Name: San Antonio-area emergency chief who led efforts against novel coronavirus dies of the disease
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San Antonio-area emergency chief who led efforts against novel coronavirus dies of the disease

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateHe was a leader in Atascosa County’s fight against COVID-19. He scrounged for personal protective gear for first responders and jail guards wherever he could find it. He joked that he’d used so much sanitizer, his hands were chapped.Then last week, David Prasifka, the county’s emergency management coordinator, tested positive for the very virus he’d worked so hard to keep at bay.Prasifka, 58, died Saturday of COVID-19 and the effects of leukemia, which had been diagnosed shortly before the virus. It wasn’t immediately known how he contracted the virus.“It was just a real shame and a real shock, and you could feel it this morning as we gave him a good send-off,” Kyle Coleman, Prasifka’s counterpart in Bexar County, said Monday. “There were so many people down there that he had assisted and helped.”The send-off came Monday morning as area firefighters and other first responders from Bexar, Atascosa and surrounding counties lined San Antonio streets and Interstate 37 leading south to Atascosa, paying their last respects to Prasifka. He was carried in a white hearse from Methodist Metropolitan Hospital downtown to Hurley Funeral Home in Pleasanton, where funeral arrangements are pending.The end came quickly.Just last week, Prasifka had been in Bexar County’s Office of Emergency Management warehouse, gathering personal protective gear for his people in Atascosa. Thursday, he was on the phone with Coleman, telling him he had been diagnosed with acute leukemia and was on his way to a San Antonio hospital.Friday, Prasifka told another colleague that he had tested positive for COVID-19. By Saturday, the man described as a caring, reliable professional who always could be counted on in a crisis was gone.Since the novel coronavirus had hit South Texas earlier this year, Prasifka had spent much of his time working to secure personal protective equipment — “PPE,” to use the parlance of his profession — for nursing home workers, voting sites, jail staff and inmates, and others in his rural county south of San Antonio, Coleman said.On ExpressNews.com:“David would drive around the county and distribute that PPE out, to make sure that they got it. If they needed anything, they’d call David, and David got it for them,” he said.After Prasifka visited the Bexar County OEM warehouse last week, he left with a supply of protective suits for county jail employees, Coleman recalled.Three days later, on Thursday, Coleman got a call from Prasifka as his wife, Donna, was driving him to the hospital in San Antonio. Prasifka sounded surprised as he told Coleman he’d been diagnosed with leukemia.“He told me that he had acute leukemia, and that his doctor told him he needed to get up there pretty quick,” Coleman said.Friday, Prasifka told another emergency manager that he’d tested positive for COVID-19. Coleman texted him that day but didn’t hear back. He became worried.Prasifka went into renal failure and died Saturday.Atascosa County officials have said the leukemia likely compromised his immune system before he “passed away from the very disease he has been valiantly fighting against” in the community — COVID-19.“Recently, David had been leading Atascosa County through the COVID-19 pandemic. His humor, heart, and passion for not only his EM job, but his family will be missed by many,” Atascosa officials said Saturday on Twitter.Prasifka began working in Atascosa County’s emergency management office in 2013 and was named coordinator in October 2014. Before that, he was a firefighter in Jourdanton for 27 years, holding numerous offices in the volunteer fire department and serving as chief for several years. He also was a longtime mechanical technician for the San Miguel Electric Cooperative, which provides power for member cooperatives in 42 South Texas counties.Prasifka graduated from Jourdanton High School in 1980.Coleman said Prasifka was well-liked in a tight-knit family of emergency management professionals who are comfortable working together, often in high-pressure situations. He was known for helping others in neighboring counties, especially McMullen and Wilson counties.He provided assistance after the 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs left 26 people dead in rural Wilson County and after a 2015 tornado in Floresville.On his agency’s web site, Prasifka noted that his office prepares for disasters, large and small, and supports other counties in times of need.“Emergency Management is a very rewarding job,” he wrote.Coleman said he didn’t know how Prasifka contracted COVID-19. But he said Prasifka wore PPE and was “the consummate emergency management coordinator.”“It’s one of those things that all you have to do is slip out once” to be exposed, Coleman said.On ExpressNews.com:As of Saturday, Atascosa County’s emergency management office had reported 145 confirmed cases of COVID-19: 56 active, 87 recovered and two deaths.Social media sites were filled with remembrances of the emergency management leader. Some talked about his neatly trimmed lawn; others recalled how he often had breakfast at Jourdanton’s Restaurante Chile Bandera — one of his favorite hangouts, since long before the pandemic forced businesses to shut down or scale back.Prasifka and Donna were married in 1994; he has four sons.His Facebook page features a giant American flag as its profile photo. Among the many images he’d posted in support of police and first responders was a meme with a lit candle honoring “all our essential people who are keeping things going during COVID-19.”Around that candle are the words, “I can’t stay home … I’m an emergency manager.”Scott Huddleston covers Bexar County government and the Alamo for the San Antonio Express-News. To read more from Scott, . | Twitter:

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateHe was a leader in Atascosa County’s fight against COVID-19. He scrounged for personal protective gear for first responders and jail guards wherever he could find it. He joked that he’d used so much sanitizer, his hands were chapped.Then last week, David Prasifka, the county’s emergency management coordinator, tested positive for the very virus he’d worked so hard to keep at bay.Prasifka, 58, died Saturday of COVID-19 and the effects of leukemia, which had been diagnosed shortly before the virus. It wasn’t immediately known how he...

San Antonio-area emergency chief who led efforts against novel coronavirus dies of the disease

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