Joseph Stone wasn’t in Ukraine for excitement or danger, but to help people, say friends and relatives of the 36-year-old U.S. paramedic, who was killed in Luhansk region on April 23 in a suspected landmine explosion.
Stone is the first member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine to be killed on duty. He was killed near the village of Pryshyb, 800 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, in the Russian-controlled part of Luhansk Oblast.
Stone died in an explosion and fire when the OSCE armored vehicle he was in, one of two on patrol in the area, hit the suspected mine. Two of his colleagues were injured. Overnight into April 24, the OSCE brought Stone’s body to Ukrainian-controlled territory in order to repatriate his remains.
Stone is survived by a son, girlfriend, two brothers, a grandmother and his mother, according to News4Tucson.
He was born in Milwaukee in March 1981, and but had lived in Arizona since an early age, CNN said. He went to Prima Community College in Tucson, where he was eventually certified as emergency medical technician (EMT).
In 2003, he was hired as paramedic by the Southwest Ambulance service, according to Jackie Evans, the operations manager for American Medical Response in Southern Arizona. Stone had worked there for about nine years, and then switched to providing medical aid in conflict hotspots overseas as a contractor to various companies.
Stone’s brother Matthew told CNN that Joseph later worked in Afghanistan, and then went to Liberia for a year. He also did contract work on a seismic vessel in the North Sea and spent some time in Iraq after that.
“He wasn’t a thrill seeker, he wasn’t in it for the ego or the glory or the drama,” Aaron Haworth, Stone’s long-time friend and colleague told KGUN9 TV channel of Tucson, Arizona. “He really was that guy that would kind of just do the job and gut it out because it was his duty, you know. And I really honor him for that.”
After Iraq, Joseph Stone got his final job with the Global Rescue company, which had a contract to provide medical services to OSCE missions.
As a paramedic, Stone was eventually embedded to the organization’s monitoring mission in Ukraine’s war-torn eastern region of Donbas.
“He’d work two months or so in Luhansk and then come back for a month. He rotated back and forth several times,” Matthew told CNN.
His brother also said Joseph used to say he had met a lot of nice people in Ukraine and felt bad for them. “You see all these bombed out buildings,” CNN said, quoting his words.
Toward the end, Joseph said he was not enjoying the travel aspect of his job, but he loved helping others.
“He liked going to those places where he could make a difference,” Matthew Stone said. “He liked going where people needed him. He couldn’t not try to help somebody. That’s just who he was.”
Matthew Stone described his brother as a “secular activist” and a “humanist” interested in the secularist and atheist traditions, and a “voracious reader” of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, and Maajid Nahwaz.
“The world is a lot worse off without him.”
