Jonas "Heavy" Stentäpp

Jonas Stentäpp was born on 4 November 1975 and grew up in Björbo, a village in Gagnef Municipality in Dalarna. He became known to everyone by the nickname Heavy. As a teenager he played music with friends from the area, among them Hjalmar Östman, who grew up in neighbouring Dala-Floda and would become his partner in Hjalle och Heavy.

In 1994 Stentäpp was one of the founders of the punk band Mimikry at Tjärna Ängar in Borlänge, playing drums alongside singer Hjalmar Östman. He also played in the forest metal band Dökött. Mimikry released nine studio albums, beginning with Automatiskt in 2000 and including Kryptonit (2004), Alderland (2008), Monster (2012), Grit (2018) and Splitter (2021), along with live recordings, compilations and DVDs.

National fame came through television. In autumn 1997 and spring 1998 Hjalle och Heavy took part in TV4's family programme På rymmen, in which they were chased around Sweden by a television team. Every week they wrote a song about the tracker dog on their trail, and the songs were played on the Sveriges Radio P3 request show Önska. The programme peaked at 1.7 million viewers. In 1998 the duo released three albums. På rymmen went straight to number one and stayed there for four weeks, selling about 80,000 copies; 2:a säsongen sold about 120,000 and also topped the chart; Dunder, released in November, sold about 40,000. That summer they toured the folk parks, opening at Liseberg in Gothenburg before 11,000 people, with Mimikry and Dökött as their band. Singles included Lasse Kronér and Jag ska bli prins.

In April 2001 Sofia Olsson Olsén, then managing editor of Dala-Demokraten, hired him as an entertainment reporter despite his having no journalistic experience, a gamble she later said proved entirely right. He worked for many years as a journalist at the paper and then as a television presenter within the Mittmedia and Bonnier groups. A lifelong enthusiast of folkrace, the low-cost Swedish form of rallycross, he founded the website Folkracepuls in February 2023 and served as its editor-in-chief, broadcasting races with his colleague Michael Hjelm.

Stentäpp lived in the Borlänge area with his wife and their children; friends recalled him dropping off his daughter Matilda at school in Borlänge. Former colleagues described him as warm, curious and endlessly enthusiastic, someone who made the people around him a little happier in every room he entered. Alongside music, folkrace was his great passion, and he spoke with pride about finally being able to work in the sport full time.

In June 2026 Stentäpp announced on social media that he had been diagnosed with cancer in one lung. Despite treatment his condition worsened quickly. He continued to attend races and gigs, writing that it had been tough but had also lifted his spirits, and as late as the weekend before his death he presented Folkracepuls's broadcast of the Cirkus Hjelm race in Västerås.

He died on the afternoon of Thursday 15 October 2026 at Falun Hospital (Falu lasarett), aged 50, with his closest family present. He had spent all but his final hours at home. His wife announced his death on Facebook the next day, calling him the love of her life and the most life-loving person she had ever met. Michael Hjelm, who was with him in hospital, called it the most terrible day of his life. His death was reported by SVT, Sveriges Radio, Dala-Demokraten and VLT.

For a generation of Swedish children and families, Hjalle och Heavy and their songs from På rymmen were a defining television memory of the late 1990s, and their two chart-topping albums made them one of the unlikeliest pop successes of the decade. In Dalarna he was equally remembered as Mimikry's drummer for more than 30 years, as a familiar byline at Dala-Demokraten and as the voice of folkrace through Folkracepuls, a sport to which he gave national coverage it had rarely had before.