By the time it reached Scottsdale Airport late Saturday night, the car had a Phoenix police helicopter circling above it and, according to police, a GPS tracker stuck to its rear bumper. It then pulled up to the airport’s locked security gate.
Then, police say, it was on the airfield, and it had hit an airplane.
Two people, 33-year-old Liberty Dawn Still and 24-year-old Michael Gregory Wall, were arrested and booked into jail on felony charges, Phoenix police said. The department has not released the specific counts, and neither has been convicted of anything.
A traffic stop that ended on an airfield
The Phoenix Police Department’s account goes like this: around 11 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17, officers tried to pull over a vehicle the department has tied to what it calls an “unlawful street racing group.” The driver didn’t stop. Instead of chasing the car, Phoenix police said, officers let the department’s Air Support Unit follow it from overhead as it left Phoenix and crossed into Scottsdale.
The helicopter was not the only thing keeping tabs on it. Phoenix police Sgt. Chris Berrelleza told FOX 10 that detectives had managed to fire a GPS tracking device onto the car’s back bumper so officers could monitor where it went without staying on its tail.
Where it went was the airport. The air unit watched the car stop at a locked security gate, and police say that was the first moment officers on the ground actually tried to stop it. The driver then backed into a detective’s vehicle, according to police, before going forward through the gate and onto the airfield, where the car struck a wall and an unoccupied small plane.
Police told AZFamily that Still was behind the wheel and that the car finally came to rest inside a private hangar. From there, Phoenix police said, the two got out and ran toward the tarmac. That meant crossing open airport pavement on foot, under a police helicopter that had been following them since Phoenix. Officers caught both of them. Police said a Taser was used on Wall during the arrest.
Not a quiet corner of the map
Scottsdale Airport is not an abandoned strip in the desert. The city-owned field has a single runway, 8,249 feet long, and logged about 171,675 takeoffs and landings in 2023, according to the City of Scottsdale’s airport fact sheet. Roughly 422 aircraft are based there, from single-engine recreational planes to corporate jets, and the city describes it as one of the busiest corporate jet facilities in Arizona.
Berrelleza pointed out that the car ended up on an active runway and said the outcome could have been “potentially catastrophic.” Airport operations were not affected, KTAR reported, citing police.
The part of the plan that worked
Launcher-fired GPS trackers exist for exactly this kind of night. As the National Institute of Justice describes the technology, a launcher on the front of a patrol car fires an adhesive projectile containing a GPS module onto a fleeing vehicle, which lets officers back off and follow its location remotely instead of chasing it at speed. Phoenix police have not said which system they used.
By the department’s account, that is roughly how it played out. There was no ground pursuit. Officers knew where the car was the whole time. The car went somewhere it could not get through, and then drove through it anyway.
What happens next
Scottsdale police secured the scene and documented damage to the gate, the hangar and the plane, according to Phoenix police. The FBI responded and is investigating the pair’s entry into a secured area of the airport, Phoenix police told ABC15. Police have not identified the plane, its owner or the extent of the damage, and the accounts released so far do not mention any injuries.
Court records detailing the charges were not yet available Monday. This story will be updated when the specific charges are available.
Of all the places a car could go with a police helicopter following it, this one went to the airport.