Heaviness settles across community

From the April 9, 2026 newspaper

There are places that sit just a little off the map, not because they are forgotten, but because they have never asked to be found. Here in our small village, what folks might call the backside of nowhere, we live without many of the things the larger world seems to require. We don’t have an interstate skirting the edge of town, a Walmart shopping center, a walk-in picture show, or traffic that hums like a restless, menacing bee. And for the most part, we have lived without something else, too, violent crime.

That absence, we have long believed, is part of the bargain, part of the deal.

There is a quiet peace to places like ours when you strip away the noise, the clutter and the constant motion that pulls the world elsewhere. What remains is a fragile kind of tranquility. And when that peace is broken, it does not scatter, it settles into the pit of our stomachs. It lingers. It hangs low over everything like a dark fog.

What happened here a couple of weeks ago has settled that way.

There are events that pass through a community like a brief storm, loud and sharp and then gone. And then there is pain that seeps into the very fabric of a place, into its schools and onto its porches, into conversations, into families, into the spirit and soul.

This one has done just that.

For the children in our schools, Deputy Rick Coyle was never just a badge or a uniform. He was presence. He was steadiness. A man who could stand in a hallway and make it feel anchored and safe. Students knew him in the easy way children know who can be trusted. It was something rare, security that didn’t have to announce itself. It was simply there... quiet, stoic and certain.

Teachers felt it, too. In rooms where the demands are constant and the certainties are few, his presence was a kind of blessed assurance. He watched without intruding. He understood without needing explanation. In him, they found not only protection, but partnership.

And beyond those walls, the wider community came to know the same man. He chose this place for his own.

After years spent in Chicago, in the hard edges and harder lessons of a city that asks much of those who serve it, after decades that included time on a SWAT team and more than 2,000 missions, he came here, not to disappear, but to give again. He taught. He mentored. He shaped younger officers across Marion and throughout this region, passing along knowledge that cannot be found in manuals or classrooms, only in lived experience. Those who serve beside him say he may well be the most experienced, most thoroughly trained deputy this county has ever known.

And so the question lingers, heavy and unresolved. How does something like this find its way here? To a place that has long stood apart from such things. To a man who had already walked through the worst the world could offer and still chose to invest himself in something smaller, quieter and, we believed, safer.

This is not simply an incident to be recorded and filed away. It is the first time in modern memory that an officer here has been shot. It is a wound layered and deep, felt by children who this week notice the absence in their hallways, by teachers who feel the difference in the air, by fellow officers who stood alongside him, and by neighbors and townspeople who are shocked and grieving.

Sheriff Evan Head and Deputy James Duncan, who stood with him on that call between Mattoon and Sturgis, now carry their own burden from that day. And so, too, does the Phillips family, who, in their own way, are left to bear the weight of a horrific act and a single, irreversible decision.

It is a burden that will not easily be set down. They all will need the steady hand of a community that understands how to stand together when there is little else to be done.

And in the stillness that has followed, in the long pause that comes after something we never expected to face, one truth remains.

Choices are forever. Whether we choose rightly or wrongly, there are consequences that do not fade.

Deputy Coyle chose to be a lawman because it is what he was called to do. Policing and his life are bound together.

And those choices, bold in one life, misjudged in another, are now something this community will carry for a long time. Something owed. Something remembered. Something that, in its weight, reminds us just how dangerous, and just how fragile, even the safest places can be.

Chris Evans, a newspaperman since 1979, has been editor of The Press for more than 30 years and is the author of South of the Mouth of Sandy, a true story about crime along the Tennessee River. You can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold.