When the job hits home: Coweta Coroner Richard Hawk

Written and Photographed by JACKIE KENNEDY

He’s a big man. Broad-shouldered. Solid. You might call him burly – until you look in his face. That’s when you see Santa Claus.

It’s not that he grew his beard out to intentionally favor the jolly old elf, but that’s what happened. Look close, and you might see his eyes twinkle. Lean in and listen to his soft, calming voice, and you’re compelled to read him your Christmas wish list.

It’s not a bad combination for a coroner: solid as a rock and tough as nails, but warm and approachable, too.

That’s Coweta Coroner Richard Hawk.

The coroner’s job

The job of a county coroner is to determine the cause and manner of death. An elected official, he joins local – and sometimes state or federal – investigators to assess death scenes, especially where crimes are believed to have occurred, in order to determine how a person died. All have input, but the coroner has the final word.

Richard never intended to become coroner. For 30 years, he worked as a paramedic, part of that time in Coweta County, five years with Grady Memorial in Atlanta, 13 years with the air medical industry as a paramedic onboard a helicopter. He was working with a helicopter service when then-coroner Ray Yeager called him some 15 years ago with a job offer.

 “He said he needed a deputy coroner, said pray about it and call me back,” says Richard. “I said: ‘I deal with living people. I don’t work with dead people.’ I didn’t want to do it.”

But about that time, the service he’d worked with was bought out and the new company dropped employee insurance. Richard did what Yeager had asked: He prayed about it, then called him back and took the job. Two years later, when Yeager chose to step down, Richard ran for the office of coroner and was elected in 2012.

The coroner’s phone “rings off the hook,” according to Richard, who applauds the county’s four deputy coroners who make the job manageable. Calls come in not only from first responders but from family members checking on the status of their loved one’s case.

Former Coweta County Sheriff Mike Yeager met Richard when he was deputy coroner.

“From then until now, he has served the citizens of Coweta with dedication, compassion and professionalism,” says Mike Yeager. “Due to its
nature, the job has got to be tough, but Richard has
a true servant’s heart and a strong commitment to
assist families.”

What leads the coroner to respond to scenes that would repel most? What changed his initial reluctance to “work with dead people”?

“I realized people need hope. That’s what really drives me: People need hope in this dire situation,” says Richard. “To help families know somebody cares, that’s what it’s about. It’s hard times for people. It’s not just a death; grief is involved and emotions are involved.”

He speaks from experience.

April 8, 2022

It was spring break 2022 in Coweta County.
Richard’s 17-year-old son Luke, then a senior at East Coweta High School, had opted to skip the beach and stay home to help his grandparents, Tommy and
Evelyn Hawk, at the family business, Lock, Stock & Barrel Shooting Range in Grantville. On the evening of April 8, when Luke didn’t show up for supper, his dad went looking for him at the shooting range. There, he discovered his son and both parents dead from multiple gunshots.

Fast-forward to December 2024: The killer was tried in Newnan, found guilty on three counts of malice murder, and sentenced to three life sentences without possibility of parole.

Rewind back to April 2022: In shock, Richard dialed 911. As help arrived, the man charged with determining cause and manner in such situations stepped aside, handing over investigative work to his deputies and other agencies.

That day, the coroner was a bereaved family member.

Coweta County Sheriff Lenn Wood was one of the first at the scene. He says he’ll never forget, or fail to appreciate, what Richard did that evening.

“He was telling me what was going on and I embraced him,” says Wood. “He hugged me, and I started crying. And then he starts comforting me. That’s stuck with me.”

Wood doesn’t remember the words his elected peer said. It’s the actions he recalls.

“He was more concerned about other people than himself,” the sheriff says. “I couldn’t imagine.”

Richard, his wife Donna and their daughter Audrey were shaken to the core. They turned where they always do in times of trouble: to God.

“If I didn’t know for a fact that my mom, my dad and my son were saved by grace through faith and that they’re in heaven, I’d be curled up in a corner sucking my thumb,” says Richard. “I don’t have to be that way, though, because God’s grace is sufficient, and I know where they are and that I’ll see them again.”

The coroner says he’s gained hope and peace from being able to use his story to better assist others.

“It made me realize a couple of things: Life on
earth is short,” he says. “As Christians, we’re
here to work for Christ and tell others about him.
This made me realize I’m not doing that enough.
And, it’s given me a deeper emotional connection with families: I understand what they’re going through. I know the hurt.”

Richard credits God with making a way for him to handle the unimaginable.

“God had prepared me with my work as a paramedic and dealing with death as a coroner,” he says. “And about 13 months before it happened, I’d started teaching a class on the death investigation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and how he was crucified. I think that’s what prepared me more than anything – seeing what God did with his own son, the things our Lord went through to take our sins on himself. That’s powerful.”

