09/10/2026
The members of Quail Creek Fire Department extend our deepest condolences to the Pafford family and the entire Pafford EMS family following the loss of John Pafford.
Emergency services can be a surprisingly small world. You may not personally know the person whose name you hear, but there is a good chance someone standing beside you does. Maybe they worked a call together last week, trained together, picked up a shift in the next bay over, or simply crossed paths during years of serving the same communities.
That makes losses like this hit close to home.
According to John's sister, Jamie Pafford-Gresham, John suffered a catastrophic cardiac event earlier this week. From the first moments of his emergency, he was surrounded by people working to give him every possible chance. His care began with his family and the responding crews from Ruston Fire Department before being handed off to the medical staff at the local hospital. John was then transported by a Pafford Air crew to Little Rock, landing at Arkansas Heart Hospital, and was later transferred to Baptist Health. Despite the tremendous efforts of everyone involved in his care, John ultimately succumbed to the cardiac event.
There is a particularly difficult weight seeing a family that has spent generations caring for others suddenly find themselves on the other side of an emergency.
The Pafford family's service to EMS dates back nearly 60 years. Pafford Medical Services began in 1967, when the family founded Pafford Ambulance in Magnolia, Arkansas. What started as a small family ambulance service grew into an organization serving communities across Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
John was quite literally raised in EMS. He began working as a dispatcher while still in high school and continued building a career within the organization his family created. His loss is therefore more than the loss of an executive or a familiar name on the side of an ambulance. It is the loss of someone whose life was intertwined with EMS and with a family that has helped shape emergency medical care throughout our region.
Perhaps the most fitting part of John's story is that his service to others did not end with his death. His family has shared that John's organs will be donated, giving others an opportunity to continue their own lives. After a lifetime spent as part of an organization dedicated to saving people, John will leave this world doing the same.
To the entire Pafford family, and the EMTs, paramedics, dispatchers, pilots, nurses, mechanics, administrators and countless others who make up the Pafford EMS family: we are thinking of you and praying for you.
There will still be calls to answer. Ambulances will still roll. Aircraft will still lift. Radios will still crackle to life, and people will still call Pafford because they are having one of the worst days of their lives. We know that continuing that mission while grieving one of your own will not be easy. From all your brothers and sisters please know that you do not carry that grief alone.
