AUSTIN, TEXAS — Douglas Allen Copeland, a service technician with Absolute Pest Management, Austin, Texas, unexpectedly died on Jan. 24. He was 39 years old.
Copeland’s service manager, Charles Partridge, has established a GoFundMe page to benefit Copeland’s surviving wife Jennifer and five children.
Partridge said he created the fund to help Jennifer, who has struggled financially since her husband’s passing, with day-to-day expenses.
Copeland was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1975 to Donna and Allen Copeland. He was a longtime Orkin employee in New York before deciding to move to Texas to be closer to his parents and two younger brothers in 2008.
Copeland transferred to a local Orkin branch in Austin where he worked for five years. In December 2009 he met Jennifer. The couple was married in 2011 and has five children.
“In the summer of 2010 I met Doug as my neighbor and at first it was like the Coke and Pepsi man commercials as competing pest control companies living beside each other,” Partridge said. “After a few passing glances and reluctant ‘hellos’ we stopped and talked about the one thing we had in common, which was pest control. After a few work-related conversations we decided to introduce our spouses to one another. On the night we introduced our wives found we had another thing in common besides work, both of our wives are named Jennifer. We all hit it off and became very good friends from that point forward.”
After more than 10 combined years of service with Orkin, Copeland came to work as a service technician at Absolute Pest Management. “This meant the world to me that he would give up that much time invested with Orkin in order to work with me as his friend and also his supervisor,” Partridge said.
“Doug may be gone but he will never be forgotten he was a great friend and valuable asset to Absolute,” Partridge added.
Visit Partridge’s GoFundMe page here: www.gofundme.com/kv6fgs.