Brett Elmore has died, according to the Facebook page of radio station WJLX in Jasper, Ala.
Elmore is the manager who made industry headlines earlier this year when he reported to police that his station’s 200-foot AM tower and its transmitter had been stolen.
TV station WIAT in Birmingham, Ala, reported his death. It said Elmore was 41.
The TV report said Elmore “had been a fixture in the community, hosting his own radio show at the station, as well as calling football games for the Jasper Vikings football team, a role that had previously been held for over 40 years by his father, Johnny Elmore.”
Elmore and his father are shown in the above undated photo on the Facebook page. Johnny died in 2022, according to online news stories.
Brett Elmore often described himself in emails as the station owner, and the Facebook page and TV news report describe him that way. But he told Radio World earlier this year that he was the station’s general manager. In FCC correspondence the licensee is listed as James D. Early.
The apparent theft of the WJLX tower, still unsolved, caught the attention of news writers not only within broadcasting but around the world. But it also generated a considerable amount of skepticism from critics who thought the theft had been faked or falsified, which Elmore emphatically denied. [Read: Skeptics Question Disappearance of Alabama Radio Tower]
The FCC in February granted special temporary authority to WJLX(AM), a 1 kW nondirectional station on 1240 kHz, to be silent. WJLX programming has been heard since February on an associated FM translator on 101.5 MHz thanks in part to an agreement with iHeartMedia.
