Time and time again we hear of state employees and SEANC members who go above and beyond the call of duty and each time we are proud to thank them and help share their stories.

This time we are recognizing six SEANC members whose actions and achievements were honored by the state Department of Public Safety at the first annual Badge of Excellence Awards ceremony in January.

Shekarra Crutchfield – District 27
Shekarra Crutchfield, a probation/parole officer II in Durham County, was one of those honored.

Crutchfield, who has worked for the state for five years, was honored not only for her official work, but also for her efforts to, according to a news release, “visibly show the community that the probation officers of Durham care and want to give back to their community.”

Among the projects initiated by Crutchfield were a food drive and an effort to provide clothes and other supplies for victims of domestic violence, as well as other efforts to reach out to her community and to promote health awareness among her co-workers

She said becoming a probation and parole officer was a dream ever since she sat in on her mother’s college criminal justices classes.

“It’s interesting and exciting. Every day is a different day. There are always stories to tell,” she said. “It’s not a job people say thank you all of the time, but if you have just one person that comes back and says, ‘Thank you for going the extra mile to help me,’ those moments make it all worth it.”

But for Crutchfield, going the extra mile means doing more than just her job as a state employee.

“I’ve been doing community service projects for a long time,” she said, explaining that in high school her 4-H club would offer babysitting services so parents could go to classes, job trainings and more in order to improve their situations.

So when she joined DPS and moved to Durham, she felt like giving back was one way she could get to know her new community, and she picked the food bank and domestic violence projects because those are resources that probation and parole officers use to help their clients.

“We rely on them to help us, so I felt like we should try to make an effort to replenish them,” she said.

Plus, she said, those and other efforts such as a literacy day at a local school show the community that they really care.

“It lets people know that we care, that we’re not here just to lock people up, but that we’re here to help any way we can,” Crutchfield said.

Darris Williams – District 5
Community service also was the reason correctional officer Darris Williams was honored.

Williams, who has worked in Burke County in the support section of Marion Correctional Institution for the last six years, is the intelligence rep for his housing unit. That means, he explained, monitoring inmate communications, working with other prisons and talking to informants to gather information for ongoing investigations.

“It was something I just had a knack for coming out of basic,” he said.

Growing up, he said he saw a fair amount of gang activity and so stopping it is something of a personal mission for him. That’s why even outside his shift he spends his time tracking and validating the activities of gang-affiliated inmates. And according to a DPS news release, those efforts earned him the honor of being named Marion’s Facility Intelligence Officer.

But that isn’t all. Williams, described as a former standout football player at East Rutherford High School, has also been active in his community’s youth sports programs for the last nine years.

Currently the president of the Forest City youth football program and vice president of the Mid Atlantic Youth Football/Cheer Conference, a DPS news release described him as having dedicated , “untold hours of his personal time … for no compensation – only the satisfaction that he may be providing a foundation of future success for these youth.”

He explained that the Forest City program has 250 youth in it at a time, while the Mid Atlantic Conference serves upwards of 5,000 – all with the goal of keeping young men and women busy and off the streets. And, he said, he has seen the program work, with students improving in school and working their way out of the juvenile criminal justice system.

“It’s a great deterrent for them, because once they get involved, they don’t have time to get in trouble. It keeps them off the street,” he said.

Alvin Laws – District 58
Correctional training instructor Alvin Laws, a 23-year state employee, was honored in the category of heroism, though he would deny that he did anything particularly heroic.

What is undisputable, though, is that Laws’ actions helped to save the life of a Goldsboro man.

Laws, based out of Pitt County but working as a correctional trainer across the state, also is a volunteer firefighter for New Hope Fire Department in Wayne County. He explained that on Jan. 21, 2014, he was over at his daughter’s house when he was alerted to a fire at a next-door neighbor’s house.

He said he ran outside and grabbed his turnout gear from his truck. As he began to dress and assess the situation from outside the home, he could hear the fire department on its way, but then his daughter heard a man calling for help.

When he rounded the back of the house, he said he saw a man trapped, hanging out a second-floor bathroom window as the fire raged beneath him. Laws said he tried to reach the man, but that the only available ladder was too short. He then told the man that he was going to have to jump or that, as the fire threatened to blow out the wall of windows on the first floor, they “were both going to die.”

As several of the windows blew, the man jumped and Laws helped break his fall.

“We were both eating smoke,” Laws said. “But he’s alright now.”

Amazingly, with 29 years as a volunteer firefighter, Laws said that was his “first fire save.”

“And I hope I never have to do another one,” he said. “That was a bit on the edgy side, I have to admit.”

Ultimately, though, he said, it wasn’t that big of a deal and he thinks his daughter deserves more of the credit for hearing the man calling for help.

“All the hype that was built up, it wasn’t all that,” he said. “There was definitely a guardian angel that day.”

Other SEANC member recipients
Other SEANC members receiving the Badge of Excellence Awards were members of the DPS U.S. Open Security Team – a group of more than 200 employees. Among the leaders of that team were SEANC members Capt. Shane Manuel of the Highway Patrol (District 38), Janie Sutton of the State Bureau of Investigation (District 22), and Johnny Hawkins, the Adult Correction and Juvenile Justice Security Services chief (District 40).