Dennis Pepa, who founded Death Angel with his cousins in the early eighties, has stage four duodenal cancer. He was diagnosed in February and has only now said so publicly, through a fundraising page.
The way he opens it is worth reading as he wrote it. He says people may know him from a Death Angel record sleeve, from work, or from years of friendship, and then apologises for getting straight to the point, because he is already feeling very vulnerable and there is no easy way to say any of it.
The order of events is the part that does the damage. He had already lost a job he held for almost twenty years. The diagnosis came after that, and his family had to find money for cancer treatment while still paying the ordinary bills. Duodenal cancer is a malignancy of the small intestine and an aggressive one.
He is asking for help to be treated at the Immunocine Cancer Center in Mexico, which offers dendritic cell immunotherapy, a treatment built from a patient's own immune cells and tumour material. The goal on the page is 150,000 dollars, for the treatment and for his family through the months ahead.