I first met Ken Jones a little over a year ago on a 55 mile bike ride in Joshua Tree National Park. The ride had some big climbs — enough to make even the fittest cyclists among us breathe heavy. I remember running into him at one of the rest stops and joking about how our mutual friend, retired San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson, had smoked him on the climb.
I didn’t know that Jones’ neck was bothering him that day. And Jones didn’t know that the bump on his neck that was bugging him was a tumor. We climbed 4,000 feet, we took in a lot of Joshua trees, and we celebrated that amazing feeling of being alive in nature. It was February 1st, 2025.
“Ken has been dx with adenocarcinoma,” Nicholson texted me, just over a month later, on March 19th. The bump on his neck had gotten bigger and he was waiting for results from a biopsy. I googled immediately. “Oh fuck, I’m so sorry,” I wrote back.
Five days later, Jones found out that the cancer had started in his lungs. He texted Nicholson: “I did that damn Joshua tree 55 with lung cancer!” It wasn’t just lung cancer, it was Stage 4. Fourteen months later, on May 30 2026, Jones died at the age of 71.
Lung cancer is not uncommon among firefighters and Jones was a San Francisco firefighter for 17 years. He joined in 1995 when he was 40 years old and spent the following decade running into burning buildings, driving fire engines and caring for people in their worst moments.
It was in the San Francisco Fire Department that Jones met his wife Helen Horvath. They worked together at Station 38 in Pacific Heights. He loved to tell the story of how disinterested she seemed when he first asked her out (for her part, Horvath said she was just keeping her head down as one of the few women in the department). But both Jones and Horvath agreed that their first date changed everything.
“Pretty much that was it,” Horvath said. The two were married in 2002 and helped raise Jones’ daughter Rachel. Horvath became family to Jones’ adult son Josh and later took in Jones’ grandson Josh Jr. when he was in high school.
Jones was the full package. He’s been described as handsome, buff, smart, kind. He loved art, cycling and lifting weights. But one of the things Horvath appreciated early on was Jones’ awareness that peoples’ experiences with “physically strong men” like himself weren’t always good or welcoming. “He always wanted to counteract that and make sure that people that may have been shunned by people who look like him – that he wasn’t doing that,” Horvath said. She saw that in him and loved him for it.
As for Jones, “he loved the hell out of Helen,” Nicholson told me.
“They just had such a bond,” Lisa Koltun, one of Jones’ friends in the Alameda cycling community, said of his relationship with Horvath. “It was always fun to watch – they would look at each other from across the room or across the table and it was like star struck lovers.”
Jones was next-level chivalrous. He loved to take care of Horvath — not because his incredibly competent firefighter wife needed caretaking but because it gave him so much pleasure to dote on her. After Jones retired in 2011, he dedicated himself to that. He would drive Horvath to work, cook for her, do the laundry, vacuum the house.
With the cancer diagnosis, their dynamic was about to change and no one wanted that.
A rock
Before becoming a San Francisco firefighter, Ken Jones put his fine art photography skills to work in a professional photo lab in the Mission where he formed life-long friendships with his colleagues.
Then in 1995, he joined the fire department when it was still under a consent decree to integrate women and minorities. Jones was good at what he did. His colleague at Station 10, John Christy, remembered him as “tough.” Others said he was brave, dedicated and loved his job. But that is pretty common among firefighters.
What was really special about Jones was revealed by his role on the “stress unit” (now called the behavioral health unit) in the fire department. There, Jones served as a peer counselor to firefighters dealing with addiction, PTSD and other mental health challenges.
“I was really glad when he became a peer counselor because it was absolutely perfect for him,” his sister Kasey Jones said. He took care of his colleagues the way he did his friends and his family.
His daughter, Rachel Jones, attributes her dad’s commitment to helping people with her own decision to becoming a nurse.
A number of Jones’ former colleagues told me that he revitalized the stress unit. “Ken upped the game a lot,” said Christy. Under Jones’ leadership, the stress unit got connected to the department’s central command and began getting called out to critical incidents. His phone rang constantly and he would show up to peoples’ homes, fire scenes and to hospitals, setting a precedent for how the unit operates today.
“ Ken was unique in being able to support and be trusted by people from a huge range of backgrounds,” Horvath said. “He was able to connect with people from such a wide range of experiences – women, gay people, people that might not have felt accepted in the fire department. And at the same time, he was able to still do all the things that came along with being the tough firefighter that could do all the firefighter shit, so I think he was respected across the spectrum.”
