Firefighter of the Year Rock Jones Leaves a Lasting Legacy
Published on October 12, 2026
Rahsarn “Rock” Jones, Charlotte Fire’s Firefighter of the Year, retired Sept. 11 after more than 25 years of service.
By Kevin Campbell, Charlotte Fire
For Rahsarn “Rock” Jones, Sept. 11 was never going to be just a date on the calendar.
It was the day in 2001 when a Charlotte man preparing to enter the fire service sat at home watching the unimaginable unfold on television, knowing that the men and women running toward burning buildings were doing the very job he hoped would soon become his own. Twenty-five years later, Sept. 11 became the day Jones chose to close his career with Charlotte Fire.
Now, just weeks after his Sept. 11, 2026, retirement, Jones is being honored as Charlotte Fire’s Firefighter of the Year, recognition of a career built not only on what he did when the bell rang, but on the compassion he believed every firefighter owed the people on the other side of that call.
“I’m glad I stuck with it,” Jones said. “I made the best decision I ever made in my life.”
Jones stands outside Firehouse 17, where he reflected on the Charlotte community that shaped his life and career.
Jones’ story begins only a few miles from Firehouse 17, where he recently sat down to look back on his career. He was born and raised in Charlotte’s Clanton Park neighborhood, attended Steele Creek Elementary and Kennedy Junior High, and graduated from Olympic High School in 1989.
Long before he wore a Charlotte Fire uniform, there was a firefighter living nearby.
His neighbor, Sam Byers, seemed to Jones to always be around, present with his wife and children. As a boy, Jones finally asked what he did for a living.
Byers told him he was a firefighter.
The answer stayed with Jones.
Years later, Jones took his first firefighter test in 1998 and did not pass. Discouraged, he began to think the fire service might not be for him until a chance conversation with Gene “Frenchy” Forte, a Charlotte firefighter who has since retired, changed his direction.
Forte told him to get back in the game.
Jones did. He tested again in 2001 and passed. Then, around Sept. 11, his application packet arrived in the mail. Jones still remembers coming around the corner in his neighborhood, seeing the mailbox standing open and spotting the large envelope inside.
“That’s gotta be my packet,” he remembered thinking.
Then came Sept. 11.
Jones watched firefighters climb into an unfolding catastrophe while thousands of people tried to escape it. He knew he was preparing to join the same profession, and the reality of that decision suddenly looked very different.
“It was rough sitting at home watching that on TV knowing that that’s what I was trying to do,” Jones said. “I’m about to sign up for this.”
He called his longtime friend Harry King, who was already with Charlotte Fire. King reminded him that firefighters work in the midst of tragedy and that every shift carries risk. Training, judgment and experience could prepare a firefighter for much, but there were circumstances no one could fully anticipate.
Jones admits he thought about walking away.
“This is real,” he remembered thinking.
He stayed.
On Feb. 27, 2002, Rahsarn “Rock” Jones began his Charlotte Fire career.
That career eventually brought him to Firehouse 18, where he spent about 11 years. The assignment put him in a busy house, but for Jones, serving that part of Charlotte meant something much deeper.
His mother and father attended West Charlotte High School. His wife went to West Charlotte, as did her brothers. His grandparents lived off Beatties Ford Road, and Jones spent much of his childhood around the Beatties Ford and LaSalle Street corridor.
“It’s always been home,” he said.
At Firehouse 18, Jones found a crew and a community that helped shape the firefighter and man he would become. Some nights brought little sleep, with calls coming repeatedly throughout a 24-hour shift, and the pace demanded that young firefighters learn quickly.
“We had a dynamite crew,” Jones said. “We did a lot of good work. I learned a lot. I grew as a man, as a person.”
There was a bond between the neighborhood and the firefighter serving it because Jones was not protecting an unfamiliar piece of a map. He was working among streets and communities woven into his own family history.
Jones spent the final chapter of his Charlotte Fire career in aircraft rescue and firefighting at the airport.
By 2014, after years of that pace, Jones and Capt. Derek Alexander began talking about finding a different challenge. Jones followed Alexander to an airport assignment, arriving Sept. 4, 2014, and quickly discovered that fewer residential streets did not mean an easier job.
Aircraft firefighting brought an entirely different set of risks, systems and procedures. Jones had to learn airport operations, communicate with the control tower and become comfortable navigating an active airfield, where an emergency could involve an aircraft carrying hundreds of people.
“It’s a totally different operation out here compared to being on the street,” Jones said.
Before retiring, Jones checks an aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle during his airport assignment.
The learning curve was steep, and Jones embraced it. That assignment would become the final long chapter of his career.
Jones said one of the most intimidating parts of the job was learning to drive across the airfield while communicating with the control tower. He and fellow firefighter Zach Bradshaw completed that process within months of arriving at the airport.
