Vernon Collins is expected to announce his retirement as Columbia County Coroner as early as Thursday.
Details of the announcement are not clear, but it comes more than a year before the end of his term.
Collins, 75, first served as deputy coroner in 1990 and succeeded former Coroner Thomas L. King Sr. when he died in 2006. Collins worked closely and learned from King as a deputy coroner for many years and received death investigation training yearly at the Georgia Public Safety Center.
A replacement for Collins will likely have to be made by Columbia County Probate Judge Alice Padgett.
The coroner and his deputy coroners are responsible for investigating the deaths of all those who die at home, in accidents, in wrecks or under questionable circumstances, in addition to those who die within 24 hours of being admitted to a hospital and all deaths of anyone age 18 and under.
In a 2016 letter in support of the coroner’s re-election, Evans resident Mack Taylor said Collins served his office with “honesty, compassion and integrity.”
“His calm, serious demeanor is precisely what we want from the person in charge of investigating deaths in our community,” Taylor wrote to the daily newspaper.
In a 2016 news article, Collins talked about how he had modernized the coroner’s office, securing laptop computers for work at scenes and creating an expanded four-page death investigation form to replace one that was handwritten on carbon paper.
He earned an electronics degree from Augusta Technical College and ended up in the trucking industry, where he became supervisor at age 21. According to the news article, a single event led him to the medical field. Collins responded to a wreck on Wheeler Road where a young boy on a bicycle had been hit and killed by a car. He rushed to help, but with no medical experience and the severity of the boy’s injuries, nothing could be done.
“The child actually died in my arms,” Collins said.
He became an emergency medical technician and ended up working for two years as a burn technician in the Doctors Hospital burn unit.
“I got a crash course in emergency medicine,” he said. “It was like do-or-die situations. I learned a lot.”
Collins was working as a recovery room technician when he met Dr. Butch Garrison and King, who then ran the county’s ambulance service from his funeral home.
In 1990, King asked Collins to become his deputy. Collins has been working in trucking and acting as coroner ever since.
Comforting the survivors is one of the most rewarding parts of the job, Collins said.
Check back here for updates on this developing story.
