But members of the girl’s family had “run him off, started cussing him and threatened to kill him,” said Calvin “Buck” Houck, an uncle of Christopher Cooper. After killing Deputy Todd Cook, Cooper ran from law enforcement officers and eventually shot himself to death Thursday on Linwood-Southmont Road.

Someone, presumably a relative or friend of Cooper’s girlfriend, had called and left threatening messages on an answering machine at Cooper’s home before Cooper shot the deputy. Houck said members of Cooper’s family gathered at his maternal grandparents’ home Friday night and watched a television newscast on WFMY-Channel 2, which broadcast a recording of the threatening messages.

“I think there was a bunch of harassment,” said Cooper’s uncle, “by the Sheriff’s Department and the girl’s family. He would never have done what he done” had it not been for the harassment.

“He found out the girl was pregnant and he was going to try to marry her if the family would let her. He went to see her again to talk about marrying her ... and they run him off,” Houck said.

Cooper’s stepfather, John Cook, went to Channel 2 with the recorded threats and later turned them over to the State Bureau of Investigation.

Less than four hours after Cooper killed Deputy Cook and took his own life, Cooper’s natural father went to another television station to apologize to the deputy’s family for his son.

Arthur Cooper of Linwood Road, south of Lexington, called WXII-Channel 12, in Winston-Salem, and asked to appear on the evening news shortly before it aired Thursday night.

“He called us because he wanted to let folks know he was sorry” for what his son had done, says Brian McLaughlin, news editor.

Fighting back tears in the opening segment of the 6 p.m. broadcast, Cooper offered condolences to the family of slain Deputy Todd Cook, “not so much on my son’s behalf,” he said, but for himself. He wanted people to know “how deeply sorry I am for this because it was my son involved.”

Shortly after 1 that afternoon, the deputy had gone to Christopher Cooper’s home on Beechwood Drive, a small development of upper middle class houses off U.S. 29-70 three miles north of Lexington. Cook wanted to take him to the Davidson County Courthouse to sign a paper acknowledging a second-degree trespass charge.

Lexington Police Officer Melissa Price also wanted to question him about statutory rape charges a Lexington woman had raised when she filed the trespass charge.

That, apparently, was exactly what Christopher Cooper feared — and he shot Cook at least five times when the deputy went into the house, once in the front, three times in his back, more when he was down.

Cook never drew his gun. Was he distracted or ambushed? The bullets that struck him came from two guns.

Officers are still investigating the events.

His stepbrother, Paul Cook, who was in the basement, drove to an off-duty police officer’s house to report what had happened and a neighbor made a 911 call. When the stepbrother got back, officers were there, and his stepbrother was left, driving a yellow Mustang.

He was sighted in the Southmont area, however, and a police chase exceeding speeds of 100 mph ended a little after 2 p.m. when Cooper rammed through a police roadblock and stopped a short distance away on the side of the road. He stuck an assault rifle in his mouth and killed himself.

Neither his father nor his mother and step-father, Polly and John Cook, who are not related to the deputy though they share the same surname, could be reached Friday.

Arthur Cooper told Channel 12 he last saw his son on Wednesday night when he dropped by for a talk with him.

At that time Christopher was worried that he might serve a long prison sentence for statutory rape.

“He was quite upset about that,” his father said. “He said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to handle it. I don’t want to go to jail,’ but the girl persistently called him, and you know, ‘Why haven’t you called me? Why haven’t you come by?’ ”

Cooper said he believed his son must have panicked when the deputy came to serve the warrant.

“I know he just snapped because he’s not this kind of person,” he said, adding that his son liked to collect guns but rarely fired them.

Christopher had been in and out of trouble since 1994, most recently in early January.

Court records show 17 incidents, most of them traffic violations and conviction for one misdemeanor larceny.

“He was in jail a few weeks ago,” Cooper said, “and he was very upset about it. He told me he was going to do everything he could to straighten his life out.”

Instead, his family will conduct funeral services for him at Mt. Carmel Free Will Baptist Church Sunday at 2 p.m., with burial in the church cemetery. The family will see friends tonight from 6 to 8 at the Davidson Funeral Home.

