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A federal bankruptcy judge has removed Aaron Mayfield from control of A.M. Pyrotechnics LLC, the company that abandoned Mountain Home’s Red, White & Blue Festival fireworks in June. The July 27 order came 11 days after the U.S. Trustee accused Mayfield of hiding roughly $300,000 in customer prepayments from the court and telling a judge that shows would go on the day before he cancelled them. Mayfield did not fight the motion.
The company is now run by Norman Rouse, a Joplin attorney serving as trustee in the case. On Sept. 1, the Arkansas attorney general’s office entered the case as a creditor on behalf of the state. Court records reviewed by the Observer show no buyer for the company and no refunds to the communities it left without shows.
The findings below come from more than 20 filings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Missouri. They include sworn schedules, monthly operating reports, the trustee’s motion and a nine-page memo Mayfield wrote in his own defense.
What the court was told, and what happened
A.M. Pyrotechnics filed for Chapter 11 protection on Feb. 27 under Subchapter V, a streamlined track for small businesses. In Chapter 11, the owner usually keeps running the company as the “debtor-in-possession” while a plan to pay creditors moves through court. That is the status Mayfield lost.
At creditors’ meetings on April 7 and May 6, Mayfield testified under oath that the company had many contracts for shows and had been paid for some of them up to a year in advance, according to the trustee’s motion. He said the company was obligated to perform them. The sworn schedules he filed said the opposite: asked whether the company held any deposits or prepayments, the answer was “No,” and the list of open contracts was blank.
The U.S. Trustee, the Justice Department office that polices bankruptcy cases, told him to fix the schedules and notify every customer. He never did. On April 7, the same day as the first creditors’ meeting, his lawyer filed a report stating “the Debtor believes all schedules are complete.”
Whether the company could actually put on its shows came up at four straight status conferences, on April 21, May 5, June 2 and June 16. Each time, according to the motion, the company “insisted it planned to go ahead with each pending contract.”
The first list of shows reached the court on the morning of June 30, three days after Mayfield emailed the Mountain Home Area Chamber of Commerce to cancel. It covered only the coming week: six shows cancelled, three going forward and 17 “pending but anticipated to proceed.”
Of the 17, three happened and one was rained out. The other 13 were cancelled, most of them on July 1, the day after the hearing. The trustee’s office also found one cancelled show that was never on the list at all.
“It is unclear how Mr. Mayfield could have asserted to the Court that he anticipated such shows to proceed when he lacked the necessary ability, including inventory, to perform these contracts,” trial attorney Adam Miller wrote for the trustee’s office. The motion states that Mayfield “has engaged in at least some dishonesty with his clients” and took on new customers after filing without telling them the company was bankrupt.
The trustee’s office also learned on July 8 that Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin had been in contact with Mayfield about a possible investigation under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Mayfield had known about the complaints since June 30, the motion says, and told neither the court nor the trustee.
The customers who weren’t creditors
The communities that prepaid for shows did not exist in the case file until July 13. That is when the company filed an amended list of unsecured creditors adding 22 “damages for cancelled show” claims worth about $307,000, along with two unpaid technicians. The figure matches the deposits the trustee says were never disclosed.
Because they were never scheduled, none of them received the notice the court sends to creditors when a case is filed. Chamber President Dani Pugsley has said she learned of the bankruptcy from Mayfield’s June 27 cancellation email. The deadline for creditors to file claims, May 8, had already passed.
Seven of the added creditors are in Arkansas, with claims totaling $151,500. Four are in the Observer’s coverage area: the Mountain Home Area Chamber of Commerce at $30,000, the Lake Norfork Fireworks Association in Gamaliel at $30,000, the Salem Chamber of Commerce at $8,500 and the Calico Rock Lions Club at $8,000. The city of Batesville is listed at $35,000, Bella Vista at $28,000 and the Eden’s Bluff show at Beaver Lake at $12,000.
