Beach chaplain found calling in church and on the street

VIRGINIA BEACH

For three decades, the Rev. Donald R. Staton has been patrolling the streets of Virginia Beach.

With his ball cap fitted over high-and-tight gray hair and shoulders set square, he's a man of God who takes no guff.

"If they listen, they get mercy," he said recently, in a cadence as much military general as preacher. "If they don't listen, they get justice."

Staton is the head of 17 police chaplains in the city.

They work the Oceanfront during the hot months, helping police officers keep control. Year-round, they respond when those in uniform, or the civilians they serve, have a crisis.

Staton, administrator of the chaplain program, has volunteered more than 52,000 hours for the city.

Through the years, he's been a presence at graduations and retirements.

During times of loss, Staton is a figure of faith or simply a strong shoulder to lean on. He is often called to tell families that loved ones are gone.

Staton has been on the other side of that situation as well, an experience that has helped shape his life.

When Donald Staton was a boy in Rockbridge County, a state trooper made a lifelong impression on him.

Staton's family invited the officer out of the rain to fill out paperwork for an accident report.

"In my mind, even today, that man was as big as a mountain," Staton recalled. "I actually slipped up close enough to touch him, but I didn't dare do that."

Staton was the son of a railroad man, the grandson of a preacher. He grew up hoping to work for a railroad someday, but they were cutting back by the time he was old enough. He looked for God, though, he said, but never found him in many churches.

He married Sue, a petite redhead, and served as a draftsman with the highway department before finally calling the State Police and letting his wife grow into the idea. He joined the force in 1962.

His father killed himself while Staton was in Richmond training to be a state trooper. Staton still remembers not having anyone to talk to about the loss.

Troopers relayed him home. After the funeral, he went back to work and stayed at it until 1967.

Along the way, he investigated crimes, helped motorists and notified people whose loved ones had died on highways or state roads.

"We never had any training for it," he said of that delicate task.

His first notification came after a fatal crash in which a man went off a road, into an apple orchard and halfway up a tree.

Staton found the man's wife. She was upset because her husband had driven off after an argument.

When Staton finished telling the woman that her husband was dead, she stiffened up, fainted and slid to the floor.

Staton said he eventually grew disillusioned with the job. He had a hole in him big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through without touching the sides, he said. So he quit.

"I didn't leave it because I didn't love it. I left it looking for God," he said. "I'd had enough of not having the answers I needed to have."

He started selling insurance, and that led to him meeting a man who helped bring about his spiritual awakening.

In 1968, during a business meeting in Richmond, the two spoke in a hotel room about faith. Staton picked up a Bible. "What I need is in here," he said. "Help me find it."

They went to the man's hotel room, where their wives also were talking about faith. The man asked Staton's wife, "Would you like to pray and make contact with the living God and become a Christian?" She said yes.

"Don, how 'bout you?"

Staton, in that moment, already had.

The Statons moved to the Beach, and Donald Staton worked as a draftsman again with a firm in Norfolk. They joined a church and, eventually, Staton founded his own, Christian Mission Fellowship, after correspondence courses and studies - some of it funded by sales of model trains, a childhood love that became a sideline vocation.

Walking upstairs one day at home, Staton said he noticed a book on a shelf: "Preacher With a Billy Club."

He read it cover to cover, and began to dream about working again with police officers. He prayed, got a reference letter from an old friend and contacted the Beach police.

In 1976, the force had only three police chaplains. Backed by the recommendation, Staton was added to the chaplain rolls, so long as he also volunteered as an auxiliary officer.

For years Staton served as an unpaid auxiliary officer and as a chaplain.

Staton lost his wife in 2002. She had battled illness for years. Together they had raised three children, an adopted child and 17 foster kids.

"My little wife had a big heart," he said.

In 2004, his son, James, fell asleep at the wheel in New England. The mother of a friend his son had been traveling with told Staton about the accident.

Soon after, police Capt. Steve Smith, who oversees the chaplain program for the department, and another chaplain visited Staton's home to make the official notification.

Staton preached during his son's funeral. And he kept right on volunteering for the city.

"That shows the calling from God to serve," Smith said recently.

The tragedy helps him relate, Smith said.

"If a person's lost a child, no one truly knows that pain other than another person who's lost a child," he said.

Staton has dealt with tragedies that include the loss of officers and, this year, the deaths of two girls whose car was struck by a drunken driver, a crash that led to a local and national outcry because the driver was an illegal immigrant.

Though he had to retire as an auxiliary officer because of age limits, Staton said he has no plans to stop working as a chaplain, which has no such restrictions.

"When you know you're called by God," he said, "you don't argue."