Funeral services for Deputy Cook are scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday at First Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1448 Highway 64-E; Pastor Wayne Knight will officiate. Visitation will take place at Family Funeral Care on Randolph Street in Thomasville from 6 to 9 Sunday night.

Knight is conducting a series of grief counseling sessions at First Pentecostal Church for all employees of the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department and their spouses who want to attend.

About 25 gathered Friday afternoon for the first session, their cars and television trucks in the parking lot obviously shocking mothers picking up their children from day care.

The grief sessions will probably take a while, Sheriff Gerald Hege indicated, since his office has 160 employees, with two 12-hour shifts on and one off duty each day.

“We get everybody in there together,” the sheriff said as he left the first session, “and let them vent their frustrations” with laws that seem designed for the criminal and structured sentencing that “turns these guys loose.”

Maj. David Hege, a cousin of the sheriff and also a member of the staff, said the sessions give officers an opportunity to talk to each other and try to come to some conclusions.

“They’re just coming together as a family,” his wife, Priscilla Faye Hege, added, “because that’s what they are. This has been hard on all of them. We see death every day but when it’s one of our own ... ”

By Friday afternoon, a winter sun in a clear blue sky had replaced the gray cast and bitter cold of the day before, turning still unsullied snow on Beechwood Drive into sparkling blankets on well-cared for lawns.

Nothing hinted of the tragedy that had stretched yellow tape around the John Cook home Thursday afternoon.

Neighbor Harold May had come in about 3 in the afternoon and noticed the commotion and television trucks, “but I thought it had something to do with the snow.”

Then his grandsons, Justin, 7, and Jacob, 6, ran down to check it out and came back with reports of police vehicles and that yellow tape.

Usually people on the street, he says, “will kind of stay to themselves. You couldn’t ask for better neighbors. It shocked me.”

But the tape and the curious — and the Cooks — were gone Friday.

The short, winding street was deserted.

Then a car pulled into the Cook driveway, a woman got out and knocked at the front door, waited a bit and gave up.

Pam Britt and her mother, Betty Owen, had come to see what they could do for their longtime friends, Polly and John Cook.

“I’ve known them since the boy that did the shooting was 6 months old,” Owen says. “You’ll never find better people. I know personally that they tried to keep him on the right track. ... Polly tried to make him go to school or go to work.”

Both had high praise for his mother, who had worked hard to become a licensed practical nurse and now works for a Lexington rest home, and for her husband, who at times has worked three jobs.

“We came,” Britt adds, “because with everything on the news and everything, we wanted to let them know that they have friends.”

“I feel sorry for all concerned,” Owen adds. “He probably just got scared.”

Cooper’s aunt, Barbara Houck, also of Lexington, says the Cooks are both taking it hard. Polly’s mother “got her some nerve pills so she could get through it.”

Christopher, she says, stayed with his grandparents until recently.

“Then he went back to living with his mama and step-daddy. We didn’t think that he would do anything like this.”

When he was a small child, he went to Sheets Memorial Baptist Church’s private school, “but his real daddy wanted him to go to a public school, and he talked him into doing that, so he went to Central High. But he dropped out.

“Then he went to Davidson County Community College and got his GED, and then he went to take auto repair. But he failed math or something like that, and he was going to have to retake it before he got his certificate.

“They was trying to get him settled, to make something of himself. He’d get a job, but he was hard to get up in the morning.”

People he worked for, she says, got tired of that, so it was hard for him to keep a job.

“Or he’d be ready to get on full time, and he would lay out of work and they’d let him go. So that kept his parents upset. But other than that, he was just a typical boy.”

And despite his interest in guns, his aunt didn’t think of him as a hunter.

“Him and his brother would go out in the woods behind the house and shoot squirrels and stuff like that, but he wasn’t no hunter.”

His interest in guns was apparently part of a larger interest.

Sheriff Hege said a search of his home turned up bomb-making paraphernalia, automatic weapons and survivalist magazines.

And all of it saddens his aunt.