Corporal Keith Heacook, a 22-year veteran with the Delmar Police Department in Delaware, has been declared clinically dead after he was brutally beaten while responding to a 911 call, according to authorities.
Delmar Police Chief Ivan Barkley announced the tragic news during a press conference on Wednesday, three days after Heacook was hospitalized for severe head injuries sustained in the line of duty, local news outlet WMDT reported.
“Our community, my department, his family — we all mourn,” Barkley said.
Heacock was injured early Sunday morning while responding to a call about a fight in progress at one of the homes located in the Yorkshire Estates Community, according to a media release from the Delaware State Police.
A 911 caller had reported that a man, identified by authorities as 30-year-old Randon Wilkerson, was “being disorderly” and “destroying items inside the residence,” police said.
A separate 911 call came in moments later from a neighbor of the initial caller, reporting that he and his wife had been attacked and their assailant was no longer in their home, according to authorities.
Heacock was dispatched to the scene around 5:12 a.m. local time, police said, and was allegedly “met with physical confrontation with Wilkerson” while responding to the house of the first 911 call.
Officials said Heacock was found unconscious inside the home by additional officers responding to the call.
Heacock was then rushed to TidalHealth in Salisbury, before being transferred to R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore with “significant head injuries,” according to state police.
Upon further investigation, authorities found that an elderly couple — a 73-year-old man and a 76-year-old woman — had been attacked inside the house across the street from the home where the initial 911 call came from.
Police said the incidents were related, alleging that Wilkerson struck the man and woman with a glass object several times before fleeing their home.
The couple sustained significant injuries in the attack and were transported to a local hospital, police said. The woman was later transferred to Shock Trauma in Baltimore as well.
Wilkerson was arrested following the alleged attacks and charged with first-degree attempted murder, first-degree burglary, third-degree assault, terroristic threatening, and two counts each of first-degree assault and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony.
His attempted murder charge was upgraded on Wednesday, according to a statement from Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings.
“These are the worst moments any of us can imagine: mourning the loss of a member of our law enforcement family. Cpl. Keith Heacook served his Department and his community honorably and faithfully for more than two decades — a family man, a public servant, and a protector of his community until his final days,” Jennings said.
“The man who stole him from his family and from his community has been arrested, and mark my words: he will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Jennings continued. “He will be held accountable for his heinous crimes against Cpl. Heacook, against the elderly couple he viciously assaulted, and against Delmar and our state.”
Wilkerson currently held at Sussex Correctional Institution on $451,000 bond. An attorney for Wilkerson could not be immediately identified by PEOPLE.
Though he’s been declared clinically dead, Heacock will remain on life support until his organs can be donated on Friday, according WMDT.
A GoFundMe campaign has been set up in Heacock’s honor to support his family. As of Wednesday, it has raised over $18,000 out of its $40,000 goal.
*story by People
