Elizabeth Hawks Hermacinski

Partied n piddled around for awhile, moved to Springfield for a year, then enlisted in the military in 1991. I was hired as a deputy in 1993 at the Peoria County Sheriff's Dept. and was only the 3rd female deputy ever hired. I met my husband, Mike, on a call. He was a Peoria Police K-9 officer and showed up on a track for me. We were married in 1997 and as many cops that were at our wedding, not a single shot was fired!😂

After 8 years of adventures at the Sheriff's Dept, I wanted a faster pace and was hired at the City of Peoria Police Dept. where I was able to be involved in units that the PCSD did not have. In 2013, I began having seizures for a still unknown reason and after almost 22 years in law enforcement, I had to retire from the department. My husband retired from the PPD in 2016, so now we are fighting to see who gets sick of the other first!!
In between all of that, we have dealt with many ups and downs, brain tumor with my youngest, cancer with my husband, deaths, births, and absolute miracles! Plenty of tears and laughter throughout it all! God has blessed our family so much and I hope He has done the same for all of you!!

I'm one of those dorks that looks back at High School and has great memories!! Oh I have bad ones too, but the good and great ones outweigh them by far. I get butterflies when I hear the Richwoods Marching Band practicing down the road. Just the sound takes me back to our field, the summer camps, the flags and practicing over and over for that Friday night game!!! Mr. Domico was like a physic woodpecker! The crunch of the football helmets. I loved it all!
And my friends were as dorky as I was. We had a community locker that many shared. We were Girl Scouts until we turned 18, several of us earning our Gold Award (equivalent to the Boy Scout Eagle Award). We went pumpkin chuckin' and had hilarious adventures together. While we had a core group of us, there were always others with us as well. Anyone was welcome, but they had to laugh...that was the rule. We weren't the "popular" kids, but we never cared. We were too busy doing our own thang...having fun with friends.