Before retirement, Jones drives an aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle across the airfield.
Jones navigates the active airfield during his final years as a Charlotte firefighter.
Before retirement, Jones communicates with the control tower while operating on the airfield.
The transition from one of Charlotte’s busiest firehouses to airport firefighting slowed the pace in some ways, but Jones said the specialized operation brought an entirely new level of complexity.
“It’s very challenging,” he said.
Jones with one of the specialized aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicles that became part of his work at the airport.
But for Jones, the meaning of the job was never defined solely by the apparatus he rode, the firehouse where he reported or the emergencies he handled.
That became especially clear during his interview at Firehouse 17.
As Jones talked about his career, an urgent radio transmission interrupted the conversation. A fire had escalated to a second alarm, and for a brief time, two firefighters were unaccounted for.
The conversation stopped.
Jones immediately turned his attention toward the radio and urged those around him to check on what was happening.
The firefighters were quickly accounted for and found safe, but for those few moments, the uncertainty hanging in the firehouse offered a stark reminder of the profession Jones had just left.
When the interview resumed, Jones was asked what hearing that radio traffic felt like now that his own journey was over.
“I’m glad I’m done with it because I finished my journey, my personal journey,” Jones said. “But like I told you before, this is part of the job.”
Then he began describing what “part of the job” had looked like over more than two decades.
There was the child who drowned in a pond behind a home and the hours spent recovering him from the water. There were murder victims discovered inside a burning house. There were devastating vehicle crashes, traumatic injuries and the people firefighters could not save.
But there were also the people who survived.
“I’ve done CPR on several people that have actually got up and walked out of the hospital,” Jones said.
Living on both sides of that line between loss and survival helped form the philosophy Jones carried through his career and tried to pass to every firefighter who worked alongside him.
“Treat these people like they’re your family and you’ll never go wrong,” he said.
Compassion, to Jones, was not something firefighters could reserve for the easy calls or the moments when they were rested. It mattered at 5 a.m. when they had been running all night, when patience was thin and another person was calling for help.
“You signed up for it,” Jones said.
One day, he knows, he will be the person who needs that help. When it happens, Jones said he does not want special treatment because he once wore a Charlotte Fire uniform or because someone sees a plaque on his wall.
He simply hopes the people who arrive treat him well because it is the right thing to do.
Jones stands between two airport firefighting vehicles from the assignment that closed out his Charlotte Fire career.
That philosophy may also help explain the respect Jones earned across Charlotte Fire and the recognition that now comes with being named Firefighter of the Year.
Jones entered the department at 30, older than many of the recruits around him. He describes himself as an old soul, raised around older people who taught him compassion and the importance of treating others correctly. Over time, he made it his business to become the firefighter who could walk into someone’s worst moment, put a hand on a shoulder and make the chaos feel a little more manageable.
“If I could be the guy to put my hands on your shoulder and tell you, ‘Everything is going to be all right. I’m here. I got you,’” Jones said, “I’m that guy.”
And he expected the people around him to understand the responsibility that came with wearing the uniform.
“This is what the people expect, and this is what you owe them,” he said.
Even the nickname “Rock” carries a connection to the generations that shaped him.
Jones said his great-grandfather, Sam, was a railroad worker and a man who helped bring running water into the Crestdale community near Matthews, paying to have a water main extended so neighbors could connect to it.
His great-grandfather had trouble pronouncing Rahsarn’s name, and over time, “Rock” became the name that stuck with him throughout his life.
So did the lessons.
Jones beside an airport firefighting vehicle after more than a decade serving in the specialized assignment.
And on Sept. 11, 2026, Jones decided that a date associated with tremendous loss could also hold another memory for the people who had shared his journey.
He understood why people questioned his decision to retire on Sept. 11. He had never forgotten the 343 firefighters killed in the attacks or the first responders who died in the years afterward from illnesses connected to their work at Ground Zero.
But Jones wanted to put something joyful alongside the sorrow.
“We’re going to shine a little sunshine on this day,” he said.
His retirement brought together firefighters from different generations, including people Jones said had “laid down the brick work” that made his own career possible. There were old friends, retired firefighters and colleagues he had not seen in years.
For Jones, it was a day filled with love.
Now Charlotte Fire has added another chapter with his selection as Firefighter of the Year, recognizing a man whose career can be measured not just in years served or emergencies answered, but in the standard he tried to set each time someone called for help.
Jones leaves Charlotte Fire at 54, proud of the life the fire service gave him and grateful he stayed with it when the horror of Sept. 11 once made him question whether he could.
He leaves with roots still planted in the same Charlotte community that raised him, with more than two decades of memories from a profession that showed him humanity at its best and worst, and with a belief that remained remarkably simple through all of it.
Treat people like family.
And when someone is living through one of the worst moments of their life, be the person who can look them in the eye and say:
“I’m here. I got you.”