Slain correctional worker relished helping others
Wayne “Cotton” Morgan, 56, a transportation officer for the Tennessee Department of Correction, was shot and killed Tuesday morning in Kingston while transporting an inmate.
Morgan, a graduate of Central High School in Wartburg, was a deacon and choir singer at the Meadowview Baptist Church. He also voluntarily ministered at a Morgan County nursing home and the county jail once a month.
“He loved to go to the jail and tell the inmates there was a better way, and that was Jesus Christ,” Gail Burgess, his youngest sister, told The Knoxville News Sentinel.
Burgess said her brother would want everyone to know he is a Christian. “We know he’s in heaven,” she said. “That’s what is getting us through.”
Morgan’s family said he had a risky job transporting prisoners from the Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex in Petros to courthouses around the state.
“Anytime you work around desperate people, you know there’s a risk,” Burgess said.
Rose Rickers, Morgan’s 71-year-old oldest sister, said he enjoyed his work.
“He thought it was one of the better jobs in the prison,” she said. “He got to travel all over the state.”
She said he’d had the job for about a year. Before that, she said, he’d been a prison guard for about 27 years.
Morgan’s family said he served as an Army infantryman in Vietnam from 1968-69 and was awarded the Purple Heart after being wounded. They remembered the man who last weekend helped harvest potatoes out of the family garden.
“That’s what I was thinking about coming up the road,” said brother John Morgan, 54, who heard about the shooting while he was at work at a McDonald’s in Harriman.
Relatives said Morgan liked to hunt deer and ginseng in this mountainous region near Frozen Head State Park. And he helped relatives cut hay and keep bees.
Morgan is survived by his wife, Viann of Wartburg; daughter, Carla Sue Keeton of Huntsville, and her children, Cole, 5, and Hallie, 3; and son, Dennis Morgan of Knoxville. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.