‘She pulled us all together’: Redding celebrates life of flight nurse Suzie Smith

Flight nurse Susan “Suzie” Smith flew home for the last time beside her husband R.J. Smith and longtime paramedic partner Beth Watt.

That was about a month ago, as Watt and R.J. escorted the flag-draped casket holding Suzie’s body from Sacramento to an airfield in Red Bluff, where hundreds of people, community members and fellow first responders, awaited.

As the helicopter descended closer to the ground, the sheer outpouring of community support more clearly shifted into focus.

“R.J.’s words were, ‘Oh, God. Oh, God. Suzie, you have to see this,’” Watt said.

That final flight led to a procession through the north state that, in spirit, continued Friday night as more than a thousand people gathered at the Redding Civic Auditorium for a celebration of life for Suzie, a career nurse and staple of her north state community who died after the Reach Air Medical Services helicopter on which she worked crashed onto a busy freeway in Sacramento last month. She was 67.

For as brightly as Suzie smiled, at times she had a macabre sense of humor, said Gabriel Smith, Suzie’s son, fitting of a first responder whose life’s work familiarized her intimately with the precarity of life and death.

“My mom said that the job that she did was the most dangerous job in the U.S.,” Gabriel said. “She spent a lot of time preparing us for this. She told us she wanted a celebration, and not a sad thing.”

People shared stories and hugs, with some dressed in formal attire while first responders wore their uniforms, whether those of Reach Air Medical Services or the countless local and state agencies that intersected with her lifetime of work in the nursing profession. Memories were shared and prayers were made.

In other words, it was as she had wanted.

“In a way she prepared us for this a long time ahead of time,” Gabriel said. “It doesn’t make it hurt any less, but we knew what we needed to do.”

Getting the call

The flight carrying Suzie and its two survivors — pilot Chad Millward, 60, and paramedic Margaret “DeDe” Davis, 66 — crashed in Sacramento but was headed for Redding, home to the flight team’s base and where a month later more than a thousand people gathered to celebrate all that Suzie meant to them and their community.

Gabriel got the call that night from his father, R.J., who had received an Apple alert that Suzie had been in a crash.

“He knew the second that it happened,” Gabriel said.

It could have been a car crash based on the phone alert. But they knew Suzie was on shift, which meant she may have been in the air.

The helicopter carrying Suzie and her team fell from the sky and onto a busy freeway moments after taking off the night of Oct. 6 from nearby UC Davis Medical Center. It skidded down an embankment and across several lanes of traffic, narrowly avoiding a wave of cars and halting the eastbound traffic it barreled toward on Highway 50.

Drivers and passengers who witnessed the crash, or who were stopped as a result of it, rushed to help, as did emergency responders, who arrived soon after and guided a group of ordinary people to lift the overturned helicopter, which had trapped Suzie beneath a part of the aircraft.

The wreckage was quickly cleared and the helicopter hauled away overnight. Rush-hour commuters the next morning had little indication of what had happened on that same road the night before.

But by that time, Suzie’s family had already arrived in Sacramento, where they spent the next several days beside her as she fought to recover while on life support at the hospital from which she and her flight crew had departed before the crash.

A lifetime of care

Suzie had always been one to bring in and give back to others. She dedicated her life to nursing, a role she held for about 50 years.

Her passion for helping others was extended through her medical work performed on mission trips, which were themselves extensions of her Christian faith. She served missions in Sri Lanka, Mexico and Haiti, but had an affinity for Nicaragua, where she returned again and again to help others.

“It was just amazing how she could put people at ease and smile and take care of people beyond measure,” Watt said. “She served extravagantly to our community. It was amazing to watch her work.”

Suzie spent her final days in a setting she knew well, on the receiving end of care, surrounded by family, friends and colleagues, each with a story to share and a reason for staying with her until the end.

“I realized our family was so much bigger because of her,” Gabriel said. “She pulled us all together.”

Watt said that “at the exact time” when the decision was made Friday, Oct. 10, to take Suzie off of life support, the herd of about 30 people near her began receiving phone alerts in harmony.

“The decision was made, and then the phones blew up,” Watt said.

The messages they received, from various people they knew in the Redding area, showed that during Suzie’s last moments in Sacramento, two vivid rainbow arches, touching the horizon from end to end, appeared in the sky above her home in Palo Cedro.

Watt recalled that story before Suzie’s celebration of life as a rainbow pushed through the cloudy sky before the sun set.

Fabulous treachery

Jackie Corn attended the celebration of life with her 13-year-old son, Asher. They are family friends who knew Suzie through their church community at Valley Christian Family.

“She was always busy loving on people, and doing things to serve the lord,” Jackie said. “She was just one of those larger than life, high-energy, wonderful people.”

Don Watt, deputy chief of operations for Cal Fire’s Shasta-Trinity unit and Beth’s husband, knew Suzie for decades, dating back to his time as a volunteer at Palo Cedro’s volunteer fire department.

“She was the kind of person that, if you ever needed anything, she was right there to help you out,” he said. “If you needed anything, she’d find a way to get it done, help you out.”

“It was amazing to see how much the community really bonded around her with the procession when we brought her back from UC Davis.”

Her flight crews often flew into rural communities, of which there are many in need of emergency services, but the local authorities in the Redding area knew her well, as did responders in communities throughout the north state.

“It was a very sad loss, but she went doing what she loved to do,” Don said. “People are going to remember Suzie a long time.”

Those sentiments and more like them were shared throughout the night during a celebration that, fittingly, was both beautiful and sad.

“It’s a duality,” Gabriel said. “To see the outpouring is so heartwarming and comforting while being the most tumultuous time of my life.”

To that point, he has held on to a line his mother once sent to her granddaughter, describing a horse riding trip as both “fabulous” and “treacherous,” which, Suzie added, she loved.

That idea stuck with him, summing up the spirit of his mother, who lived her life for others, flying into people’s lives in moments of pain and danger, and doing what she could to make treacherous moments better.

“We knew she touched a lot of people, but we didn’t realize how much we underestimated it,” Gabriel said. “It’s hard to say, because we always held her in such high regard, but with the outpouring of the community and seeing just how many people she had reached in their darkest moments … It blows me away. It really does.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2025 at 10:48 PM.