Dr. J. Brock Amon: Criminal delivers babies
Working long hours is nothing new for Dr. J. Brock Amon, a graduate of Yuma High School.
In high school he learned how to prioritize his schedule when he was involved in student government and playing on the football and basketball teams.
“Being active kept me involved. So you learn a work ethic when you’re being stretched thin.”
Sometimes he got off course, but his math teacher, Marty Raebel, was always there to get him back on track. “There were a number of occasions when he sat me aside if I was slacking and let me know it,” Amon says now.
Amon admired his physics teacher, Richard Robinson, because he had the energy to be involved in both school and community activities. “The support he provided after school was second to none,” said Amon.
Amon believes that the diverse student body at YHS is what made it such a special school. “You had the super poor, the super rich and all the ethnic groups were represented."
He said he believes Yuma High lost some of its diversity because the district restructured the student population when it redrew attendance boundaries as Gila Ridge High School opened. He said when they transferred students from Mesa del Sol and the Foothills area into Gila Ridge High School, they should have replaced those students with similar students at YHS.
While he is proud of Yuma High's 100th anniversary, he wishes that current and future students were able to experience the diverse student population that YHS was known for, like he did.
He graduated Yuma High in 1992 with a full scholarship to attend Arizona Western College. Going to AWC was an opportunity to move forward with his education instead of moving backward. “A lot of friends went to places like the (University of Arizona) and returned home without finishing school.”
Amon never had to take out a loan in college because he worked as a full-time physical therapist technician at Yuma Regional Medical Center. Both Larry Autrey and Carvin Short introduced him into the medical field, he said, and influenced him the most.
He graduated AWC with two scholarships to attend the UA. He majored in microbiology and graduated in 1996.
He married Jean Rouff, also an alumna of Yuma High, AWC and the UA, two weeks before they began medical school at the UA in 1997. They met in an accelerated math class in eighth grade but didn’t date each other until their senior year at Yuma High.
In medical school, he thought he would go into cardiology or internal medicine but changed his mind once he realized how rewarding bringing life into the world is. “Nothing is more special than helping start a family, and I got hooked.”
In 2001, he and his wife graduated the UA’s College of Medicine. He joined Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix as an OB/GYN physician-resident. She went to Phoenix Children’s Hospital to complete her pediatric residency program. In 2005 they returned to Yuma to practice medicine.
Currently he is an OB/GYN at Women’s Health Specialists and she is a pediatrician at Yuma Pediatrics. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Emma Grace, and are expecting their second child in the fall.
