Memory of Ronnie Cheek’s kindness is vivid, 30 years after deputy was killed in line of duty
Tim Cheek still recalls with great clarity the afternoon that he lost his father. His family had a less-than-pleasant lunch in their Crawford home that August day in 1995.
“We were all a little testy because we were supposed to be on vacation,” said Tim, who was home on summer break from Toccoa Falls College. “There was another deputy who had needed time off, so he ended up being the one that was off instead of dad. So instead of being in the mountains camping, we were all hectically trying to have lunch together.”
His mother, Faye, headed back to her job at Bell’s Food Store and his father, Ronnie, went on duty for the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Office. Tim had planned to go riding with his father, but was tired after they had spent a good portion of the prior evening together watching ”M*A*S*H,” “Cops” and “Real Stories of Highway Patrol.”
Tim took a nap after lunch but was woken up by a frantic phone call from his sister, Lisa.
“My sister called the house and said, ‘Get up. Something’s wrong with Daddy, I’m listening to it on the scanner,’” he said.
Tim tried to calm his sister and dissuade her from showing up at the location she heard, remembering how their father never wanted them to listen to it while he was on duty.
“I said, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t embarrass him. Don’t show up at the call,’” he said. “And while I was talking to her, our pastor pulled up in the front yard.”
Tim, Lisa and their pastor, the Rev. B.G. Williams, were waiting in the kitchen when Faye arrived. The tension from their lunch was soon forgotten even before Williams could tell them the devastating news.
“(Mom) got to the house quickly, and when she walked in, I remember her saying, ‘Oh my God, it’s Ronnie.’ And she fell to her knees on the floor and started just bawling.”
On Aug. 5, 1995 — nearly 30 years ago — Sergeant Ronnie Cheek was killed in the line of duty while responding to a domestic call that turned into a shootout, leaving him and one other man dead.
The memory of Ronnie as a husband, father and friend is carried on by his family, and his law enforcement legacy continues through efforts of the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors, or C.O.P.S.
Chaos in tragedy
Ronald Charles Cheek, 54, was shot in the chest and killed in the front yard as he arrived at the scene. The call was made from a family the Cheeks knew from church and Tim remembers sitting behind them during services and being babysat by the daughters.
When Ronnie arrived at the house in Winterville, it was not the same friend, husband and father they had sat across the aisle from, but a familiar face carrying out actions influenced by drugs and alcohol, according to published reports.
Backup officers arrived shortly after Ronnie was shot and fired warning shots before shooting and killing the other man.
In the moments after learning about his father’s death, Tim said he was walking around in a daze when Miller, who was the pastor at Crawford Pentecostal Church, said he was going to check on the family of the man who killed his father.
Tim asked if he could ride with him. In the chaos of the moment, no one knew better than to stop Tim from seeing the crime scene.
“I could go back to the yard, I could tell you exactly where everybody was standing and where everybody was,” he said. “If there was one thing that I could do differently that day, I wouldn’t have done that.”
Although Tim remembers most of that afternoon as if it happened yesterday, one detail gives him pause: his age at the time of his father’s death.
“This is the hard part when I always have to do the math, because it feels like I was 8 years old when he was killed,” he said. “I felt that helpless and that lost. I tell people I was young when this happened. I was 21. I did the math and I was an adult, and it did not feel like it.”
Picking up the pieces
Tim stayed with his mother and sister in Crawford after his father died as they “took one step in front of the other.”
In May of 1996, the Cheek family went to Washington, D.C., for Police Week, where he remembers President Bill Clinton reading Ronnie’s name, seeing Mariah Carey sing “Hero” and taking countless etchings of “Ronald Charles Cheek” from the wall of names of fallen officers at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
After being survivors for a year, Tim and his mother founded the Georgia chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors, or C.O.P.S., with fellow survivor Eleanor Howard of Rome, Georgia.
Tim said his mission to work with other survivors arose from his concern that they would make impulsive decisions like he did in the chaos of the moment.
