A spiritual leader’s fall from grace

MARYLAND
Baltimore Brew

Fern Shen and Mark Reutter January 27, 2015

They are not totally silent, the people who knew Heather Cook before December 27 – the terrible day when, texting and severely intoxicated, the Episcopal bishop plowed into a bicyclist pedaling along a Baltimore bike lane and killed him.

Online and in conversations with The Brew, they wrestle with how Cook’s actions that day – in particular, fleeing from the scene of the crash – square with the warm, empathetic, down-to-earth person they knew her to be.

“She’s good people,” said Rev. John Morris, in an online forum, recalling Cook from her days as the rector in charge of a suburban parish in York, Pa.

She was funny and smart, said a woman who knew Cook during her tenure at a Bedford, N.Y., parish in the early 1990s. Looking at her arrest photo posted on the Internet, this person said she wasn’t able to reconcile that image with the Heather Cook she knew.

But these friends, colleagues and members of her family are reluctant to speak out publicly. Morris declined to respond to a reporter’s phone messages. So did a former classmate at St. Paul’s School in Baltimore County, where Cook and her five siblings went to school.

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