Ranger Down: Seven Shootings, Two Dead Troopers, and the Ninety Seconds That Killed the Wrong Man

Seven officer-involved shootings. One week. Two DPS crew members dead in a helicopter crash in Flagstaff. An officer grazed by a bullet in a Wendy's parking lot in Goodyear after a shoplifting call, because a suspect went for his gun. Two cops hit by gunfire in Queen Creek over a hit-and-run. And a Phoenix officer who fired into a house and killed the man who had just disarmed the shooter and was holding him down when police arrived.

That's not a Netflix pitch. That's Arizona, February 2026.

Fifteen officer-involved shootings in Arizona since January 1, and we weren't out of the first week of February.

Wednesday night, February 4, Flagstaff. Officers respond to a domestic violence call north of Route 66 just after 8:30 p.m. They find the victim in the front yard, and a man with a semi-automatic rifle opens fire on them from behind the house.

What follows is almost two hours of a running gun battle. Terrell Storey, 50, hops rooftop to rooftop, firing down on officers and into people's homes. Flagstaff Chief Sean Connolly called it a neighborhood under siege. Residents heard close to a hundred shots.

DPS sends up Ranger 56, a Bell 407 out of Kingman, for tactical air support. At 10:17 p.m. the helicopter crashes.

Pilot Robert Skankey, 61, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel with 22 years in the Corps and four kids. He joined DPS in 2021 and made aviation supervisor by 2024. Retirement apparently wasn't in his vocabulary.

Trooper paramedic Hunter Bennett, 28, the number one overall graduate of his academy class, highest scores in academics and fitness. He transferred to air rescue in 2024 because he wanted to fly and save people. He had married his high school sweetheart months before.

Both killed. No gunfire hit that helicopter. The NTSB is investigating. Storey survived and sits in the Coconino County Jail on a $5 million cash-only bond, facing two counts of first-degree murder and ten counts of aggravated assault on law enforcement.

He survived and they didn't. That's not commentary. That's the math, and every officer in this state is sitting with it.

In the same 24 hours around Flagstaff, four more shootings across three counties.

Then Tuesday, February 10. Goodyear. A shoplifting call near I-10 and Litchfield Road around 4 p.m. The first officer on scene tries to detain a man matching the description. The suspect grabs for the officer's holstered weapon. They fight over the gun across a Wendy's parking lot. A round goes off and grazes the officer's leg. The suspect keeps reaching for the gun. The suspect did not survive. The officer went home.

Goodyear Chief Brian Issitt said something unusually candid for a chief: there's a lot going on right now, a lot of emotion, and he asked for calm and levelheadedness. That is a West Valley chief telling his community in public that his people are working in an environment that is not calm.

Same day, Queen Creek. Officers searching for an armed hit-and-run suspect in Ironwood Crossing find Gavin Johnson, 23. He fires and hits two officers. One is hospitalized and later released. Johnson is killed.

The Arizona Police Association doesn't put out statements lightly. It put one out. President Darrell Kriplean said the quiet part: in regular interactions, people are resorting to weapons and violence more than they used to.

He's not talking about warrant service on armed fugitives. He's talking about a shoplifting call, a traffic stop, a fender bender. The baseline violence in ordinary encounters is going up, and the people answering those calls absorb it with their bodies.

I'm not a cop. I've never cleared a room or wrestled anyone for my own weapon in a fast food parking lot. What I am is someone who lives in this Valley and believes the public's understanding of what officers actually do is so shallow it's almost dangerous.

When you hear seven shootings in a week, you process seven separate headlines. Officers don't get to. Every cop in every Valley agency heard about Flagstaff Wednesday night, and Thursday morning they put on the vest and answered the radio anyway.

Calls don't come with a difficulty rating. A shoplifting call is a shoplifting call until it isn't. A domestic is a domestic until a man with a rifle is on a rooftop for two hours.

