By admin 
The great and the good of Lexington County and uniformed members of seemingly every law enforcement agency in the state turned out for the funeral of a superhero.
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That’s at least how Lochlann Weigmann remembers his late aunt, Lexington County Master Deputy Jillian Olson, a member of the sheriff’s department dive team who died during a training exercise on Lake Murray last week.
“He really believed she could send tornadoes away and save people from volcanoes,” Olson’s sister Julia Weigmann wrote in comments read during Olson’s funeral at Lexington’s Pilgrim Lutheran Church on Wednesday morning. “He called her to ask her to arrest a kid on the playground who wasn’t nice to him.”
Family, friends and colleagues remembered a fun-loving, self-confident and driven 29-year-old woman who seemingly had a bright future ahead of her. Among other accolades she collected in a five-year law enforcement career, Olson had only recently completed her 100th dive as a member of the department’s dive team, tasked with locating objects and people lost under the lake and other bodies of water.
On July 30, it became the mission of that team to locate Olson, Sheriff Jay Koon said in a funeral tribute that gave the most public details yet of what happened during last week’s training exercise.
Olson was on a deep-water dive to the Wyse Ferry Bridge, a submerged structure that once straddled the Saluda River between Lexington and the Dutch Fork area, until a hydropower dam put it 110 feet underwater almost a century ago. The structure has become a popular attraction for divers on Lake Murray.
But the two-year dive team veteran didn’t resurface.
“Our men and women on the water were heroes,” Koon said. “Last Thursday was tough. We were praying for the best and preparing for the worst.”
When the worst was confirmed, Koon went back to his office to meet with Olson’s parents, Jim and Molly Olson.
“I admire the amazing strength and faith they showed,” the sheriff said.
Olson was born March 29, 1997, in Evanston, Illinois. She “didn’t drift through life,” her father Jim Olson said. “She had dreams and she went after them,” starting with a black belt in taekwondo, an achievement Jim Olson said instilled discipline in his daughter.
After she graduated from Western Illinois University, Olson moved south to start her career in law enforcement. She loved her job nearly as much as she loved the lake, where she frequently went paddleboarding or kayaking.
Her brother Corey Olson said this week was the first time he met many of the people whose names had become familiar to family group chats after his sister moved to Lexington.
“She found her home here,” Corey Olson said.
Frank Anderson, the pastor of St. Michael’s Lutheran Church on River Road, had been Olson’s godfather when she was a child. But he found a new respect for her when she followed him south years later as an adult.
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He recalled how he once nervously called her up to talk about how best he could apologize to a mutual friend. When he later visited her home, “She pulled me in for a hug, invited me in… and we talked for two hours,” Anderson said. “Forty-five minutes earlier she didn’t know I’d needed her.”
The pastor left amazed that the person he had held as a baby was now the friend he would turn to for advice.
Her family remembered her as someone who always strove to be independent, who taught herself to paint as well as to install ceiling fans.
“She was most satisfied figuring out something that didn’t make sense,” her brother Corey said. “She would never admit defeat.”
Koon recalled meeting Olson after a dive in a pond during a missing person search.
“She looked like she’d been in a pig pen,” he said. “But she was happy to report the all clear. She was lost doing what she loved.”
Representatives of multiple state and local law enforcement agencies attended the service and accompanied Olson in procession to her burial at St. Michael’s. Also in attendance were Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s attorney general and the Republican nominee for governor; his father, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-Springdale; Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott; U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling; and members of Lexington County and Lexington Town Councils.
Her father said if his daughter could stand in front of that crowd, “she would be terribly uncomfortable.”
“She did not like being the center of attention,” Jim Olson said. “She wanted to make everyone else laugh and feel seen.”
But he was also proud of the life she had built for herself in Lexington.
“To one little boy, she was a superhero, and maybe she is,” he said. “This was the life she wanted. It was far too short, but it was incredibly full.”
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