A Coconino County grand jury indicted 50-year-old Terrell Storey on Friday for the murders of two Arizona Department of Public Safety members killed when their helicopter crashed during an active shooter response in Flagstaff. Storey faces two counts of first-degree felony murder and 58 additional felony charges.
The dead are DPS trooper and paramedic Hunter Bennett and DPS helicopter pilot Robert Skankey. They went down on the night of February 4 while providing aerial support to Flagstaff police responding to Storey's rampage.
Coconino County attorney Ammon Barker addressed the families directly:
"Our hearts remain with the families of Hunter Bennett and Robert Skankey, and with all the families impacted by this incident."
Two Hours of Chaos North of Route 66
According to Breitbart, the picture prosecutors are assembling is staggering in scope. Storey allegedly used a rifle to fire on the police helicopter while leaping from rooftop to rooftop and exchanging gunfire with local officers on the ground. The incident began around 8:30 p.m. MST and raged for two full hours before Storey was shot and taken into custody.
Two hours. An armed man on rooftops with a rifle, engaging police from elevated positions, firing on aircraft. This wasn't a momentary eruption of violence — it was a sustained urban gunfight in a residential neighborhood.
The 58 additional felony charges beyond the murder counts reflect the breadth of Storey's alleged carnage. Charges relate to multiple other victims, including 25 police officers and residents of homes in a neighborhood located north of Route 66 between Thompson Road and Mark Lane. The FAA and NTSB are still investigating the helicopter crash and the fire that broke out after impact.
The Men Who Answered the Call
Hunter Bennett was a trooper and paramedic. Robert Skankey was a helicopter pilot. They climbed into that aircraft because officers on the ground were pinned down by a man with a rifle who had turned a neighborhood into a war zone. They flew toward gunfire. They didn't come home.
No asterisk makes that sacrifice smaller. No policy debate makes it abstract. Two men with families are dead because they did the job most people wouldn't consider for any salary.
Barker pledged the prosecution would match the gravity of what happened:
"We are committed to pursuing this case with the diligence and care it requires."
That's the minimum. Sixty felony charges suggest the county attorney's office understands the scale.
What Do 60 Charges Tell Us?
Sixty felony counts against a single defendant is not a number prosecutors reach casually. It reflects a crime spree that terrorized an entire neighborhood, endangered dozens of officers, and killed two public servants whose only offense was responding to a call for help.
Stories like this one tend to cycle through the news quickly — a few days of coverage, a candlelight vigil, then silence until the trial date. That pattern serves no one, least of all the families of Bennett and Skankey or the 25 officers who survived that night. The charges filed Friday should ensure this case stays visible. A community endured a two-hour siege. Twenty-five officers were victimized. Two men were killed in the line of duty. The legal system now carries the weight of answering all of it.
The names that matter here are Hunter Bennett and Robert Skankey. Everything else — the indictment, the investigation, the courtroom proceedings to come — exists because they flew into danger and didn't fly out.
