A Vicksburg Warren School District teacher excited about beginning a new assignment at Grove Street School drowned Sunday, the eve of the first day of the school year.

Quincy Jones, 32, 317 Lake Forest Drive, also was going into his second year as pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church on Monroe Street, and had preached a sermon Sunday morning about the importance of giving oneself over to worship, his wife, Monica Jones, said this morning.

She discovered her husband’s body in the couple’s in-ground pool around 6:30 p.m. Attempts by deputies and emergency medical workers to revive him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead at 6:40 p.m. by Warren County Deputy Coroner Kelda Bailess.

The cause of death was drowning, but Bailess said she ordered an autopsy to rule out any medical conditions that might have played a part.

No foul play is suspected, Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace said.

Quincy Jones could not swim, his wife said, and it wasn’t clear why he had gotten into the pool.

“He was very outgoing, a very straightforward guy,” she said this morning. “He was loveable.”

Quincy Jones was set to teach third grade this year at Grove Street, said his wife, a service coordinator with the Mississippi Department of Health. Previously he had taught eighth grade there, as well as fourth grade at Warren Central Intermediate. He had been with the school district for 2 1/2 years, district records show.

Jones was excited about his class at Grove Street this year, said his friend Brian Crawford.

“He wanted to be there,” Crawford said. “He wanted to help those kids.”

Crawford said he and Jones had been friends since beginning youth baseball together in the third grade. The two had been close friends at Vicksburg High School, sang in the choir together and shared similar spiritual experiences as 11th-graders. Jones was dedicated to teaching and to ministry, said Crawford.

“He poured his life into it, he poured his heart into it,” said Crawford, a strategic planner at the Vicksburg District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and pastor of Joshua Generation Church in Tallulah. “It was central to his Christian faith and reflected in how he poured himself out through service.”

Jones had served with other A.M.E. churches in the state, his friend said, but was thrilled to be at Bethel, the church in which he grew up, Crawford said. “It was an opportunity to come back home to Vicksburg.”

Sunday, Quincy and Monica Jones had eaten a meal around 3 p.m., his wife said. She went to take a nap while Jones watched a baseball game on TV.

“He loved basketball and baseball,” she said. “He would play basketball on occasion when they got a pickup game going.”

When Monica Jones woke up sometime after 6 p.m., she looked for her husband throughout the house, checked the garage for his truck and finally checked the backyard, finding him in the pool.

She said her husband usually did not go into the pool without her being nearby or letting her know.

“It didn’t look like he was cleaning (the pool),” she said. “It looked like he got in. I think he was using the float and maybe fell out.”

Bailess said she had been a classmate with Jones at Vicksburg High School, where he was a 1997 graduate.

“I try to keep myself removed, but it was hard yesterday,” said Bailess, who is also a fourth-grade teacher at Bowmar Avenue Elementary School. “He was an all-around fabulous person, like your ray of sunshine. You never heard him say a bad word about anybody.”

Quincy Jones is survived by his parents, Clarence and Annie Jones of Vicksburg, two brothers, Clarence Jones, 40, a U.S. Army recruiter who lives in Connecticut, and Christopher Jones, 24, of Vicksburg, an Army reservist and counselor at Chamberlain-Hunt Academy.

Funeral arrangements were being handled by W.H. Jefferson Funeral Home.