Candidate profile: Hooker says he's community-minded

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July 21, 2012

Candidate profile: Hooker says he's community-minded

Victor Miller victormiller@daltoncitizen.com The Dalton Daily Citizen Sat Jul 21, 2012, 10:03 PM EDT

— Eric Hooker says he is not running for Murray County magistrate post 2 judge because he needs a job.

“I have a great job that supports my family,” he said. “I’m doing it for the community, to be able to work with the community. This is something I want to do with the community.”

Hooker is running for the part-time position on July 31 against five others: Jim Beavers, Leroy Green, Kevin Jones, Mike Padgett and John Waters. The position is nonpartisan. There will either be a winner or a runoff.

Hooker, a vice president of Big Bob’s of America, a franchise flooring organization with an office in Dalton, said this is his first run for elected office. A former jailer at the sheriff’s office who also worked at the Chatsworth and Fairmount police departments, he said, “When I worked at the police department I saw what those guys had to go through. ... I thought that was something I would be interested in doing when I was not in law enforcement.

“I think my seven years of law enforcement experience will definitely aid me in the criminal side of it, and also the civil side. We dealt with so many civil cases, and the civil side of things is kind of touchy when you’re evicting somebody from their home, bad checks — all ran through the police department in some capacity when I was there.”

Hooker said he is a “strong community-minded person. I volunteer several hundred hours in the school system every year, and I’ve always done the American Cancer Society Relay For Life. My community-mindedness and awareness there, I think, will not only help me with the sensitivity that’s involved in that but also help me make a strong, good judgment to what needs to happen in each case based on the law.”

Hooker was “raised in Murray County all my life,” graduating from Murray County High School. He has been married for 16 years to April Hooker and has two sons, Andrew, 14, who will be a freshman at North Murray High School in the fall, and Caleb, 9, a third-grader at Woodlawn Elementary. Hooker is a coach at Bagley Middle School.

He said he has attended Faith Worship Center “for as long as I can remember.”

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Candidate profile: Hooker says he's community-minded

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