The $30,000 figure for Mountain Home is the company’s number. Pugsley told the Observer in July that the Chamber paid roughly $40,000 for the show. She told Arkansas Business the Chamber then paid Premier Pyrotechnics of Richland, Missouri, another $20,000 to put on a replacement display with less than a day’s notice.
Missouri communities make up most of the rest of the list, including Osage Beach, Webster Groves, Carrollton, Lowry City, Theodosia, Mexico, Mount Vernon, Camdenton and Potosi. Two customers are in Oklahoma, two in Illinois and one is represented by a Kansas City law firm.
Where the money went
Mayfield’s own explanation is in a memo he signed July 15 and his lawyer filed with the court five days later. Under a heading titled “Use of customer funds prior to the manufacturing shutdown,” he wrote that deposits paid for chemicals, shell components, wages, insurance premiums and the making of fireworks for upcoming shows. The money, he wrote, “had therefore been converted into physical inventory” rather than staying as cash.
That inventory was never finished. Mayfield wrote that about 1,000 display shells, 4 to 8 inches across, were “approximately 95 percent complete” when manufacturing stopped after a Nov. 26, 2025, fire at the plant that killed employee Chad Eaves. He estimated $1,500 in black powder and a month of his own labor would finish them, but the company lost its authority to manufacture after the fire.
Mayfield called the unfinished shells “a substantial asset of the bankruptcy estate.” The sworn schedules filed under his signature valued “chemicals and partially finished fireworks” at $0.
The company’s books tell the rest. A balance sheet filed with the court shows Mayfield took $50,082 in personal draws from the company in the first 10 months of 2025 and $226,302 in total. On Nov. 11, 2025, two weeks before the fire, the company had $27,472 in the bank and a growing payroll tax bill.
That bill became the largest priority claim in the case: $115,217 owed to the IRS for “941 liabilities,” the taxes withheld from employee paychecks that a company must send to the government. The schedules also list $5,000 of company money sitting in Mayfield’s personal bank account, and a $25,000 customer check that had never been cashed.
Creditors questioned some of the spending directly. In his memo, Mayfield acknowledged Netflix charges on the business account, clothing bought at a store called Eye Candy for “business meetings, public-speaking engagements, and the upcoming fireworks season,” and grocery purchases at Mama Jean’s. He reimbursed $53.98 for Netflix and promised to stop using company money for clothes, meals or groceries.
The June operating report, signed under penalty of perjury on July 22, shows the company’s cash position at the end of its busiest month. It took in $35,148 against a projection of $100,000, spent $74,890 and ended June with a negative cash balance of $23,909. The company had two employees.
Asked on the report whether all receipts were deposited into the court-monitored bank account, the company answered no.
Four explanations
Mayfield has offered a different reason for the Mountain Home cancellation to each audience.
To the Springfield Business Journal in March, the bankruptcy was “a structured reorganization process.” To Pugsley on June 27, “ongoing rain and flooding at our facility have complicated preparations,” according to the email as reported by Arkansas Business. To KY3 two days later, the company “was just unable to secure the qualified personnel necessary to safely perform the display.”
To the bankruptcy court, the problem was inventory. Mayfield testified that after the fire and “subsequent government investigations,” the company could no longer make its own shells and would have to buy them. When creditors asked how he would pay for shells with almost no cash, he said he would use receivables and “deposits for new bookings,” according to the trustee’s motion.
A company already in trouble
The 2026 filing was A.M. Pyrotechnics’ second Chapter 11. The first came in July 2014. One debt from before that case, $103,000 owed to Dominator Fireworks of North Little Rock, is still listed as “pre-2014 debt” in the current schedules.
Mayfield filed a personal Chapter 13 bankruptcy in November 2025, the same month as the fatal fire, Arkansas Business reported. His finances and the company’s are hard to separate in the court file. The $1.37 million in real estate the company lists as its own is described in the schedules as “land owned by Aaron Mayfield serving as collateral,” and his estranged wife, Gina, holds a 50% to 70% interest in three of the six parcels.
