In Memory OfDetective Kristen N. Hearne

She was born in Rome, Georgia on November 15, 1987, and she grew up just across the county line in Rockmart — a small town in the rolling foothills of northwest Georgia, the kind of place where the church parking lot and the high school football field are the two compass points everybody knows by heart. She graduated from Rockmart High School. Somewhere along the way she met a man named Matt who would put on a uniform of his own, and the two of them settled in Cedartown a short drive down the road and made a life there. They had a son named Isaac.

The first thing she wanted to do was be a nurse.

She took a job in the oncology wing at Floyd Medical Center. She got involved in her patients’ lives. She formed bonds she didn’t know how to let go of. Her mother saw what was happening to her — saw a young woman who couldn’t keep the distance the work required — and she tried to tell her, more than once. “I kept telling her,” her mother would later remember, “baby girl, these people are going to die. They’re sick.” But Kristen didn’t have an answer for that. She only had this one. “Mama, I can’t help it. I want to save them.”

It became overwhelming to her, in the end. The losses kept coming, and Kristen Hearne didn’t know how to put less than her whole heart into anything.
So she tried a different way.

Her law enforcement career began in the Floyd County Sheriff’s Office, where she worked first as a jailer and then, in 2008, was sworn in as a deputy. She found her niche. In July of 2012 she came home, transferring to the Polk County Police Department as a Patrol Officer in the county that had raised her, and a year later she was promoted to Detective and assigned to Criminal Investigations. By the time she died she had been a police officer for ten years. She was only twenty-nine.

The chief who had watched her work for five of those years — Polk County Police Chief Kenny Dodd — would later say it the simplest way anybody said it. “She really made an impact on every one of our lives.” He also said, openly and without much in the way of professional remove, that he had thought of her more like a daughter than an officer.

Then came the day that changed the world around Kristen — and around all who had ever felt her joy. It would begin like every other call.

A rookie officer needed help.

It was a Friday morning in late September, on a country road in the northwest corner of Polk County. He had a call about an abandoned vehicle, and he called for backup. The detective who had a reputation for showing up showed up.
She didn’t have to.

She was in plain clothes. She wasn’t on patrol. She wasn’t wearing a vest, because she was responding as backup on what was supposed to be a routine matter, unaware of any danger waiting in the woods beyond the road. She could have handled it from her desk. She could have walked him through it over the radio. She could have stayed where she was and stayed safe.

Kristen Hearne didn’t know how to stay where she was when somebody needed her.
She went.

Her chief would later describe what happened in the kind of plain language a man uses when there’s nothing else to say. “It was more or less an ambush.” The rookie officer she had come to help was wearing a vest, and the rounds that hit him stopped at the plate, and he survived. Kristen wasn’t, and she didn’t.

She was pronounced dead at Polk Medical Center at 11:49 that morning.
She was twenty-nine years old.

The community of Polk County did what communities do when they lose someone genuinely irreplaceable. They showed up. And they kept showing up.

The night she was killed, law enforcement officers from across the county formed a procession and brought her home. The Monday after, her family received friends at Victory Baptist Church in Rockmart, the town where she’d gone to school — six hours of visitation, three until nine, the people of Polk County coming through the doors to stand beside her family for as long as it took. On Tuesday afternoon, the same church held her funeral. Roughly a thousand people came: family, neighbors, schoolmates, officers in dress uniform who had driven in from across Georgia and beyond, because that is what you do when one of the lights goes out. The Floyd County Law Enforcement Honor Guard carried her casket. The procession to Oak Grove Cemetery in Cedartown moved down the highway in a slow river of blue light.

At the front of the church that Tuesday, her mother Trish Brewer stood holding three-year-old Isaac. She faced the room. And she gave the people who loved her daughter the line her family has carried since.

“We’ll never say goodbye. It’s never goodbye. It’s until we meet again. Her watch ended that day. But now she’s watching over us.”

Her husband Matt — a lieutenant with the Aragon Police Department, the man Kristen had married, the father of her son — spoke to reporters in the days that followed, and said what husbands try to say when no words are big enough.

“She was the most amazing, beautiful person I’ve ever known. She died doing what she loved to do. She was trying to make the world a better place for our son.”

The memorials came. They were earned.

The Floyd County Sheriff’s Office dedicated the training center on its jail grounds in her name. It is a building full of new officers, year after year, learning how to do this job — every one of them walking past a sign with her name on it, most of them too young to remember the day she died. Members of the Polk County Police Department traveled to Washington, D.C., to add her name to the National Peace Officers Memorial, and her chief was among those who stood at the wall and laid a remembrance there. A sketch-artist portrait of her, donated to the county, hangs as a permanent memorial in Polk County Courthouse No. 1.

She is the first officer killed in the sixty-year history of the Polk County Police Department.
There is one more thing.

The rookie officer she went to help that morning — the man whose vest stopped the rounds that should have killed him too — is the man who submitted her name for this plaque. He has carried what happened on that country road for the rest of his life, and one of the things he chose to do with what he carries was this:
Make sure she is not forgotten.
She won’t be.

Rest easy, Detective. We have the watch.

Til Valhalla.