Five Shootings. All Armed. And the Officers Went Back to Work.

Twenty-five officer-involved shootings statewide in two and a half months. Thirteen in the Phoenix metro. Five fatal in Phoenix, three of them in five days. And last night somebody shot at a police helicopter.

Every one of these involved an armed suspect who refused commands. Shotguns, rifles, handguns, a car used as a battering ram. The people calling 911 were women, children and neighbors hearing gunfire through their walls at 2 a.m.

These officers aren't choosing violence. They're walking into it, over and over, and right now the pace is relentless.

Sunday, 6 a.m. Officers answer a fight call at an apartment complex and find a woman and her young daughter trapped behind a locked wrought iron gate. The woman says the man inside has cocked a gun.

First job: get them out. Officers forced the gate with a Halligan tool and pulled mother and daughter to safety. A mom and her little girl are breathing because of what those officers did in the first 90 seconds.

Then the man appears with a shotgun and refuses to drop it. What follows is a standoff of more than an hour. He fires rounds inside the apartment and shoots down a police drone. Officers don't rush in. They send a second drone from the Special Assignments Unit, evacuate the neighboring units and wait. After every option to bring him out alive was exhausted, detectives entered and found him in critical condition. He later died.

No officers, residents or bystanders were hurt. That's not a headline. That's discipline under fire.

Thursday, March 12, just after 2 a.m. Hours earlier, three juveniles were shot nearby, and a red sedan was left riddled with bullet holes. Officers find a man in the roadway matching the suspect description, armed with a handgun and walking toward them.

They order him to stop and drop it. He refuses. They fire. He goes down, keeps the gun and points it at an officer from the ground. That officer fires again. The man later died.

People talk about police shootings as if officers have time to deliberate. They have the time between a muzzle rising and a trigger pull. In that window, you go home or you don't.

Friday, March 13, about 6 p.m. Officers on a domestic violence call find the man named in it. He runs through the complex carrying a rifle. Repeated commands to stop and drop it. He refuses. Officers fire, and he dies at the hospital.

Two domestic calls in four days, a shotgun in one and a rifle in the other. Domestic violence calls are the most dangerous calls in policing, bar none. The officers answering them every shift don't get to pick which door has a gun behind it. They open all of them.

The body camera from the February 27 shooting at I-17 and Durango is out. DPS had used a Grappler to stop a fleeing car driven by Jesus Gonzalez Flores, 41, tethering it to a patrol cruiser. When Phoenix officers arrived, a passenger was being taken into custody and Flores was still at the wheel.

The video shows him flooring it while chained to a police car, smoke everywhere, tires screaming. The tethered cruiser lurches forward and slams into a Phoenix officer and a DPS trooper. He keeps accelerating. Officers fire. Even after, his foot is still on the gas; they use a 37mm less-lethal launcher to make sure it's safe to approach. He died at the scene.

Both officers survived. That matters.

The NTSB's preliminary report on the Flagstaff crash is out, and two DPS families deserve every word of it. Trooper paramedic Hunter Bennett, 28, top of his academy class, married to his high school sweetheart. Pilot Robert Skankey, 61, a Marine veteran and father of four from Kingman, flying for DPS since 2021. They were overhead during the February 4 active shooter response when their Bell 407 went down.

Investigators found no evidence of bullet damage. The report points to the main rotor system: three blades were found 165 feet from the wreckage and the fourth 650 feet away. The radio captured two loud bangs and a voice saying, "We're going down."

They didn't die from a bullet. They died because something failed while they were in the air doing their job, there because a man was firing on officers from rooftops and somebody had to be the eyes in the sky. Terrell Storey is indicted on two counts of first-degree felony murder and dozens of other charges, has pleaded not guilty, and is due back in court April 16. The final NTSB report could take a year or more.

Just before 1:30 a.m. two days ago, near 36th and Van Buren, officers responded to gunfire, and a Phoenix police helicopter overhead was fired on. No one aboard was hurt. Three people were detained. Shooting at a law enforcement aircraft is a federal offense, and six weeks after this state buried two men who died in one, there's no version of this that isn't deadly serious. The officers in that helicopter kept flying.

Saturday, 1:36 a.m., 60th Avenue and Indian School: a car crossed into oncoming traffic and hit another head-on. Passenger Marc Anthony Velazquez Serrano, 18, died. The driver ran. If you know who was driving, call Phoenix PD or Silent Witness at 480-WITNESS. That family needs answers.

Housekeeping: the Phoenix PD Public Records Bureau is moving to the new headquarters at 100 W. Washington St., reopening there March 30. Use the online portal or [email protected] during the move.

Phoenix New Times led with the count: five police killings in two and a half months, nearly halfway to last year's total. It noted that during a similar cluster last summer, Chief Giordano went public with new procedures and training, and hasn't this time.

The piece gets the number right, and the number demands acknowledgment from leadership. What it spends less time on is what these officers walked into: a shotgun and a hostage child, a handgun after kids were shot, a rifle on a domestic call, a car used to ram two officers, a barricaded man shooting inside an occupied complex. None of these were traffic stops gone wrong.

Both things are true. Officers are facing more armed, more volatile suspects than at any point in recent memory, and the department should be talking publicly about why. Mental health? Easy access to guns? The temperature of the country? All of it?

These officers aren't asking for sympathy. They're asking for backup. Sometimes backup is a chief at a microphone telling the city what his people are walking into every shift, so the public understands that when you call 911 at 2 a.m., the person who shows up might have to make the worst decision of their life to save yours. That deserves more than a written statement from an unnamed spokesperson.

Officers who held the line, took the hits and went back to work. We are in service.

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This piece is adapted from Episode 6 of The Valley 10-8 podcast, first published March 17, 2026, and reflects Phoenix PD and DPS statements, released body camera video, the NTSB preliminary report and news reports at the time; the investigations and cases described may have developed since, and all defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty. Corrections and information: [email protected].