WSP remembers Mid-Columbia trooper killed by car west of Prosser

Thirty years ago Trooper Raymond L. Hawn had stopped along the highway west of Prosser to help a motorcyclist who’d run out of gas.

A passing car veered onto the shoulder of then Highway 12 and struck him in the darkness. Hawn, a 47-year-old father of three, died two hours later.

As part of of its Centennial Year Celebration, the Washington State Patrol is memorializing the 30 troopers who lost their lives in the line of duty during its first century of service.

Hawn died Jan. 17, 1990. He had served 21 years with the WSP.

Hawn was born in California but grew up in the Yakima Valley, graduating from high school in Grandview.

After attending Yakima Valley College, he worked for a time at a Bellingham aluminum plant before joining the state patrol. He was commissioned in 1970 and first assigned to the Seattle area. Later, he worked in North Bend and Bellevue before his assignment to Sunnyside in 1987.

Seventeen years after his death, the Interstate 82 weigh station near Grandview and WSP detachment office were named in his memory. And in 1996, he was posthumously awarded the Washington Law Enforcement Medal of Honor.

The WSP said a memorial note posted online decades after his passing, an older gentleman wrote: “I knew Ray from the time I was very young to the time of his passing. A better trooper nor a better human being has never nor will ever exist in my opinion. When I was a troubled teenager, Ray talked to me as a friend. Many things he said convinced me to change my life for the better. I was on the east coast when I learned of his passing and the tears began to flow... years later when I think of Ray, the tears still flow.”

The agency said it will always remember “the big man with the big smile and big heart. He died the way he lived, helping strangers and friends find their way. We remember...”