PALM BEACH COUNTY, FL (Boca Post) (Copyright © 2025) — Another year has passed since Deputy Sheriff Gary E. Hobbs lost his long fight with the injuries that started on a routine stolen-car call and ended with his death on December 9, 2000.
The trouble goes back to June 7, 1991. Hobbs was out examining a stolen vehicle, doing the kind of slow, careful look deputies do when they finally track down a car that’s been taken. While he was standing there, a crop duster came over and inadvertently sprayed him with herbicide as it flew past. It was quick, just a pass overhead, but the dose was high.
That spray caused severe neurological damage. Not right away in a dramatic, TV way, but steadily. His health began to slide and then kept sliding. Doctors tied the decline to that herbicide exposure, and over the next nine years his condition worsened until he died in 2000.
He didn’t die in a crash or a shooting. He died because chemicals meant for fields washed over a deputy doing his job next to a recovered stolen car. It’s an odd way to lose someone in law enforcement, but that doesn’t change the fact that the job put him there.
Before all of that, Hobbs had already served in uniform overseas. He was a Vietnam War veteran, then he came home and put on a deputy’s badge. Different role, same idea: service, again and again.
His name now sits on the lists of fallen deputies whose deaths are tied to duty, even if the cause looks different on paper. One line in the memorial posts that go around this time of year sums up how the agency says they want him remembered: “TO SERVE AND PROTECT WAS HIS OATH — TO HONOR HIM IS OUR DUTY.”
For the people who knew him, and for the ones working the same kind of quiet calls today, that’s the part that sticks.
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