Death Came Brutally to a Man Who ‘Never Quit’

Stephen “Scott” Helvenston was Hollywood’s image of a soldier -- blond, bronzed and broad shouldered. In fact, the 38-year-old former Navy SEAL trained health-conscious Californians how to pump iron like commandos and coached movie stars to play the role of combat-ready recruits.

Days after the private security contractor and three colleagues were killed by an angry Iraqi mob, friends and colleagues recalled Helvenston as a man whose energy and athleticism helped him parlay his military service into work as a film consultant, a fitness guru and an international hired gun. But as family members prepared Friday for the return of Helvenston’s remains, relatives lamented that the patriotic soldier and devoted father they once knew had become a symbol of American foreign policy.

“You know what they did to him? I can’t talk about it,” his mother, Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel, of Leesburg, Fla., told the Orlando Sentinel. “What happened to him is so horrendous.”

Helvenston’s ex-wife, Patricia Irby, was en route to Florida on Friday, where services are being planned.

Helvenston, of Oceanside, was the divorced father of two children, Kyle, 14, and Kelsey, 12, and had served 12 years in the U.S. Navy’s elite special forces. He was working for a private security firm, Blackwater Security Consulting, when he and three colleagues were ambushed in their cars and killed by rocket-propelled grenades. In grisly images broadcast around the globe, a crowd of Iraqis in Fallouja hacked at their remains and hung two charred corpses from the trestles of a bridge.

Friends found the images difficult to comprehend because they believed Helvenston to be unstoppable.

“The guy pretty much didn’t know the word ‘quit,’ ” said Markus Heon, a physical trainer based in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. “If he were to go down, I wish he had gone down in a different way. I know, for a fact, if he did, he would have taken a lot of those guys with him.”

A statement released by Helvenston’s family said he grew up in Florida, attended high school there and joined the service at age 17.

“He prided himself on strength, agility, speed, flexibility, balance, determination and toughness,” the statement said. “Scott never quit anything in his life. After he broke his legs in a parachute jump, he tried to walk away from the scene.”

“He was always really taking care of people, which is what he was doing there” in Iraq, said a family friend, Alice W. Brown, 51, of Del Mar. “Taking care of people -- that was Scott.”

She describes how she and her family would meet him to go rock climbing.

“He would have a whole pile of children,” she recalled. “I used to tell him, ‘Scott, you ought to be teaching high school PE.’ Because he was like the Pied Piper.... He just gave and gave and gave.”

Brown described him as a man of dignity and morals.

“I had that sick feeling yesterday morning that Scott was one of those guys,” Brown said. “All Americans are just outraged about this. I hope we’ll send more troops over there. I think we’re just understaffed over there. We need to reinstate shock and awe over there.”

After leaving the Navy, Helvenston settled in Oceanside and helped start a fitness consulting firm, Amphibian Athletics, that promised a Navy SEAL-style workout for his customers. He also found success in Hollywood as a stuntman and as an instructor for movie and television actors.

His credits include the movie “G.I. Jane,” in which he showed Demi Moore how to endure the rigors of military training, and the television shows “Combat Missions,” and “Man vs. Beast.”

Friends and family say his serious side was evident in his work for Blackwater Security.

“A lot of people are saying ‘Do you think he went over there for the money?,’ ” said Keith Woulard, who worked with Helvenston as an instructor at the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition School in Coronado and later was with him on the “G.I. Jane” set. “Of course he did. But that wasn’t his main goal. It was to go over there and help out and put his knowledge to use.”

Blackwater Security employs former soldiers and intelligence officers to provide armed security and risk assessment to governments and corporations worldwide.

The North Carolina-based company is one of dozens of private security firms that operate in Iraq, and employs former military specialists who inhabit a murky and violent world of armed conflict, private and public contracts and intelligence gathering.

“Mobile security teams stand ready to be deployed around the world with little notice in support of U.S. national security objectives, private or foreign interests,” reads the company’s website.

The other victims have been identified as Jerko “Jerry” Zovko, 32 of Ohio; Wesley J. Batalona, 48, of Hawaii; and Michael Teague, 38, of Clarksville, Tenn.

Zovko spoke five languages and joined the Army at 19. “He loved people,” said his mother, Danica Zovko. “He wanted the world to be without borders, for everybody to be free and safe.”

Batalona grew up one of 10 children in Hawaii and joined the Army after high school. “We gave him two choices,” said his mother, Shibata Batalona. “Either go to school and become a policeman or join the service.”

Teague served 12 years in the Army and was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan. His wife, Rhonda Teague, described him as “a proud father, soldier and American.”

Woulard recalled Helvenston’s love of snowboarding and climbing and described him as a dedicated father who took his kids with him wherever he went. “He’d always have my kids, too,” he said.

Brown recalled Helvenston’s love for his children as well. She first met him in the late 1990s when she signed up to take what she believes was his first “Navy SEALs fitness boot camp,” offered through a Del Mar gym.

“It just turned my life around,” she said, recalling a regimen of rock climbing, running, kayaking, races and relays that turned her into an outdoors aficionado.

Helvenston encountered financial problems, and, for a time, the family lived in a trailer near Big Bear, where he worked as a camp host, Brown said.

“That was sort of a difficult time,” she said. He and his wife divorced. “He felt, in his heart, sometime, they would get together again. He just loved his family,” Brown said.

A family friend answering the telephone at the Helvenston family home in Leesburg referred reporters to an article quoting the family that appeared in Friday’s Orlando Sentinel.

In that article, his mother recounts how her son called her about 6 a.m. Tuesday from somewhere in Iraq and left a phone message for her while she slept, the ringer on her phone turned off.

“He said, ‘Mom, I love you and miss you. Don’t worry; I’m OK. I’m safe. I’ll be home in June.... We’re going to have our quality time. I’m going to spoil you.”

Services for her son will be scheduled when his body is returned from Iraq, said McGee at the home in Florida. He will be buried with full military honors at the national cemetery in Bushnell, Fla., he said.

The family is asking that memorial contributions be sent to a fund created for the victims of the attack. In their statement, they said that checks may be made payable to “Memorial Fund” and sent to: Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 159, Moyock, NC 27958.

Times staff writer Jennifer Mena contributed to this report.