Perhaps that was because of how he was raised. Jones was born in Washington DC to two English professor parents, just over a decade before Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage nationwide (including in Maryland where his father taught). His father was the first Black student to get a PhD in English at Catholic University and his mother, a white woman, got her master’s degree at Howard University in the 1950s where the two met.
Or maybe Jones developed his empathy and compassion through his own struggles with drugs and alcohol in his early 20s and his time in “the program.” Jones had been sober over 45 years when he died. His sister Kasey remembered how committed Jones was to AA, so much so that when he drove across the country to move to California in 1980, he figured out how to attend meetings in every city he stopped in along the way – not easy in an age before the internet.
“People are coming out of the woodwork saying, ‘He helped me get sober 35 years ago,’” Horvath said.
One of those people was John Christy, Jones’ former colleague at Station 10, who went through a tumultuous period after a divorce. “When my life bottomed out and I called [the stress unit] and asked for him, he was at my house in 20 minutes,” said Christy.
Eventually, Christy left Station 10 and joined Jones on the stress unit, crediting Jones as his mentor. “He’s my rock and he helped me be the rock to other people.”
Christy wasn’t the only person who told me that Jones was the one who picked them up in their worst moments. Jones’ friend and cycling teammate, Lisa Koltun, said that when her son died in a ski accident at college in Colorado she stayed up all night crying not knowing how she could go on. Then, the doorbell rang and it was Jones.
“He didn’t say a word. He just hugged me. And I felt like, I’m gonna be alright,” Koltun said. “It’s like an angel was standing on the doorstep.”
The best treatment
Cancer is often referred to as a “sniper” in the fire department. That’s because firefighters are exposed to smoke and other toxins throughout their careers – every time they enter a burning building to save someone’s home or someone’s life, they not only put their own lives at risk in an immediate way, but they also increase their chances of getting the kind of terminal cancer diagnosis that Jones got. By law in California, if a firefighter gets cancer, it is presumed to be linked to their job duties and thus worker’s comp kicks in.
Christy had cancer. Nicholson too. Both are in remission.
Because of the high rates of cancer among firefighters, organizations have formed to support them and their families following a diagnosis. After he found out he had lung cancer, Jones got in touch with the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation. He was quickly linked up with help navigating the healthcare system including group therapy for firefighters with cancer.
Firefighters, including retired ones like Jones, get their health insurance through the city. The city’s Health Service Board changed providers from United Healthcare to Blue Shield of California last year so that’s the insurance Jones had when he was diagnosed.
He was treated at UCSF, one of the leading hospitals for cancer research and treatment in the country. Jones’ daughter, Rachel, is a nurse at UCSF. His wife, Horvath, the firefighter, is also a nurse. Most of his friends and former colleagues have some degree of medical training. He was in the best possible hands.
In the first few months, Jones underwent a number of surgeries, some chemotherapy and radiation. But somehow when I next saw him at Nicholson’s birthday last June, he looked like himself. I hugged him a little longer than I might have otherwise, but he still seemed ok. Good even.
He and Horvath were traveling. They went to Kauai with Rachel and her family and to Norway just the two of them. One of their favorite things to do had always been driving in the rain and listening to jazz so they drove up to the redwoods in Mendocino, hoping for a downpour.
Jones kept riding his bike. When that started to get hard, he got an e-bike. This August, according to his Strava, he logged some 90 miles.
And he continued the family’s Sunday tradition of gathering in the backyard to grill. Jones’ daughter Rachel would come with her daughter, Audrey, and whoever else was dropping in. There was food, there was love and there was always laughter.
“His laugh was outrageously infectious. When Ken laughed you just lit up inside. His smile, same thing,” Koltun said.
Those backyard Sundays were special to Jones’ sister, Kasey too. On a visit to California some five or six years ago, she remembered everyone hanging out back when the neighbor’s dog came running into the house and up the stairs. It was a small moment but “I just thought my brother has made such a beautiful and perfect life for himself and I was just so proud of him,” she said.
“He is just a good man. I think of the Salt n Pepa song ‘Whatta man, whatta man, whatta mighty good man…’ Thats my brother.”
Insurance denial
Horvath doesn’t like equating cancer to an enemy. She prefers terms like “journey with cancer” over “battle with cancer.” But Jones’ body was fighting – and having an aggressive form of cancer is not just a physical fight, it requires mental fortitude. Little things like friends moving in a stationary bike or the delivery of a FatBoy ice cream sandwich help combat the feeling of impending loss. What does not help is any financial or bureaucratic hurdle that gets in the way of treatment.
