robbing a home in Olivenhain. During the crime, Stanewich attacked a 32-year-old travel agent and his 82-year-old grandmother, threatening to set them on fire if they didn’t open a safe containing more than $100,000.

The picture was further clouded late Tuesday when it was learned that Stanewich had been arrested for impersonating a police officer in 1980, before he became a deputy.

Earlier Tuesday, friends, family and officers filled the Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church on Garnet Avenue for a half-hour ceremony during which Stanewich was eulogized as a family man, provider and dedicated deputy. The officer had been cremated after close friends and family attended a viewing session over the weekend.

The Rev. Larry Grounds told those at the rites that Michael Stanewich should not be judged solely on the events last week when the veteran officer, wearing a mask and armed with a gun, forced his way into the rural home of Donald Van Ort.

After the services, Grounds said, “I told them that, while these things are churning around in people’s minds and are always in the local news, they could be ignored for the funeral service.”

Later, fellow officers talked about the deputy they now say had many complex parts to his character. They asked questions about his mysterious return to the Olivenhain home where he and four other plainclothes narcotics officers served a search warrant in May.

Investigators believe it was during that first visit--when he ordered Van Ort to open a safe in the home--that Stanewich first learned about the hoard of cash. Now, the department is investigating other cases Stanewich worked to see if he might have returned to rob other homes.

“We’re looking into anything that might explain why this officer might have become a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Capt. Bob Apostolos said after the funeral.

Apostolos, commander of the Encinitas station, said that, among the questions being asked, were, “Why did he go back to that house? Was he a rogue cop looking for justice? Did he target them for a rip-off? Or was he in cahoots with someone else to rip them off?”

Also being considered, Apostolos added, was “The fact that he was off-duty and parked his own car down the street after removing the license plates. All that points to something we’re all very familiar with--residential robbery.”

But there were other elements about the shooting that don’t add up, he said. For one, Stanewich was a safety-conscious officer, skilled in self-defense, who had given seminars on how to handle encounters with a suspect who might be armed and dangerous.

On the day he was shot, Stanewich was confronted in the kitchen of the home by Deputy Gary Steadman.

Steadman arrived at the home in response to a call to police by Van Ort’s girlfriend.

The warning Steadman shouted wasn’t aimed at the friend and fellow officer he knew but a masked bandit.

When Stanewich apparently made a move for a knife on the counter, Steadman shot him twice.

“Mike Stanewich trained other officers in high-risk stops,” Apostolos said. “Why, then, did he make furtive movements while standing in front of a gun? What the hell was going on in his mind? Did he want to die there?”

In Stanewich’s Mira Mesa neighborhood, he was a folk hero who would gather the neighborhood kids around him and recite tale after tale of catching crooks.

The little boys on the block all idolized the man they knew as “Sheriff Mike,” who never tired of describing his exciting life as a sheriff’s deputy, neighbors said.

“He was just a real good guy,” said Richard Puryear, who lived two houses away. “We all loved him in the neighborhood.”

On the street, Stanewich played things strictly by the book, fellow officers say.

Recently, while working what his commanders later determined to be an unauthorized narcotics surveillance outside a North County home, Stanewich’s car was backed into by an off-duty deputy who worked out of his office.

The deputy, who was drunk at the time, had come to visit a friend who lived nearby. Instead of giving him a friendly warning, however, Stanewich turned the fellow officer in to his superiors.

The deputy was transferred to another station after supervisors feared that there might be hard feelings between the two men.

“With some officers, there might have been some room for discussion in that situation,” one law enforcement officer who knew Stanewich said. “But not with Mike. He played things strictly by the book.”

But informing on a fellow deputy also tipped off Stanewich’s supervisors to his own unauthorized surveillance. In the weeks before the incident, the department had undergone a reshuffling that called for narcotics officers working in any of the Sheriff’s Department’s six substations to be supervised by a special investigations unit based in Kearny Mesa.

So Apostolos asked Stanewich to complete a report on his activities and submit it to his superiors there, after which he was issued a written reprimand. For the next few weeks, he was also sent back to work with veteran narcotics officers on departmental rules and regulations involving drug stake-outs.

“Looking back, we didn’t think that incident by itself was enough to take the officer out of his job,” Apostolos said. Times staff writer Mark Platte contributed to this report.