BY DAVID GRANT LONG

Kenneth Wayne Dugan III, 22, was a friend who could be counted on when the going got tough, according to people who knew him best, and died while following his credo.

"He was helping somebody out that needed help," said Basil Hougland, one of Dugan’s close friends, on Monday. Hougland was with Dugan when he was fatally wounded during an argument outside his ex-wife’s residence on County Road 25 early Thursday.

"With Kenny, if you came up to him as a friend — or even as an enemy — and asked him to do something, he’d do it for you," Hougland added, "and that’s what he was doing."

Still, Dugan was no angel, according to Sonja Gallegos Dugan, his wife and mother of his daughter Sierra, 3, and son Nathan, 7 months.

"Only a certain kind of person would like Kenny," she said during an interview Monday. "Because he wasn’t real nice to everybody.

"I mean he was, but he was very blunt and told you his opinion —he was very opinionated."

And Dugan, who had a record of minor alcohol-related run-ins with the law, had recently made some major changes in his life, most of which began during her most recent pregnancy, Gallegos Dugan said.

"Kenny didn’t drink any more," she said. "We had split up for a little while when I was pregnant.

"He came and told me that he’d show me he could change. He said he loved me more than anything, and if that’s what it took he’d show me, and that’s what he did."

"He changed his whole life around for me," she said.

That short life was abruptly ended last week when Dugan was shot in the chest during an altercation at the residence of his ex-wife, Lindy Kennedy Dugan, allegedly as he was trying to evict a woman later identified as Shanna Dawn Fletcher from a camp trailer behind the mobile home.

But, according to Gallegos Dugan, Dugan was not directly involved in any of the fighting and had only gone to the residence at the request of a friend who wanted to get his girlfriend out of a bad situation.

"Kenny’s friend wanted his girlfriend to come home," Gallegos Dugan said. "So he asked Kenny to go out there ‘cause he heard there was some problem with some guys out there."

"Kenny wasn’t even in on any of the fights," she said. "He just went out there to make sure (the women) came back into town or the guys wouldn’t bug them any more."

"Two minutes before he left he came into the house and told me he loved me and kissed me good-bye, and I told him to hurry back."