By October of last year, Jones’ health had taken a turn for the worse. He lost weight and was experiencing a lot of pain from the tumors that were growing in his body. He stopped riding his bike.
Some people who are lifelong caretakers struggle to accept help, but Jones was gracious. He was no longer the one driving everyone around, he was walking with a walker, and eventually in a wheelchair.
“I think [that] goes to his appreciating that his identity is not being a strong man. He is a strong man, but that’s not who he is. You know what I mean?” Horvath said.
Jones and Horvath had arrived at UCSF for an infusion on December 9 last year when he learned that his insurance had denied the treatment his doctor was recommending.
Jones had already undergone some chemotherapy by that time and in the denial letter Blue Shield stated that being “used after other treatments is not a medically accepted use” of the drug his doctor had prescribed. That use, the letter stated, was not FDA or Medicare approved.
Jones’ doctor, Dr. Matthew Gubens, a veteran oncologist who writes guidelines for cancer treatment, disagreed. He appealed in writing and said he called Blue Shield himself, spending hours on the phone trying to fight the denial. But Jones went home that day without the treatment.
Horvath and Nicholson kicked into gear. They showed up to a Health Service Board meeting on January 8, with Jones’ daughter, Rachel, a dozen or so firefighters and organizers from Protect Our Benefits, which advocates for city retirees’ health and pension.
“Blue Shield has decided that my father’s life is not worth paying for,” Rachel said in an emotional address that captured the attention of Supervisor Matt Dorsey who sits on the Board.
The following week, Dorsey was joined by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and his colleague Supervisor Connie Chan at a rally outside City Hall. They demanded Blue Shield cover Jones’ treatment and pledged to reevaluate the city’s contract with Blue Shield.
Chan and Dorsey then called for a hearing and Chan requested an audit of healthcare denials from the city’s Health Service System. She also set in motion direct dialogue between Blue Shield and Protect Our Benefits, which is still ongoing.
Blue Shield did not agree to an interview but sent a statement to Mission Local that the insurance company has “taken steps to strengthen support for members facing serious conditions.“
Those steps were too late for Jones. When the appeal to Blue Shield was denied, Jones’ community donated over $50,000 to help pay for the treatment out of pocket – enough to cover one immunotherapy infusion. After that, Jones left Blue Shield and Medicare covered the treatment.
But they’d lost critical time. Jones was weaker in February when he began that treatment than he had been in December.
“They’re not to blame for his cancer but I do feel like he took a turn when he was denied. That was the time that he needed them,” Rachel said of Blue Shield. She wanted to keep the pressure on them, to call them out and protest every day “but it’s right in the middle of when my dad’s dying so – priorities.”
Instead Rachel chose to enjoy the time with her dad as best they could, which meant the simple things. The backyard. Their love of washing cars. Time with her daughter Audrey. And always laughs.
“Over the last year he turned into this different person physically – he lost so much weight – but he still had that sense of humor,” Rachel said.
What would Ken do
John Christy was walking into the movie theater with his wife on the last Friday in May when he got the message. Jones was not doing well. Anyone who wanted to say goodbye should come now.
He left the theater and joined roughly a dozen of Jones’ friends and family in a crowded hospital room at UCSF Parnassus. Firefighters trickled in throughout the night. They played music, told stories and watched goofy videos on their phones.
And they laughed. “I hope he heard it,” Rachel said.
They also cried.
Ken Jones died the next morning surrounded by family and friends who had been by his side all through the night.
When the hospital room finally cleared out, Horvath and Nicholson bathed his body and said their last goodbyes. Sort of. Everyone’s still kind of talking to Jones in their heads. When they need support, when they don’t know if they can possibly handle the loss.
Somehow, Jones seemed to have left everyone with the tools they need to keep going. “Sad is an emotion. Grief is an emotion. I don’t need a person to survive. He taught me that,” Christy said.
Jones’ son Josh has taken to asking himself, “What would Ken do?” And as far as Horvath is concerned, that’s a pretty good compass to live by.
Jones is survived by his wife, Helen Horvath, his children, Rachel Jones and Joshua Thomas, his grand-children Audrey Jones, Natalie Thomas, Lawrence Thomas, Roxanne Thomas, and Joshua Thomas Jr., his sister, Kasey Jones, his niece Rosa Hannah and his San Francisco Fire Department family.