Joseph RutherfordThe details of Sunday’s fatal motorcycle wreck on Hixson Pike near the entrance to Northgate Mall are still emerging as a police investigation continues.
But friends and family of Joey Rutherford, who died in the accident at age 29, say he was an experienced thrill seeker who knew how to ride a motorcycle even though he had only recently acquired his own.
They also remembered the father of three boys and longtime volunteer firefighter as a man who cherished his family and was a friend to everybody he knew.
“He’d have done anything for his kids,” Joey’s older brother Richard Rutherford said at the visitation service Wednesday in Soddy-Daisy. “It was all about his family. He would do anything to keep them under a roof, power on and that stuff. He was my younger brother, but he was my hero.”
Joey Rutherford spent more than half of his life as a firefighter for the Lone Oak Volunteer Fire Department on Taft Highway, starting as a junior firefighter when he was 11. He worked at Invista along with Josh Partin, the Lone Oak fire chief who served as a pallbearer at Thursday’s funeral ceremony.