<p><strong>N</strong>early 15 years ago, Kirby Cochran set his mind to a task.</p>
<p>His good friend, a former police officer, had cancer. Other friends did too. Cochran wanted to do something. He helped form a Relay for Life team for the 24-hour Franklin walk.</p>
<p>He wanted to work as hard as he could, raise the most money, spread his passion for the cause and make a difference.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery
<p>And he and his group did. Eventually, he knew he needed to funnel the passion of his group to do more. He formed a nonprofit organization, Friends for Life, and looked at what other causes they could help. Among the many groups that benefit, local families in need get help at Christmas time.</p>
<p>His dedication to community service came from his mother. As a child, he watched her gravitate to the people in their neighborhood who needed help getting to a doctor’s appointment or the grocery store, or recovering from a fall.</p>
<p>He’s fulfilled that desire to help through always treating people, even criminal suspects, the right way, through spending the last 11 years as a child abuse and sex crimes investigator, through forming and growing his nonprofit organization and serving on the boards of several other community helping agencies.</p>
<p>And he’s passed his dedication on. His two grown sons work as a police officer and a correctional officer.</p>
<p>He’s ready to use those experiences, coupled with a long and varied career in law enforcement, to serve as the next sheriff of Johnson County.</p>
<p>He has worked to be a well-rounded candidate for sheriff and has experience opening and managing correctional facilities.</p>
<p>In his 24 years of law enforcement experience, he’s worked in every division of the sheriff’s office, and said that his training and experience, coupled with his dedication to the county as shown through his volunteer work, makes him the best candidate for Johnson County sheriff because he will be able to collaborate, both inside the sheriff’s office and with groups and leaders in the community.</p>
<p>His career in law enforcement started in 1992, when he began doing home checks on people who had been sentenced to home detention across Johnson County. After gaining some experience, he wrote a proposal to add a K-9 to the checks, which would make them safer, save manpower and result in more thorough checks.</p>
<p>Later, he became a reserve sheriff’s deputy and then a sheriff’s deputy. He had fallen in love with law enforcement.</p>
<p>“That’s all I know,” Cochran said. “Law enforcement is all I know.”</p>
<p>He has learned through the years that always treating people right, even offenders or inmates, would serve him well.</p>
<p>“I’m always looking for opportunities to either help others or grow myself, either professional or personally,” Cochran said.</p>
<p>He’s since joined the board of the local organization KIC-IT, and is on the board for ASSIST, a local nonprofit that helps victims of trauma recover not just in the immediate aftermath, but for years to come. Families that can’t afford expensive private therapy can get help through trained providers.</p>
<p>He received a liver transplant more than five years ago after a 12-year struggle with lupus. He had become ill, and his doctor told him that he could die without a transplant. And if he got a match and survived, his doctors suggested he might want to change jobs.</p>
<p>That wasn’t an option.</p>
<p>The situation forced him to fight for what he wanted, work harder and pray more. Along the way, he grew in his relationship with his family.</p>
<p>He reached out to others to prepare himself mentally and physically for a transplant, for the unknown, for the chance that he may not survive.</p>
<p>Then the call came. A woman had died. He would get her liver.</p>
<p>While he was still recovering in the hospital, his next steps occurred to him. He needed to expand Friends for Life. They had to do more. They could help children at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health, or people who had diabetes, Alzheimer’s or ALS.</p>
<p>Not surviving was not an option for Cochran. Through his nonprofit organization work, he had seen people go through so much adversity. He had to believe, which is the theme of Friends For Life — “Always believe.”</p>
<p>He was scared, but the experience made him a humble police officer, and a humble man.</p>
<p>In many ways, he is grateful that he needed the liver transplant, because it connected him with the family of his donor in a way he never imagined, and with the work of the Indiana Donor Network. He’s devoted himself to promoting organ donation ever since and has been a visible advocate of the organization.</p>
<p>He takes time to visit with people who are awaiting a transplant, trying to inspire hope. He takes time to focus on his own health, which is fine and allows him to run, ride bikes and work every day.</p>
<p>“For me, I have two birthdays,” Cochran said. “And what a blessing that is.”</p>
<p>All of these experiences have made him the police officer he is today, ready to be the next leader of the sheriff’s office, he said. He’s learned how to recruit employees, retain them, motivate them, do what is right and grow an organization.</p>
<p>“If anything, it has made me a stronger, more dedicated, more passionate person,” Cochran said. “Adversity won’t stop these goals.”</p>
