Dispatching Kindness

Giving, Sandi Westerberg was good at.

It’s the receiving that was the problem for the former Ventura County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher.

But Tuesday, the 53-year-old Fillmore native--who had helped found the local Make-a-Wish Foundation and had helped begin the department’s Christmas ritual of presenting needy families with hampers filled with food and toys--was the recipient of a much-needed gift.

With tears streaming down her cheeks, a visibly weak Westerberg received a check for $47,800 from her former fellow workers to help pay for medical bills that have accumulated since her Oct. 3 diagnosis with terminal lung cancer.

“I’ve never been able to accept a gift, even a small gift,” she said. “I’m really blessed. . . . There’s still a lot of things I want to do. There’s still a lot of people I want to help.”

The hefty check is believed to be the largest charitable donation ever raised by the department’s more than 1,100 employees for a former co-worker, Capt. Keith Parks said.

The money came from 2,800 hours of donated vacation time that was then converted into cash via an agreement between the county and United Way.

“We [in the Sheriff’s Department] consider ourselves a family,” Parks said. “Sandi has been a long-term member of that family. . . . She was instrumental in getting a lot of us involved in charities.”

Westerberg, whom Parks described as the matriarch of the Thousand Oaks sheriff’s office before her 1995 retirement because of a back injury, was an 18-year department veteran.

Indeed, it was while undergoing a routine physical before yet another back surgery that doctors discovered the cancer in Westerberg’s lungs. They gave Westerberg, a former pack-a-day cigarette smoker who quit the habit five years ago, three to nine months to live.

Friends and former co-workers rallied around Westerberg and her husband, Roger, to help pay for expensive chemotherapy sessions and other treatment.

In November, more than 300 people helped raise $8,000 at a barbecue.

The outpouring of assistance comes at least in part in response to Westerberg’s selflessness throughout her life, Parks said.

The 1962 Fillmore High School graduate has not had an easy life.

She and her husband lost a 16-year-old son in a car accident; the couple’s other son died three years ago at age 33 in an accident on a movie set. Westerberg herself suffered painful and debilitating back surgeries that led to her premature retirement.

Through it all, Parks said, Westerberg helped others.

She was a board member for about a dozen years of the Make-a-Wish Foundation of the Tri-Counties, which grants wishes to seriously ill children in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. Westerberg got involved after helping to raise money in the late 1970s for a local deputy’s son who suffered from leukemia.

In addition, Westerberg was one of several employees in the department’s Thousand Oaks station 17 years ago who conceived the idea of distributing food and toys to local families at Christmas. This year, more than 130 families, with 435 children, received holiday hampers from Sheriff’s Department employees in Santa suits.

“It is kind of ironic,” Parks said as he presented Westerberg with the check. “Sandi has given so much to so many people in Ventura County. . . . We want to be there for you because you were always there for us.”

Westerberg doesn’t expect to beat the illness. But then she didn’t anticipate getting cancer in the first place. And she certainly didn’t foresee the monetary gift from her former co-workers.

“You never see yourself in this position . . . and then you think, how did I get so many friends, how did I get so lucky?” she said. “There’s probably not a good picture at the end, but I’m going to make the best of it. . . . I was terrified I wasn’t going to make it through Christmas. Now I’m going to shoot for another one.”