An Article About Tanya

This article pretty much sums up the Tanya I knew in college.

Clayton County Police Officer Tanya Crowder: Nov. 1973 - Nov. 2006

Police pay final respects to one of their own, celebrate life



By Daniel Silliman

He thought she couldn’t be serious about being a cop. When Tanya L. Crowder walked into the Clayton County Police Department to be interviewed by her hiring board in 2004, Acting Chief Jeff Turner was there and didn’t believe it.

Crowder, then 30, was a beautiful woman with a big smile, he said, the mother of a small son. She had every hair in place.

She didn’t look like a police officer.

“She made it clear to us that she was gong to be a police officer and she was going to be the best,” Turner said. “By the end of the meeting she had us eating out of her hand.”

Crowder, a Kansas native, joined the police force on Dec. 20, 2004. Those who worked with her remembered her smile, more than anything, and they remembered the way she never complained.

“I don’t believe I ever met anyone who nothing bothered until I met Tanya,” Turner said.

Shortly after she joined the Clayton Police, on her way to becoming a great cop, Crowder was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. She went through six cycles of chemotherapy that failed to shrink the tumor in her right leg. After the chemotherapy failed to stop the cancer, her leg was amputated.

Through all that, her co-workers said, she never complained and she returned back to work in the watch office on crutches.

“She said, ‘See, I told you I’d be back,’” said Maj. Tim Robinson. “She simply came to work and did her job.”

Seven months after the surgery, the cancer returned, this time to 32-year-old Crowder’s scalp and lungs.

Crowder’s supervisor, Sgt. S. Holmes, said Crowder never missed a day as a police officer if she didn’t have to.

“I can always remember her smiling. Even though she was in pain she would always show up for work,” Holmes said. “She was a trooper. She was a fighter.”

Crowder died Thursday night.

Friends, family and co-workers gathered at Divine Faith Ministries International Friday to pay their last respects, to remember her smile, to celebrate her life and to say a prayer before sending Crowder’s body to its final resting place in Kansas.

“She was certainly loved by her police department family,” said Robinson. “I had the pleasure of being greeted by her beautiful beaming smile every morning.”

The gathered friends and co-workers who spoke at the funeral Friday returned again and again to Crowder’s smile.

“Here truly lies a child of God,” Turner said.