George Jones confided during the fall of 2015 that fretting about the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline and its potential impact on his family property in Giles County was bedeviling his sleep.
At the time, the widowed veteran of the Korean War was 85 years old. He said then that he sometimes woke at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. at his Salem home, racking his brain for strategies to defeat the buried natural gas pipeline. A few months later, Jones suffered a severe stroke. He reached out that morning by phone to his son, Don Jones, who called 911 and headed to his father’s house.
“When I got there, he was trying to tell the rescue crew about the pipeline,” recalled Don Jones, who said Tuesday that he and his family believe stress about the pipeline played a key role in precipitating his father’s stroke.
