Perry County attorney and nonprofit leader Mary Meade-McKenzie dies at 52

Mary Meade-McKenzie, a Perry County attorney who spent 12 years leading Kentucky River Community Care, died at 52 in Hazard. Her obituary lists her date of death as June 27, 2026, and local reporting identified her as a business leader and member of the Mountain Classic Committee, placing her at the center of both civic and professional life in the county.

Her loss reaches well beyond a single office. Kentucky River Community Care is a private nonprofit community mental health center serving eight counties in the Kentucky River region, with services that include mental health, developmental disabilities, substance abuse and trauma care. In Perry County, the organization’s local contact point is at 115 Rockwood Lane in Hazard, a site tied to the access clients use to start behavioral-health care through the group’s Open Access system.

Meade-McKenzie’s name also appeared in Kentucky River Community Care’s own stories over several years. Those accounts identified her as CEO and executive director and showed her making day-to-day decisions that shaped how the organization worked, including relocating the Caney Digital Media team into one primary location so staff could work together in the same space each day. She also described the Voices literary journal as a “labor of love,” underscoring a leadership style that reached into both operations and community programming.

Her role on the Mountain Classic Committee connected her to one of Hazard’s long-running civic traditions, and her work as an attorney meant she moved through the same legal and business circles that many local institutions depend on. In a county where a small number of people often carry overlapping responsibilities, the death of someone with those ties leaves a gap in legal services, nonprofit leadership and community organizing at once. Local news aggregators carrying the WYMT item also said she enjoyed crafting and attending sporting events, including watching her children.

No cause of death was given in the available reporting. The obituary’s date, her 12-year run at Kentucky River Community Care and her public-facing committee work make clear that Mary Meade-McKenzie’s absence will be felt across Perry County’s health, civic and business networks.