After his family’s tragedy, Richard says he felt more committed than ever “to give people the hope I have in John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall have everlasting life.’ That is hope.”

That hope and grace have sustained his family, according to the coroner.

“There are a lot of hard days,” he says. “You don’t realize how quickly emotions wear you out. We can be cleaning the house and find something of Luke’s and that pretty much destroys our cleaning mood. We wind up sitting down, spent emotionally, and can’t do anything else. At least that’s the way it feels. But God’s grace is abundant.”

Life after loss

Born and raised in Sharpsburg, Richard, 55, has lived in Coweta all his life. He graduated from East Coweta High School in 1988, in the last graduating class at the old school building on Highway 16. He went to Columbus College and worked at Newnan Hospital as a respiratory therapist where he developed a love for emergency room work. He became an emergency medical technician, then a paramedic, and worked for both Coweta EMS and Troup County EMS.

All these years, his work has focused on serving others.

At the coroner’s office, the workload has more than doubled since he took office 13 years ago, when the office received 180-200 death calls per year. Today, it’s between 450 and 500. Most of what his office responds to are deaths with natural causes. But the increase?

“There’s no rhyme or reason,” says Richard. “You can’t track death. I’ve tried.”

At the county morgue inside the coroner’s office, 14 bodies await their final disposition. They remain there for various reasons, from family disputes to abandonment. Richard hopes to have each of these cases settled, and the bodies properly committed, by this time next year.

“The job demands and record keeping have increased,” says the coroner, noting that he or his deputies may be called into court on criminal cases, but it doesn’t happen often. “In homicides, the forensic pathologist is usually the one who testifies.”

Richard himself teaches a forensic class at a local high school. His desk is piled high with books on anatomy, ancient funeralizing methods and theology. Among a dozen thick hardbacks is a tiny paperback that’s meant the world to him. It’s titled “How to Get Through What You’ll Never Get Over.”

“It’s helped a lot, so much that we bought a case of them, and I give them to any family whose death I work,” says Richard.

Arriving at death scenes sometimes feels supercharged now, according to the coroner: “It wasn’t always this bad, but now for me the worst part of a call sometimes is when you see the family feeling the emotions. Ever since April 8, 2022, I feel the emotions with them.”

A few times, he’s had to step away.

“I may be crying, and they don’t need to see that because it’s not about me and my emotions but about them and what they’re feeling,” he says.

Always, he asks the family if he can pray with them before he leaves, says Richard, “because I know prayer helps.”

The most gratifying part of his job, he says, is being there for people: “It’s knowing you can care for people and love them and show them there is still love in this world. We had a saying in EMS and flying: ‘If you treat every patient the way you treat the person you love the most, you’ll never do harm.’ If I treat every decedent as if they’re my loved one and my family member, I will always treat their family right.”

The coroner offers practical advice regarding funerals: “Make prearrangements. At least have a funeral home in mind. We see people who have never thought about death, and it catches them off guard. Do some homework and make some prearrangments.”

Grief and compassion

Richard Hawk has seen a lot and heard it all, both as a coroner working with grieving families – and as a father and son who grieves.

“People say you’ll get closure, that everything gets better with time: Those are some of the biggest lies the devil tells,” he says. “It gets different with time, but there will always be some form of grief.”

A deacon at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Newnan, he sometimes fills in to preach when the pastor’s out. There, and in his coroner job, says Richard, he works for Christ.

“God put me in this position,” he says. “When you’re working for the Lord, it’s easy to do your job. If you’re walking in fellowship with him, he carries you through. At the minimum, he’s holding your hand and walking beside you, but I know a lot of times he’s toted me through things.”

Richard thinks about the young man who killed his family members. By law, he’s not able to contact him and wonders if the inmate will ever reach out.

“I’d love to be able to tell him about the Lord,”
says Richard. “I pray about it. If the Lord wants me to talk to him, he’ll open that door.”

In the meantime, he keeps doing his job in the manner that Sheriff Wood calls “amazing.”

“It’s the way he carries himself, the way he cares and shows he cares,” says the sheriff. “His job is not just to pronounce someone deceased; his job is to be the advocate for the family, and Richard really does that well. He’s been through it himself, so he can empathize. It’s amazing to see how he handles not only the death part, but the people, the families and everyone involved, even us. I respect that his faith is out front and he’s not afraid to share it with anybody. He doesn’t force it on them. He just shows compassion for each and every person.”

It’s the kind of compelling compassion that makes you want to read him your Christmas wish list.

And that’s what kids have been doing each December since his son and parents died. That’s when Richard and Donna Hawk started dressing as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus to the delight of youngsters and their parents.

“Will I ever stop grieving? No, I’ll probably grieve for the rest of my life,” says Coweta’s coroner. “Do I have PTSD? Yes, I probably have PTSD. But God has me. So, I will love God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength.” NCM