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Hundreds of people attended Mark Tucker’s funeral in the winter of 2004 to pay their respects to the good-natured Wake County sheriff’s deputy who loved motorcycles and cigars and, according to former Sheriff Donnie Harrison, looked more than a bit like Boss Hogg, the burly character in the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
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Tucker was 49 and had worked for the Wake County Sheriff’s Office for 24 years, plus four as a U.S. marshal, when he was shot and killed by a young man on probation with a shotgun he shouldn’t have had.
Now Tucker’s dedication and sacrifice will be remembered with the naming of the bridge that carries Holly Springs Road over N.C. 540, not far from where he died. The state Board of Transportation approved the designation Thursday at the request of Wake County commissioners.
Harrison, who was in the first of four terms as Wake sheriff when Tucker was killed, thanked the transportation board for honoring a “good man.”
“He was somebody who would do anything to help people,” Harrison said.
Tucker grew up in Cary and, according to his family, decided to go into law enforcement as a teenager after riding on patrol with his older brother Buddy, the part-time police chief in Morrisville. He joined the Wake County sheriff’s department in 1976.
President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. Marshal for Eastern North Carolina in the fall of 1999, a job he kept until March 2002 when President George W. Bush replaced him. Tucker was welcomed back to the Wake County Sheriff’s Office and didn’t consider it a step backward, said Kris Bailey, a former district court judge and a friend.
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“He went [to the department] with the same grace, dignity and humility he had when he became U.S. marshal,” Bailey said after Tucker’s death in 2004.
In an essay in The Cary News that year, Bailey described Tucker as a “big-hearted, broad-shouldered teddy bear,” a notion echoed at the time by longtime Raleigh criminal defense attorney Rick Gammon.
“You know how somebody wears their badge and their badge gets to you before they do? He wasn’t like that,” Gammon said. “He was one of those police officers who had a job to do, but he was polite and courteous.”
Matthew Charles Grant admitted to shooting Tucker in an undeveloped cul-de-sac off Holly Springs Road in February 2004. Tucker had pulled his unmarked Ford Crown Victoria behind Grant’s car just as the 18-year-old was taking a 12-guage shotgun out for target practice. He told investigators that he recognized Tucker as a law enforcement officer and panicked because he was on probation and shouldn’t have had the gun.
Grant was convicted of first-degree murder later that year and sentenced to life in prison.
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