Cape Coral family mourns pilot, son killed in Fort Campbell crash

There is a hole now in the Healy family, one that won’t soon be mended.

U.S. Army Warrant Officer 1 Aaron Healy, 32, of Cape Coral was one of nine soldiers killed Wednesday night in a Black Hawk training exercise.

They died during a routine training mission when two HH-60 Black Hawk helicopters crashed over Kentucky, according to military officials. One helicopter was carrying five soldiers and the other carried four.

Healy, an Ida Baker High School graduate, leaves behind his parents, Vicki and Michael, brothers Shaun and Brandon and his wife and daughters, Sierra, Blakelyn, 12, and Dakota, 10.

His father Michael answered the door Saturday with red-rimmed eyes, tears slowly leaking the whole time he spoke about his son. His mother Vicki loved telling stories about Aaron, but every once in a while, she stopped, overcome with grief, when something –– a word in the past tense, a question about the morning she learned he had died –– reminded her that he was gone.

Slowly, they are working their way through their grief.

The Healys remembered Aaron as a kind person – separately, both his parents recalled when Aaron gave up playing football in middle school. He had played for years, but at one point, they noticed he was holding back. So they took him aside and asked him what was going on.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he told them.

“This game isn’t for you,” Michael recalled saying, chuckling at the memory.

Healy was a dedicated father who loved to spend time with his wife and daughters, fishing, snowboarding, skiing and hiking with their corgis. They spent most weekends on some sort of family activity, his parents said.

He was a calm, collected person without much of a temper, they said, but he could be goofy, too – pulling faces left and right anytime a camera was trained on him. As Michael flipped through his photos on his phone, he saw Aaron making face after face, both in and out of uniform.

“It’s horrifying,” Michael said, dryly.

Brother Shaun remembered a time he visited Aaron while he was stationed in Alaska. They took Aaron’s daughters sledding one night, and went skiing and snowboarding the next day. They took a photo of themselves above the clouds; the trip down the mountain on skis had to take 10 whole minutes, Shaun said.

Aaron had never been up that high, Shaun said. And as soon as they reached the bottom, Aaron only wanted to go back up and do it again, he said.

The whole time, he added, Aaron wore a face mask with a long, white beard attached, à la Santa Claus.

“You probably felt like you were at the North Pole,” Vicki joked. Michael and Shaun cracked smiles, then went back to scrolling through their phones, looking at old photos of Aaron.

‘Felt like I was being torn apart’

Vicki got the call that Aaron had died at 5:30 a.m. Thursday. An accountant, she was already up and working when her daughter-in-law, Sierra, called her.

At first, she said, she didn’t believe it. Sierra told her two uniformed officers had just come to their house outside Fort Campbell, which is on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, to deliver the news. Sierra didn’t even know Aaron was out on a mission – she was caught by surprise that he wasn’t in bed, beside her, she told Vicki.

Vicki said she couldn’t take it in.

She told Sierra she must be wrong, that the Army must have been wrong. But after Vicki hung up with Sierra, two uniformed officers approached the house Vicki and Michael are staying in in Cape Coral and confirmed that Aaron had died.

“I thought I was having a heart attack,” she said. “I had chest pains, and this pain in my stomach that felt like I was being torn apart.”

She kept asking the officers if the military could have made a mistake. If, maybe, it wasn’t really Aaron’s body they had recovered.

She shook her head; they told her there hadn’t been a mistake.

It’s been three days since they found out Aaron had died, and it’s been three days since they started crying, she said Saturday.

“It’s just something you don’t ever want to go through.”

From mechanic to Black Hawk Medevac pilot

Aaron’s career in the military came as something of a surprise to his parents, but they said he loved it. And he could be stubborn.

When his Florida Institute of Technology scholarship got yanked because too many of them had been given out, he enlisted in the Army without telling either of his parents, becoming a mechanic.

The pattern repeated itself a few years later, when he was deployed for the first time to Afghanistan, and was stationed in Kandahar. According to his mother, he and Sierra, a classmate of his at Ida Baker, began corresponding via Facebook Messenger. But he didn’t breathe a word to his family – until he came home during leave.

When they went to the airport to pick him up, he told them there was someone he wanted them to meet, and walked them over to Sierra, who was sitting nearby.

“That’s when we found out,” said Vicki, laughing at the memory.

The second time Aaron was deployed to Afghanistan, he worked as a door gunner on a Black Hawk, and fell in love with flying. Although he had been with the Army longer than the service branch usually allows its flight school cadets, he got a waiver and began to re-train as a Medevac pilot on Black Hawks.

He was on a training mission when the crash took place and killed all nine service members aboard.

First Hurricane Ian, now this

The past year has not been an easy one for the Healy family.

When Hurricane Ian hit Southwest Florida on Sept. 28, it flooded the Healys out of their home. About a foot-and-a-half of water rushed through their home, soaking walls, cabinets and furniture and trashing appliances. Aaron flew back to Cape Coral and helped his uncle’s demolition company strip out the waterlogged and molded cabinets, appliances and furniture, putting it on the curb for debris haulers to pick up.

Aaron also started a GoFundMe for his parents, hoping to raise enough money to furnish the home, something insurance wouldn’t cover.

He had raised just over $1,300 when he died.

Aaron’s body is being autopsied by the Army, after which, the family hopes to have him interred in Arlington Cemetery.

Part of what makes this so tough, Vicki said, is that Aaron was so young. He and Sierra never even discussed their deaths, let alone what they wanted done with their remains.

A service has not yet been set.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Cape Coral family mourns pilot, son killed in Fort Campbell crash