BALTIMORE — In a spectacular fall from grace, Maryland’s second-highest ranking Episcopal leader and the first female bishop in her diocese was charged with drunken driving and manslaughter after fatally striking a cyclist in December.
Heather Cook, 58, turned herself in to authorities Friday, said her attorney, David Irwin. Online court records show Cook’s bail was set at $2.5 million. It was unclear late Friday whether she had posted bail. A trial is scheduled for Feb. 6.
The charges came less than a week after the national Episcopal Church opened an investigation into Cook, whose ties to the church span generations.
Cook is accused of striking Tom Palermo, 41, on Dec. 27 while he was riding his bicycle. According to prosecutors, Cook left the scene for 30 minutes before returning, and registered a blood-alcohol content of 0.22 percent after the wreck. Palermo died of a head injury later that day.
Less than four months earlier, Cook was ordained as the diocese of Maryland’s first female bishop. She attended an Episcopal girls school and had served as a boarding school chaplain, an assistant at a parish in New York and a member of two diocesan staffs.
Her father, also a priest, raised his family in the historic Old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church rectory in downtown Baltimore.
Cook’s father, like her, had a history of alcohol abuse. In 1977, the Rev. Halsey Cook told the Old St. Paul’s congregation in a sermon that he was an alcoholic suffering a relapse and seeking treatment, calling alcoholism “a rampant epidemic in our society” and a “fatal disease, not only of the body but of the mind and spirit,” according to an article that year in The Baltimore Sun.
Heather Cook, too, has had problems with alcohol. In 2010, she was charged with drunken driving on Maryland’s Eastern Shore after registering a blood alcohol content of 0.27 percent. Police found wine, liquor and marijuana in her car. The drug charges were dropped after Cook pleaded guilty to the drunken driving offense, and she received probation.
Diocese of Maryland spokeswoman Sharon Tillman said those charges were disclosed to search committee members during a vetting process as the diocese searched for a new bishop. However, the information was not shared with those people — clergy and lay church members — who voted among four finalists.
The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, bishop of the diocese, said in a statement Friday that the community is “heartbroken.”
