THOSE WHO DIED
The city of Prescott has released the names of the 19 firefighters who were killed in a wildfire. Fourteen of the victims were in their 20s.
— Andrew Ashcraft, 29
— Kevin Woyjeck, 21
— Anthony Rose, 23
— Eric Marsh, 43
— Christopher MacKenzie, 30
— Robert Caldwell, 23
— Clayton Whitted , 28
— Scott Norris, 28
— Dustin Deford, 24
— Sean Misner, 26
— Garret Zuppiger, 27
— Travis Carter, 31
— Grant McKee, 21
— Travis Turbyfill, 27
— Jesse Steed, 36
— Wade Parker, 22
— Joe Thurston, 32
— William Warneke, 25
— John Percin, 24
Associated Press
REMEMBERING THE FALLEN
Kevin Woyjeck: in his father’s footsteps
For 21-year-old Kevin Woyjeck, the fire station was always a second home. His father, Capt. Joe Woyjeck, is a nearly 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Keith Mora, an inspector with that agency, said Kevin often accompanied his dad to the station and on ride-alongs, and always intended to follow in his footsteps.
“He wanted to become a firefighter like his dad and hopefully work hand-in-hand,” Mora said Monday outside of the fire station in Seal Beach, Calif., where the Woyjeck family lives.
Chris Mackenzie: ‘just like his dad’
An avid snowboarder, 30-year-old Chris MacKenzie grew up in California’s San Jacinto Valley, where he was a 2001 graduate of Hemet High School and a former member of the town’s fire department. He joined the U.S. Forest Service in 2004, then transferred two years ago to the Prescott Fire Department, longtime friend Dav Fulford-Brown told The Riverside Press-Enterprise.
MacKenzie, like at least one other member of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, had followed his father into firefighting. Michael MacKenzie, a former Moreno Valley Fire Department captain, confirmed that he had been informed of his son’s death.
“I can’t talk about it,” he said.
Fulford-Brown, also a former firefighter, feared for the worst as soon as he heard the news of the Arizona firefighters. “I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s Chris’ crew.’ I started calling him and calling him and got no answer,” he told The Press-Enterprise.
Billy Warneke: ‘doing what he loved’
Billy Warneke, 25, and his wife, Roxanne, were expecting their first child in December, his grandmother, Nancy Warneke, told The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif. Warneke grew up in Hemet, Calif., along with his fellow Granite Mountain hotshot, Chris MacKenzie. He was a four-year Marine Corps veteran who served a tour in Iraq and had joined the hotshot crew in April, buying a property in Prescott, near where his sister lived, the newspaper reported.
Nancy Warneke said she called Billy’s sister after seeing the fire on the news.
“She said, ‘He’s gone. They’re all gone,’ ” Nancy Warneke told The Press-Enterprise. “Even though it’s a tragedy for the whole family, he was doing what he loved to do. He loved nature and was helping preserve nature.”
Scott Norris: ‘ideal American gentleman’
Scott Norris, 28, was known around Prescott through his part-time job at Bucky O’Neill Guns.
“Here in Arizona the gun shops are a lot like barbershops. Sometimes you don’t go in there to buy anything at all, you just go to talk,” said resident William O’Hara. “I never heard a dirty word out of the guy. He was the kind of guy who if he dated your daughter, you’d be OK with it.
“He was just a model of a young, ideal American gentleman.”
Andrew Ashcraft: athletic go-getter
Prescott High School physical education teacher and coach Lou Beneitone taught many of the Hotshots, and remembered 29-year-old Andrew Ashcraft as a fitness-oriented student.
“He had some athletic ability in him and he was a go-getter, too. You could pretty much see, from young freshman all the way, he was going to be physically active.”
Beneitone said athletic prowess was a must for the Hotshots. “That’s what it takes. You gotta be very physically fit, and you gotta like it, gotta like the hard work.”
Associated Press
Trapped by a wildfire that exploded tenfold in a matter of hours, a crack team of firefighting “Hotshots” broke out their portable emergency shelters and rushed to climb into the foil-lined, heat-resistant bags before the flames swept over them.
