For nearly fifty years, one name kept turning up across Augusta-Richmond County's public roster: city councilman, then county commissioner, then county attorney, then magistrate judge, with a law practice running underneath all four. Stephen "Steve" Eugene Shepard, who held that unusual run of local offices, died on September 15, 2026, in Augusta, Georgia. He was 75.

Shepard was born January 24, 1951, in Atlanta, the son of Samuel Stephens Shepard Jr. and Doris Everitt Shepard. He graduated from Druid Hills High School in 1969 and from Davidson College in 1973, then earned his law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1976. He moved to Augusta that same year and never left, building what WRDW-TV described as a legal career spanning nearly five decades.

Shepard practiced law in Augusta as a solo attorney and as a named partner in several long-standing local firms, and he became a 50-year member of the Georgia Bar Association. Alongside that practice, Augusta voters and officials called on him for public service in four different capacities: elected city councilman, elected county commissioner, county attorney, and magistrate judge for Augusta-Richmond County. Few Augusta attorneys of his generation moved through that many seats of local government, civil practice by day and public business, whether council votes, county contracts, or a magistrate's docket, running alongside it.

Shepard joined the Augusta Lions Club in 1979 and went on to serve multiple terms as its president, a civic commitment that ran alongside his legal and government work for decades. He was also a longtime member of Trinity on the Hill in Augusta, where he belonged to the Pairs and Spares Sunday School class.

He married Kathie Mauldin Shepard in 1973, and the couple shared more than fifty years together, according to his obituary from Thomas Poteet & Son Funeral Directors. He was the father of three daughters, Brooke Baker, Whitney Shepard, and Mallory Dutton, and grandfather to six grandchildren: Grant, Jackson, and Ellie Baker, and Daphne, Cameron, and Sally Stephens Dutton. Away from the courthouse, he golfed, followed Georgia football, ran and hiked, and traveled with his family.

The family will hold visitation at Thomas Poteet & Son Funeral Directors on Davis Road and a celebration of life at Trinity on the Hill in Augusta, where guests are asked to wear red and black in a nod to his University of Georgia roots.

What stands out from Shepard's time in Augusta is not one building or statute but four ordinary public offices, held one after another for longer than most residents can recall any one person holding them: a council seat, a commission seat, the county attorney's desk, the magistrate's bench. Add nearly fifty years of law practice, a Lions Club he helped lead for multiple terms, and a Sunday School class he kept returning to, and the outline of a life spent almost entirely in service to one place comes into view, a life his wife, three daughters, and six grandchildren now carry forward.