When Faulkner County Coroner Pat Moore arrived to pronounce the death of a loved one, he always helped comfort the mourners and helped them feel like everything was going to be OK, Moore's colleagues recalled Tuesday.
Moore died Monday of cardiac arrest. He was 68.
Faulkner County Judge Jim Baker will appoint an interim coroner, but he said he'll have a hard time finding just one person who can fill Moore's shoes.
"If there was ever a man who had a calling, he had a calling to be our coroner," Baker said.
Moore spent 28 years with the Faulkner County coroner's office.
He was president of the Arkansas Coroner's Association from 2012-2016 and had been president before that of the Arkansas Emergency Medical Technicians Association and the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, according to Kevin Cleghorn, the Saline County coroner and current president of the Arkansas Coroner's Association.
People close to Moore were better for having known him, Baker said.
"I don't know anybody who ever spoke a bad word about Pat Moore," he said.
Moore was dedicated to his job and approached it with compassion, colleagues said. He responded to as many calls as possible, Baker said, and if he received two calls at the same time he'd still go to both scenes.
Moore did everything he could to make families feel better when a loved one died, Cleghorn and Faulkner County sheriff's office Chief Deputy Matt Rice said.
Cleghorn recalled a story a colleague had told him of a time when Moore went to the scene of an infant's death. Moore knelt before the child's mother, grabbed her hand, put his arm around her shoulder and comforted her, Cleghorn said.
"He was concerned for that family and he wanted to make a very, very bad situation as easy as possible on them," Rice said.
Rice worked directly with Moore for seven years when Rice was an investigator for the sheriff's office.
"In truth, there is very little that we can do for the deceased on any given call," Cleghorn said. "What we do and what Patrick did was for the family that remained."
State Desk on 09/06/2017