About a thousand people filled the Redding Civic Auditorium to honor Suzie Smith, who died from her injuries in a helicopter crash on Highway 50 in Sacramento.
REDDING, Calif. — About a thousand people filled the Redding Civic Auditorium Friday to honor Susan “Suzie” Smith, a longtime flight nurse remembered for five decades of service and a lifetime of compassion.
Family, friends and colleagues gathered to celebrate a woman they said never stopped finding ways to help others. “If somebody get hurt, call Suzie,” the pastor said.
Kevin Luntey, Suzie’s brother-in-law and the family’s spokesperson, described her as “a skilled nurse and a true giving, caring, loving people that just loved everybody.”
Smith died at 67 after she was critically hurt when a REACH medical helicopter crashed on Highway 50 last month. She was one of three people on board. Her colleagues, pilot Chad Millward, 60, and paramedic Margaret “DeDe” Davis, 66., survived the crash and are slowly recovering from their injuries.
Beth Watt, a flight paramedic with REACH Air Medical Services who partnered with Smith in the air for more than two decades, said the grief has been heavy.
“We miss her terribly, but we also have joy in knowing that she died doing what she loved,” Watt said.
Watt, who knew Smith for 30 years, said her compassion extended far beyond the job.
“She lived to serve extravagantly to every person that she met. And it wasn’t just on duty when she was being paid off duty. She was constantly finding people to, people with special needs would go out and ride horses with her” Watt said.
She shared another moment that captured Smith’s instinct to help: “One of our nurses found out they were going to be able to adopt a baby out of the NICU and Suzie went over to her house and made a nursery happen in less than two hours and outfitted her entire home,” Watt said.
Luntey said Smith’s faith and her focus on caring for others shaped everything she did.
“She’s that nurse that you would want there because she’s caring and I’m sure she laid hands and prayed for many many people in the back of that helicopter,” he said.
A prayer echoed through the auditorium during the service, a reminder, her family said, of how faith tied her life together.
The service ended with hugs, tears and gratitude from those who said Smith taught them to serve boldly and love freely.
“We miss her desperately but she left such a legacy of how to serve people right that we know how to do it. She was a mentor for all of us,” Watt said.
Smith’s family has launched the “Our Angel That Flies Foundation,” a memorial fund aimed at supporting nursing education and humanitarian missions in her name.
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