MARYLAND
ABC News
BALTIMORE — Jan 9, 2015, 7:23 PM ET
By JULIET LINDERMAN Associated Press
In a spectacular fall from grace, Maryland’s second-highest ranking Episcopal leader and the first female bishop in her diocese was charged with drunken driving and manslaughter after fatally striking a cyclist in late December.
Heather Cook, 58, turned herself in Friday to authorities, according to her attorney, David Irwin.
The charges came less than a week after the national Episcopal Church announced it had opened an investigation into Cook, whose ties to the church span generations.
On Dec. 27, Cook struck and killed Tom Palermo, 41, while he was riding his bicycle. According to prosecutors, Cook left the scene for 30 minutes before returning, and registered a blood-alcohol content of .22 percent after the wreck. Palermo died of a head injury at a nearby hospital later that day.
Less than four months earlier, Cook was ordained as the diocese of Maryland’s first female bishop. She attended an Episcopal girls school and had served as a boarding school chaplain, an assistant at a parish in New York and a member of two diocesan staffs. Her father, also a priest, raised his family in the historic Old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church rectory in downtown Baltimore. According to Cook’s autobiographical statement, when Cook herself was ordained as a deacon, her father removed “the stole from around his own neck and placed it over mine.”
But Cook’s father, like her, had a history of alcohol abuse. In 1977, the Rev. Halsey Cook told the Old St. Paul’s congregation in a sermon that he was an alcoholic suffering a relapse and seeking treatment, calling alcoholism “a rampant epidemic in our society” and a “fatal disease, not only of the body but of the mind and spirit,” according to an article that year in The Baltimore Sun.
Heather Cook, too, has had repeated problems with alcohol. In 2010, Cook was charged with drunken driving on Maryland’s Eastern Shore after registering a blood alcohol content of .27 percent. Police found wine, liquor and marijuana in her car. The drug charges were dropped after Cook pleaded guilty to the drunken driving offense, and she received probation.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.