Then there's the information problem, the one that keeps me up at night. An officer rolls on whatever the 911 caller said, filtered through a call taker and coded over the radio. It's a snapshot. By the time the officer arrives, two minutes or ten, the scene may have flipped completely.

Kriplean also pointed to mental health going unaddressed or handled too late. Phoenix made a real change on December 15: 911 call takers now ask whether you need police, fire or behavioral health, and can send the Community Assistance Program directly. Diversions to behavioral health are up 128 percent. That's real progress.

But it works when someone calls about a person in crisis. It does not work when a person in crisis shows up at your house with a shotgun. By the time it's a shots-fired call, the behavioral health window has closed, and an officer has to decide in real time with whatever he's been told.

Phoenix PD released a critical incident briefing on February 9 with body camera video from two officers, 911 audio and home surveillance footage. It's public. It is not easy viewing.

January 26, about 6:20 p.m. Multiple 911 calls report a man shooting at a house near 75th Avenue and Lower Buckeye Road, with children inside. Dispatchers can hear gunfire on the line.

According to court documents, Edgar Ledezma Garcia came to the home believing someone wanted him dead. The family knew him and told investigators he'd been struggling with his mental health. He argued with the father, Christian Diaz Rendon, 36, then fired a shotgun at the front door, went back to his truck for two more guns and fired about 20 more rounds into the house.

Then Diaz Rendon did the thing we say we want people to do. He went out, took the weapons away from the shooter and held him down.

Officer Jason Valenzuela, five years on the job, arrives having been told: active shooter, house, children, gunfire. He encounters a man who appears to have a gun. He fires. The man is Diaz Rendon, the father who had already ended the threat. He died.

Chief Matt Giordano said he was deeply sorry for the family's loss. DPS's Major Incident Division has the criminal investigation, the County Attorney will review it, and Phoenix is running its own administrative review. Garcia has been indicted under Arizona's felony murder statute, because the death happened during a dangerous felony he started.

Here is the question that should be on a whiteboard in every training facility in this state: how do we update responding officers when the scene has changed between the 911 call and arrival?

The callers were accurate. Dispatch was accurate. The officer acted on what he had. But by the time boots hit the ground, the shooter was down and the rescuer was standing. Nobody had the updated picture. That's not a gotcha. It's a structural gap, and a man is dead because of it.

To its credit, Phoenix releases these briefings within 14 days, with video and 911 audio. It started faster body camera releases in October and is running department-wide refresher training on decision-making. Those are real steps. But transparency after doesn't help the officer making a split-second call during.

I'm not second-guessing from a podcast chair what an officer did outside a house where 30-plus rounds had just been fired with kids inside. I wasn't there. Neither were you. I'm asking whether our dispatch protocols and real-time tools keep up with how fast these scenes move. If they don't, the next Christian Diaz Rendon is already out there, and so is the next good cop rolling in on information that's 90 seconds stale.

I was at the FOP Lodge 32 and Arizona State Troopers Association fundraiser in Phoenix for the Skankey and Bennett families. You learn a lot about a community by who shows up on a Thursday afternoon to buy a plate of food for a family they've never met. People showed up. Cops, civilians, whole families. It was quiet and real, and it was the best of this Valley.

The Goodyear officer went home with a graze on his leg and a memory that will wake him at 3 a.m. for a long time. The Queen Creek officers are recovering. The troopers fired on in Phoenix went back to work.

These are real people, doing a job most of us wouldn't last a shift at, in a Valley that's getting harder to police every week. We are in service.

Hear every episode of The Valley 10-8 on Apple Podcasts.

This piece is adapted from Episode 1 of The Valley 10-8 podcast, first published Feb. 13, 2026, and reflects what was publicly known at the time from agency releases, Phoenix PD's critical incident briefing and news reports; investigations described here may have developed since. Names are as reported by agencies. Officers, families and readers with corrections or more information can reach us at [email protected].