Second coronavirus death reported among members of Sacramento church congregation

A second member of the Faith Presbyterian Church in Sacramento has died from coronavirus, church officials confirmed Sunday.

Pastor Jeff Chapman told church members during an online worship service Sunday that Don Sperling, 85, died Saturday.

Sperling, a longtime Sacramento resident, is a former assistant city treasurer, according to Sacramento Bee archives, and former president of the Sacramento Retired City Employees Association.

He was a member of the Sacramento Golf Council and had been active in a city employees bowling league. Church officials said the family requested privacy and did not want to talk publicly about their loss.

Sperling’s death comes six days after another church member, a longtime kindergarten teacher and children’s choir instructor at the church, also died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Church officials have said five members of the Greenhaven church have tested positive for the disease and that others, including Chapman, were being tested.

Chapman, who said in an interview Sunday with The Bee that his test has come back negative, described Sperling as a beloved member of the congregation and father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

“The first thing everybody would know about Don was he had an unbelievable sense of humor – always in kindness, never sharp – but just made people laugh,” Chapman said. “I think that was a gift.

“Everybody wanted Don to be in the meeting because he had a great, kindhearted spirit.”

Sperling served in the past as an elder on the church finance team and organized the church golf tournament, following his passion for the game, Chapman said.

“That’s what makes it particularly hard,” Chapman said of Sperling’s death. “Any loss in a church is hard, but he was a valued member of our faith community and had a lot of integrity.”

Chapman emphasized that church officials moved as quickly as possible once they learned members may have contracted the disease.

A task force of church members comprised of an emergency room doctor, a public health official and a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control infectious diseases expert all began advising the church on needed precautions, he said.

Chapman noted that Sacramento County officials moved from a policy of containment to mitigation on March 9, and that the church did not become aware of the possibility that members were infected until a few days later.

“We became aware on March 12, which is when we acted on this,” he said. “We went above and beyond strict precautions.”

Chapman said there is no obvious source of the disease among the 450 church members or throughout Sacramento in general.

“There’s no way to know from our perspective how it started, any more than anyone else does in the community,” he said.

He added that a county health official contacted the church once “but once they’d learned how we were handling the situation had no further guidance because we were handling it properly.”

Chapman said that the public should realize that “they should behave no differently with someone from our church than anyone else.”

Chapman said the church is conducting services online, as are other houses of worship.

“We’ve been sending out daily video messages to the whole church, and the system’s in place to provide people to run errands for people to stuck at home,” he said. “People are grieving, they’re grieving the loss of people they love.”

This story was originally published March 22, 2020 at 12:38 PM.