A Maury County Sheriff's deputy known across the county simply as “Pugs” is fighting for his life after an off-road vehicle wreck left him with a ruptured aorta, a torn spleen, blood clots, and multiple broken ribs. James Lee “Pugs” Johnson was airlifted to a hospital and underwent emergency surgery, and the Maury County Fire Department is now asking the community to step up for a man who has spent more than three decades answering their calls for help.
The Maury County Fire Department confirmed that a public servant was severely injured in the ATV wreck, according to WSMV. Johnson works as a Maury County Sheriff's deputy, and he has also served as a volunteer fireman for the county and previously worked as an EMT for EMS. According to a GoFundMe cited by the station, he underwent surgery for the ruptured aorta and is now fighting through the torn spleen, blood clots, and the broken ribs as he begins what the fundraiser describes as a road toward extensive medical treatment and rehabilitation.
Mooresville Baptist Church, where Johnson is a member, told its congregation the crash happened on a Wednesday, according to a church Facebook post referencing the community fundraiser. A separate Facebook post from earlier this year noted that Johnson has spent 34 years in public emergency services across Middle Tennessee, moving between roles in law enforcement, volunteer firefighting, and emergency medical services — a career that touches all three pillars of rural first response.
Fire Department Pleads for Community Support
“We are asking those in the community to help us support someone who has sacrificed so much for Maury County,” the Maury County Fire Department said, per the station's report, as it shared the GoFundMe set up for Johnson. The appeal reflects just how tightly interwoven Johnson's decades of service are with the community now being asked to help him recover.
That kind of grassroots appeal is common in a county where emergency response leans heavily on volunteers. The Maury County Fire Department operates 13 fire stations across more than 520 square miles of unincorporated territory, and it relies on just six full-time firefighters alongside more than 150 volunteer and live-in personnel to cover that ground. Statewide, the reliance on unpaid responders runs even deeper: roughly 71 percent of Tennessee's fire departments are staffed entirely by volunteers, comprising more than 12,000 firefighters, as Hoodline has previously reported.
A Crash Consistent With High-Impact Trauma
The injuries described in Johnson's case — a ruptured aorta paired with a torn spleen — point to the kind of high-velocity blunt-force trauma often associated with ATV rollovers. Traumatic aortic rupture carries an immediate scene mortality rate between 80 and 85 percent, making it the second leading cause of traumatic death after severe brain injury, according to research published in the Journal of Military and Veterans' Health. Surviving long enough to reach emergency surgery, as Johnson did, represents a narrow medical window.
Regional trauma centers are no strangers to this pattern. Medical researchers at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt report that ATV crashes rank as the fifth leading cause of trauma service admissions at the facility, with head and facial trauma from unhelmeted riding driving most of those cases. Nationally, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's 2024 OHV report estimated nearly 100,000 emergency department-treated injuries involving off-highway vehicles in a single year, with rollovers involved in over 65 percent of fatal incidents.
Rural Roads, Rising ATV Risk
Tennessee has been grappling with the growing presence of off-highway vehicles on public roads since lawmakers passed House Bill 810, also known as Public Chapter 255, which allows ATVs and UTVs on qualifying state and county roads provided riders are at least 16, licensed, registered, and helmeted. Preliminary state traffic data recorded 17 ATV rider fatalities across Tennessee in 2025, with roughly 81 percent of those victims unhelmeted and 68 percent of fatal crashes occurring on county routes — a pattern Hoodline outlined in coverage of a fatal ATV-train collision in Scott County.
Air medical evacuations have become a routine, if urgent, feature of emergency response in Maury County's sprawling rural terrain. In the weeks before Johnson's crash, county crews handled a rope rescue along the Duck River near Carpenters Bridge that required an air evac call, and a livestock attack on a quiet county road that triggered LifeFlight preparations. Those incidents, paired with a March head-on crash that sent two people to trauma centers, underscore how often the county's thin emergency ranks are stretched across long distances and severe injuries.
For now, the Maury County Fire Department's appeal centers on one man whose own career was built on answering those same kinds of calls. The department has not released additional details on the circumstances of the crash beyond the injuries described in the GoFundMe campaign, and Johnson's road to recovery is expected to involve extensive medical treatment and rehabilitation.
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