The company’s plan to pay creditors, filed June 1, depended entirely on selling the business. It projected a $523,785 down payment “to be paid 8-1-2026” and quarterly payments of $48,637 after that, with $3,500 a month set aside for Mayfield. No buyer was named, and six weeks later Mayfield was asking the court for 60 more days just to start marketing the company.
In the months before the July 4 collapse, the company was also scrambling for insurance. Property coverage through Lloyd’s of London did not take effect until April 18, and general liability coverage was running on a 30-day extension due to expire May 10, according to a May 7 filing by Mayfield’s attorney. Pugsley has said the Chamber confirmed the company’s insurance the Monday of festival week.
The company leaned on short-term lenders as well. The schedules list $87,600 owed to Unique Finance Co., which had already sued in Broward County, Florida, plus $20,630 to Overton Funding and $5,450 to Square. Twenty-five days before the bankruptcy filing, the company took a new $36,340 loan from Sullivan Bank, which later told the court it never received notice of the case.
What the judge found, and what he didn’t
The trustee’s motion asked Judge Brian T. Fenimore to remove Mayfield for “fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, or gross mismanagement,” the standard set by federal law, or to convert the case to a Chapter 7 liquidation. Fenimore ordered an expedited hearing for July 27 and set a July 24 deadline for objections. None were filed.
At the hearing, Mayfield’s attorney and Rouse both consented to the removal. The order Fenimore signed found “at least some incompetence or gross mismanagement of the affairs of the debtor during this case.” It made no finding on the dishonesty allegations, and because Mayfield did not contest the motion, none of the specific claims about hidden deposits or the June 30 list were tested in court.
The request to convert the case to Chapter 7 was denied “without prejudice,” meaning the trustee can renew it. Twelve days before the hearing, Mayfield’s memo had argued he was “the person best positioned” to finish the shells, work with federal regulators and find a buyer.
Under the order, Rouse has the power to run the business and to sell it. He cannot file a plan of his own; only the debtor can do that under Subchapter V. The trustee’s office wrote in its motion that a sale could be followed by conversion to Chapter 7 to distribute the proceeds.
The lawyers get paid first
On Aug. 14, Fenimore approved $19,100 in fees for WM Law, the Olathe, Kansas, firm that represented the company during the months the trustee says the schedules were incomplete. The firm had billed $24,100 for March through June and agreed to cut $5,000 after the trustee’s office reviewed the bills. It also asked the court to let it apply a $17,952.50 retainer Mayfield paid before the filing.
Legal fees approved in a bankruptcy case are paid ahead of unsecured creditors such as the Chamber.
What happens next
The company’s assets are modest without the land. The trustee’s motion puts the plant building at about $250,000, and the schedules list $228,035 in racks, mortars and other equipment. The 1,000 unfinished shells cannot legally be sold or moved as they are.
Mayfield wrote that an investigator from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was scheduled to visit July 20 to receive an application to restore the company’s manufacturing license so the shells could be finished. Filings available to the Observer do not show whether that happened. They also do not show whether the shows the trustee said were booked for August and September went forward.
Ahead of the unsecured creditors stand $315,793 in secured debt, mostly to the Bank of Missouri, and $120,289 in priority tax claims. The Chamber and the other communities are at the back of that line.
In his memo, Mayfield wrote that he received threatening text messages from an unknown number within hours of a creditors’ meeting and reported them to law enforcement. He asked that details about the explosives on the property not be made public. The memo was filed on the public docket.
The state of Arkansas is now formally in that line as well. Senior Assistant Attorney General Lydia Hamlet filed a notice Sept. 1 that she represents “Creditor, State of Arkansas, ex rel. Tim Griffin” and asked to be served with every filing in the case. The notice does not say what the state intends to claim, but the Deceptive Trade Practices Act lets the attorney general seek restitution for consumers and civil penalties.
Whether any of it reaches Mountain Home depends on what Rouse can sell, and when.