By the time the blaze had passed, 19 lay dead in the nation’s biggest loss of firefighters in a wildfire in 80 years.
The tragedy Sunday evening all but wiped out the 20-member Granite Mountain Hotshots, a unit based at Prescott, authorities said Monday as the last of the bodies were retrieved from the mountain in the town of Yarnell. Only one member survived, and that was because he was moving the unit’s truck at the time.
The deaths plunged the two small towns into mourning as the wildfire continued to threaten Yarnell. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called it “as dark a day as I can remember” and ordered flags flown at half-staff.
In a heartbreaking sight, a line of white vans carried the bodies to Phoenix for autopsies.
“I know that it is unbearable for many of you, but it also is unbearable for me. I know the pain that everyone is trying to overcome and deal with today,” said Brewer, her voice catching several times as she addressed reporters and residents at Prescott High School.
The lightning-sparked fire — which spread to 13 square miles by Monday morning — destroyed about 50 homes and threatened 250 others in and around Yarnell, a town of 700 people in the mountains about 85 miles northwest of Phoenix.
About 200 more firefighters joined the battle Monday, bringing the total to 400. Among them were several other Hotshot teams, elite groups of firefighters sent in from around the country to battle the nation’s fiercest wildfires.
Residents huddled in shelters and restaurants, watching their homes burn on TV as flames lit up the night sky in the forest above the town.
It was unclear exactly how the firefighters became trapped. Brewer said the blaze “exploded into a firestorm” that overran the crew.
Brian Klimowski, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Flagstaff, said there was a sudden increase and shift in wind around the time of the tragedy. The blaze grew from 200 acres to about 2,000 in a matter of hours.
Southwest incident team leader Clay Templin said the crew and its commanders were following safety protocols, and it appeared the fire’s erratic nature simply overwhelmed them.
The Hotshot team had spent recent weeks fighting fires in New Mexico and Prescott before being called to Yarnell, entering the smoky wilderness over the weekend with backpacks, chainsaws and other heavy gear to remove brush and trees as a heat wave across the Southwest sent temperatures into the triple digits.
Arizona Forestry Division spokesman Mike Reichling said all 19 victims had deployed their emergency shelters as they were trained to do. When there is no way out, firefighters are supposed to step into them, lie face down and pull the fire-resistant fabric over themselves.
“It’ll protect you, but only for a short amount of time. If the fire quickly burns over you, you’ll probably survive that,” said Prescott Fire Capt. Jeff Knotek. But “if it burns intensely for any amount of time while you’re in that thing, there’s nothing that’s going to save you from that.”
President Barack Obama offered his administration’s help in investigating the tragedy and predicted it will force government leaders to answer broader questions about how they handle increasingly destructive and deadly wildfires.
“We are heartbroken about what happened,” he said while on a visit to Africa.
The U.S. has 110 Hotshot crews, according to the U.S. Forest Service website. They typically have about 20 members each and go through specialized training.
Many of those killed were graduates of Prescott High, including Clayton Whitted, who played football for the Prescott Badgers from 2000 to 2004.
The school’s football coach, Lou Beneitone, said Whitted was the type of athlete who “worked his fanny off.”
“He wasn’t a big kid, and many times in the game, he was overpowered by big men, and he still got after it. He knew, ‘This man in front of me is a lot bigger and stronger than me,’ but he’d try it and he’d smile trying it,” Beneitone said.
He and Whitted had talked a few months ago about how this year’s fire season could be a “rough one.”
“I shook his hand, gave him a hug, and said, ‘Be safe out there,’” Beneitone recalled. “He said, ‘I will, Coach.’”
A makeshift memorial of flower bouquets and American flags formed at the Prescott fire station where the crew was based.
Prescott resident Keith Gustafson showed up to place 19 water bottles in the shape of a heart.
“When I heard about this, it just hit me hard,” he said. “It hit me like a ton of bricks.”
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