Duty Calls
Embedded Files
Jaysun Silver
Team Luster
There’s a new sheriff in town, and he says the hardest part of the job is balancing it with his family.
Austin Hann, 36, won the election for sheriff in Nodaway County in 2024. He’s raising three little girls with his wife, Chloe. “They know I’m the sheriff, but they’re not old enough to comprehend what that means,” he said.
The job can be tough to juggle. Most days are lighter calls, like clearing runaway cows off a road. Others are a challenge, like a day earlier this year when he responded to a double murder near his family’s home. He’s never off duty, and in Maryville, he’s accountable to a community of familiar faces. “Everything that goes on in the county, they want to see the sheriff there,” he said.
Sheriff Hann knows retired officers who regret missing out on their children’s younger years. He also knows cops whose families fell apart because the officers “struggle with calmness” at home. He doesn’t want his family to experience any of that. “I need to be present,” he said.
He’s not sure if he’d want his daughters to follow his path into law enforcement. “Part of me would be really proud,” he said. “But I know what this job can do, too, and I want to protect them.”
Sheriff Austin Hann, 36, stands in his office at the Nodaway County Administration Center in Maryville, Mo. The photos on top of the cabinet show Sheriff Hann with his former police dog, Bolt, who died on Sept. 11, 2026. Sheriff Hann worked with Bolt for eight years, and brought him home when the German Shepherd retired from the force.
Sheriff Hann broke down in tears after retrieving the urn for Bolt’s ashes from his parents’ house. “He was the family dog,” Sheriff Hann says, and “a big part” of his daughters’ lives.
An hour after dropping his daughters off at school, Sheriff Hann stands guard at a biweekly county commissioners meeting. The meetings have grown tense as residents show up twice a week to voice concerns about a planned data center in the area. One commissioner says that, for the first time on the job, he feels less safe.
Sheriff Hann and his family live on a 300-acre property in Skidmore, Mo. The town has fewer than 200 residents, and a notorious history of crime and violence. Sheriff Hann sends his daughters to a different school district to make it less likely that every classmate will know them as the sheriff’s kids. “I never wanted them to be in that position,” he says.
Around dinner time, Sheriff Hann spends about five minutes with his daughters before he had to return to work. He says he struggles to balance his work and home lives. He says that as he watches his daughters, he wondered, “How good of a job am I doing at balancing?”
Sheriff Hann says he feels “called to serve” in law enforcement, and he has to sacrifice family time. “You miss family dinners, you miss birthdays, you miss soccer games,” he says. When he was able to take his oldest daughter, Oakley, to her soccer practice one night, he said it was “a good feeling just to be able to be present — that’s a big deal.”
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