Each chapter of the organization acts as “boots on the ground” and makes sure that volunteers from local chapters are with the families of fallen officers and their agencies, said Sara Sloane, the national outreach director for C.O.P.S.
“Our chapters are all run by survivors themselves, and the benefit to that is that they’ve all been through it, so they know what to say and they know what not to say,” Sloane said.
Volunteers with COPS, a Missouri-based non-profit, support survivors by helping with funeral planning, setting up trusts, making sure families are alerted before news outlets, and acting as intermediaries between families and law enforcement agencies.
“It’s making sure that they take care of the stuff that the family shouldn’t be thinking about,” Sloane said. “The family should be processing their grief and doing what we all go through when we lose somebody close to us and they shouldn’t be worrying about all the other stuff. That’s what our chapters help with because they’ve been through it and they know.”
Faye served as vice president of the Georgia chapter of C.O.P.S. from 1996-97 and as chapter president from 1997-98.
Tim served on the chapter board with Faye as treasurer in 1996 and later followed in his mother’s footsteps by serving as vice president from 2012-13, and as chapter president from 2013-14.
Tim stood by other survivors in their grief and learned that even though he understood the shock of losing a loved one in the line of duty, not everyone handles loss in the same way and it can bring up complicated emotions.
“I’ve had to look at them and say, ‘I don’t get it. I don’t know what you’re going through, but I am going to get through it with you and there’s nothing that you can say that’s going to make me walk away,” he said. “Be mad, be angry. Cuss, swear, cry, laugh — whatever you need to do.”
Tim organized and C.O.P.S. hosted a memorial for his dad in 2013 at Crawford Pentecostal Church. He asked community members and law enforcement to not forget his father on the 18th anniversary of his death.
Tim is glad he held the memorial, but thinking about how Ronnie would have liked to be remembered, he said his father “would not have liked that at all.”
Tim decided to step away from his leadership positions at C.O.P.S in 2015 to turn his focus to his family. He said he doesn’t regret his time with C.O.P.S. and is still involved in the chapter, but a life revolving around death is not how he wanted his father to be remembered.
Tim now lives in Newnan with his wife, Angela, and his son David Charles, 9. Faye Cheek died in 2023 at the age of 76.
“The organization is strong,” Tim said. “The Cheeks left a good legacy. Dad didn’t need that legacy, but because of Dad, that legacy is left.”
Remembering Cheek
Many of Ronnie’s colleagues have retired in the 30 years since his death.
A memorial in the lobby of the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Office remembers Ronnie as an officer whose commitment to his job cost him his life, but to those that knew him he was “humble,” “dependable” and “funny.”
“Good, quiet, Christian type fella,” is how Ray Sanders remembers him. “Real easy. He was a good man.”
Sanders, who was Sheriff at the time of Ronnie’s death, said he had only three or four men working for him at a time, and hearing that one of his officers had been killed, “I had never been more shocked in my life.”
Sheriff David Gabriel was a reserve deputy when he met Ronnie and remembers that he was “ahead of his time on officer safety.” Gabriel said most of his officers are in their 20s, but there are still those who work in law enforcement that remember Ronnie and the day he died.
No Oglethorpe County officer has been killed in the line of duty since Ronnie’s death.
Tim still feels the absence of his father, particularly during moments he shares with his son.
“Charles is my dad’s name, and he carries that name, and carries it well,” Tim said.
He wishes his father could have taught his son skills in the outdoors, for example.
“When me and my son go camping, (Dad’s) not there to show him how to put a tent together,” Tim said. “And every time we put that tent together, it’s obvious that he’s not there.”
Tim remembers his father as someone he could talk with for hours and who “would spread dad jokes before they were a trend.” He remembers nights where Ronnie would invite unlikely guests to spend the night in their home.
“There were so many times we had prisoners on our couch because they’d get out of jail and have nowhere to go,” Tim said. “He’d bring them home because he believed in people. He believed in the power of God’s word and he would give them Bible studies. He would talk to them and he was full of hope.”