WARM SPRINGS, Ga. — In a broiling late morning sun, Vicki Lynn Haywood stood at the growing memorial outside the Warm Springs Police Department. She stood teary-eyed with family and friends and prayed.
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“I just wanted to see where he worked, and it was such a big part of his life,” she told Channel 2’s Bryan Mims. “I wanted to see where he was when Jesus took him. I just felt very drawn to come here.”
It was her first visit to the small department.
Her only child, 36-year-old Chris Fisher – who she’s always called by his middle name, Durran – had joined the Warm Springs Police Department in May, one of only six officers, after years of working as a sheriff’s deputy.
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Late Tuesday night, he was gunned down in the parking lot of the Meriwether Country Inn and died on the scene.
The suspect, 23-year-old Jimmie Lee Steverson, had been arrested by Fisher days earlier on marijuana and firearms charges and released bond. Authorities tracked him down in Anderson County, South Carolina, where he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“Since he was a little boy, he wanted to serve,” Haywood said of her son.
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Fisher served five years driving trucks and tanks in the Army and worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Fayette, Meriwether and Heard counties. He also spent time as a SWAT team officer.
“He just loved his job. He just loved everything about it. Everything he did was an adventure to him,” she said.
But his real badge of honor was being a husband and dad: He had a 12-year-old daughter and a son almost 2. Haywood said the last time she saw her son was Saturday at his daughter’s soccer game.
“That was my last hug, my last ‘I love you,’” he said.
As a fervently praying woman, she said she prayed nightly for her son who answered such a dangerous calling.
“Not a night that I laid my head on my pillow without saying a prayer for his safety and for God to protect him and take care of him,” she said.
In the wee hours Wednesday, Haywood herself got the worst call of her life. It was from her son’s wife.
“And she just put it out there, she said Durran got shot and he’s dead,” Haywood told Channel 2’s Bryan Mims. “I just remember just screaming and falling to the floor in just disbelief.”
She not only wanted to visit the memorial outside the police department, she wanted to stand in the parking lot of the hotel where her son was killed. The tears, hugs and prayers came again as a mockingbird sang from a nearby weathervane.
“As a believer in Jesus, honestly, it was to see where he went to meet him,” she said. “You just feel a sense of wanting to be near where they were in those last moments and now to see where he met Jesus.”
A childhood friend of Fisher’s, Kayla Ross, arrived at the hotel with pieces of woodwork she crafted herself: one bearing Sgt. Fisher’s name, the other a cross of blue and black and stars. She said when she was five or six years old, Fisher – no more than 10 – asked her if she knew the Lord and was saved. The two children prayed together.
Haywood also had a private moment with a hotel employee who witnessed the shooting. She wanted to meet the fallen officer’s mother. The two women, teary-eyed, hugged for more than a minute in the parking lot.
“He would just want the world to know how much he loved his family, loved his country, loved his city,” his mother said. “He was a proud officer, a proud father, a proud son and he loved the Lord with all of his heart.”
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