The obituary, shown below, was copied from
https://www.mcall.com/2003/03/06/stuart-j-woods/
(it may or may not still be available there)
STUART J. WOODS
By The Morning Call
PUBLISHED: March 6, 2003 at 5:00 AM EST
UPDATED: October 5, 2021 at 12:47 AM EDT
Stuart J. “Stu” Woods, 39, of San Francisco Drive, Richland Township, died March 4 in St. Luke’s Quakertown Hospital. He was married to
Catherine (Scheetz) Woods for 17 years in November.
A 1985 graduate of the Delaware County Police Academy, he began his career investigating youth crime in Wildwood, N.J. In 1985, he joined the former East Rockhill Township Police Department which became part of the Pennridge Regional Police Department in 1992. He was the latter’s first Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer until becoming chief of the Richland Township Police Department in 1998.
Born in West Chester, Chester County, he was a son of Eylene (Ward) Woods of West Grove, Chester County, and the late James F. Woods Sr.
He was a member, deacon, outreach director and youth ministry leader of Bethel Baptist Church, Sellersville, and a board member of Upper Bucks Christian School.
He was chaplain for the Bucks County Police Association and a member of the Upper Bucks Emergency Situation Team, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 53, and the Bucks County, Pennsylvania and international associations of police chiefs.
He was a life member of the National Rifle Association and a volunteer for the Just Communities youth and family agency, Quakertown.
He received the Officer of the Year award from the Sellersville Town Watch in 1992; the Pennridge Regional Police Best Shot Award in 1992 and 1997; the Governor’s Highway Safety Award for bicycle safety programs, and Police Officer of the Year from the Bucks County Police Association, both in 1993; the James Hackett Memorial Good Neighbor Award from the Pennridge Chamber of Commerce in 1994 for excellence in the DARE program; the Youth Aid Panel Liaison Award from Bucks County Juvenile Court in 1996; the Governor’s Highway Safety Award for Safety Education in 1997; and the Richland Township Staff Member of the Year award in 2002.
Survivors: Wife; mother; sons, Joshua and Eliot, and daughters, Patricia and
Jennifer, all at home; brothers, John P. of Batavia, N.Y.,
Russell of Portland, Ore.,
Tyrone of Toughkenamon, Chester County; sisters,
Dorothy Lyttle of Lynchburg, Va., Judy Gregg of West Grove, Ramona Stafford of Pylesville, Md., Corrine
Laferggie of Mahwah, N.J., Simone Wetenberger of Fayetteville, Ark.; nieces, nephews.
Services: 1 p.m. Saturday in the church. Call 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday in the church. Arrangements, Jeffrey A. Naugle Funeral Home, Quakertown.
Contributions: Stuart Woods’ Children’s Education Fund, c/o First Savings Bank of Perkasie, Richlandtown, or Stuart Woods Memorial Fund, c/o the church.
The article, shown below, was copied from
https://www.mcall.com/2003/03/06/richland-police-chief-dies-at-39-stu-woods-spoke-to-students-before-he-was-taken-to-a-hospital/
(it may or may not still be available there)
Richland police chief dies at 39 ** Stu Woods spoke to students before he was taken to a hospital.
By The Morning Call
PUBLISHED: March 6, 2003 at 5:00 AM EST | UPDATED: October 5, 2021 at 2:20 AM EDT
Richland Township Police Chief Stuart J. Woods, 39, spent the final hours of his life Tuesday doing what many say he enjoyed most — interacting with students.
He talked, laughed and sang in Regina Hoover’s sixth-grade class at St. Isidore’s Catholic School in Quakertown during an antidrug and antialcohol workshop.
“By the end of the presentation,” Hoover said Wednesday, “they had him listening to them sing the Sponge Bob song many, many times. They wanted to know if he could come back.”
He never will.
Woods, of Richland, died in the afternoon at St. Luke’s Quakertown Hospital, leaving behind a wife and four children.
He had complained of shortness of breath to a fellow officer after leaving St. Isidore’s. Ryan Naugle, a newly hired Richland police officer who also spoke at the workshop, rushed the chief to the hospital, where he died about 4 p.m.
Bucks County Coroner Joseph Campbell said a family doctor was doing an autopsy.
Though the cause of Woods’ death was unknown, he had been suffering from a fairly common lung disease since the mid-1990s.
Since being diagnosed with histoplasmosis, he had battled shortness of breath and pneumonia, and had increasing bouts with the common cold, said Richland Patrolman Rich Ficco, who had known Woods for 17 years.
Histoplasmosis is a respiratory disease that mainly affects the lungs and is caused by a fungus. Symptoms include breathing difficulties, a general ill feeling, fever, chest pains and a dry cough.
“You can think of it as a low-grade tuberculosis,” said Dr. S. Michael Phillips, professor of medicine and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.
In some cases, Phillips said, the disease eats away at the lungs, but rarely causes death.
Part of Woods’ lung was to be removed in December 2001, but doctors determined the surgery wasn’t necessary. “When they opened him up, the condition didn’t dictate that,” Ficco said.
More recently, Woods had been using a breathing apparatus to help control the amount of oxygen that entered his blood.
“He was well aware of what his health situation was,” said Richland Township Manager Stephen Sechriest. “Just nobody expected anything to happen when it did.”
Woods graduated second in his class at the Delaware County police academy in 1985. He worked in Wildwood, N.J., then joined the East Rockhill Township Police Department in 1985.
When East Rockhill’s force merged with departments in West Rockhill Township and Sellersville to form Pennridge Regional Police Department in 1992, Woods became an officer there. He was named Bucks County’s Officer of the Year in 1993.
He remained with Pennridge until being named Richland’s first police chief in 1998. He was also the first officer hired by the department, and tried to round up a group of officers who were as focused on community policing as he was, said his second in command, Sgt. Larry Cerami.
Cerami said he and Woods talked in great depth before Cerami was hired. They thought along the same lines and tried to bring in others who shared their ideas, he said.
“It was a tremendous match of minds, if you will,” Cerami said. “It was really great to be on the ground floor when this place was getting up and running.”
Richard J. Woldow, who headed a committee involved in selecting the chief, said the philosophy supervisors required of the new chief was simple: Be proactive in the community.
“This is not a high-crime area,” Woldow said. “What they wanted was a person to head off problems before they occurred. Stu fit those parameters.”
A deeply religious man, Woods was a deacon at Bethel Baptist Church in Sellersville, which Richland Supervisor Rick Orloff also attends.
At church, Orloff said, he noticed qualities in Woods that would serve him well as chief. “He had an incredible moral bearing. He had incredible integrity. He had incredible leadership, and he was a people person.”
Woods intermingled his faith and his work, said Upper Makefield Township Police Chief Mark Schmidt, a fellow officer of the Bucks County Police Association. Schmidt was vice president, and Woods the chaplain.
“I’ve never known anyone who was a more devout Christian” Schmidt said.
In 1998, when Richland officials announced that Woods got the top job on the force, Woldow said: “Woods will be a chief who will grow with us and be with us for 10 or 20 years.”
The chief did grow with them, Woldow said.
“He went from the visionary we saw him as to the doer that moved this department along. Sadly, God didn’t give him or us those 10 or 20 years.”
Reporter Steve Wartenberg contributed to this story.
dalondo.moultrie@mcall.com