LaRoyce Hawkins is leaving Chicago P.D. as a series regular after 13 seasons, but Kevin Atwater is not disappearing from the show just yet. Hawkins will return in the first two or three episodes of Season 14 to wrap up the character’s storyline, giving the Windy City procedural a narrow window to close out one of its longest-running arcs.
That is why the exit matters now. Hawkins first appeared as Atwater in the Chicago P.D. series premiere in 2014, which makes the move a shift for one of the show’s original cast members, not a routine casting update. The timing also lands as viewers are already looking ahead to Season 14, where the early episodes will have to do the work of saying goodbye and moving on at the same time.
Atwater’s story has already been pushed toward a finish line. In Season 13 Episode 5, he reconnected with Officer Tasha Fox, who told him she was moving to Miami for a new job in a week. Then, later in Episode 11, she came back pregnant with their first child, a turn that made Atwater’s off-duty life feel as unsettled as his work in Chicago.
Hawkins’ departure also comes as Chicago P.D. keeps reshaping itself around the edges. Ahead of Season 13, Toya Turner left after one season as Officer Kiana Cook, while Arienne Mandi joined as Officer Eva Imani for Season 13. Jesse Lee Soffer and Tracy Spiridakos have also exited recently, and the show is now casting a new series regular described as a Black cop and an agent of chaos. The result is a familiar pattern for the franchise, but it still leaves the series with a gap where an original presence used to be.
So the story is not simply that Hawkins is out. It is that Chicago P.D. has already set the terms of his exit: a short return in the opening stretch of Season 14, a final pass at Kevin Atwater’s storyline, and then a show that will have to carry on without one of the faces that helped define it from the start. What remains unanswered is the exact episode that will end Atwater’s run.
