Clovis native dies on the hunt

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Shannon Tunnell had, at the age of 33, done what most people had aspired. He lived around family, he had good friends and he got a paycheck doing what he would have done for free.

It was, unfortunately, a few moments that went wrong on June 5 near Raton that ended the Clovis native’s life. A gunner for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Tunnell and his pilot, Kelly Hobbs, were killed in a crash while hunting down coyotes that were a threat to cattle in northeastern New Mexico.

“When he got this job, he was super stoked about it,” childhood friend Shawna Chalker said. “He said it was right up his alley. He pretty much died doing what he loved.”

Tunnell, nicknamed “Bubba” as a baby by his grandfather, was proud of his National Rifle Association membership as an adult and was the person most likely to come down with “sickness” on the first day of hunting season as a youth.

“When we were younger,” sister Savannah Flack said, “my grandfather always had us greyhound hunt with him. Whenever I married my husband, we got more into it. We hunted all of the time, because we could do it all the time.”

Tunnell first joined the USDA in Roswell in 2009, a decade after his graduation from Texico High School. He’d lived in Clovis for the following decade working various jobs, Chalker said, but nothing one would consider a career.

The two knew each other since the age of 8, when an aunt of Tunnell’s was married to a cousin of Chalker. The marriage dissolved later, but the friendship remained. He started attending school with Chalker at Texico in eighth grade, and the two were close friends ever since.

“He’s just a very caring person,” Chalker said. “Any time you needed his help, he was there. He was a really great guy overall. He would do anything for his friend.”

He ended up with an entry position in the USDA through the help of Savannah’s husband, Jeremy, and put in for a gunner position when it became open.

“He was very excited when he got the USDA job, and then when he got the gunner job he was even happier,” Flack said. “My husband helped Bubba get onto the USDA. He got even happier because that was something he did by himself. He didn’t have my husband’s help on that.”

Tunnell lived with the Flacks in Capitan following the birth of their son, Jacob, and spent most weekends hunting with the two.

The deaths of Kelly and Tunnell bring to 12 the number of public employees killed during Wildlife Services aerial gunning operations in the U.S. since 1979. Many of the aerial missions happen in the West, where sheep and cattle ranchers regularly report problems with predators. Such operations were used by Wildlife Services last year to kill more than 35,000 animals in two dozen states. That included more than 21,000 coyotes.

The agency targets animals that prey on livestock and other wildlife as well as non-native species that damage crops or cause problems at airports. A total of 2.7 million animals, the majority of them birds, were killed last year.

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board released late Wednesday says the impact pushed the engine into the cockpit.

No strangers to the risks of aerial gunning missions, the men left the Raton airport just after dawn on June 5. After passing over the edge of a mesa and spotting the coyote, the pilot began to descend. At one point, the plane was flying just 42 feet above the prairie, according to GPS data.

After Tunnell took his shots, Hobbs began to climb to the left. The last reading showed the plane was nearly 100 feet off the ground and its speed had dropped to 62 mph through the turn.

“It hit me pretty hard when I heard about it. It was just like a punch in the stomach,” said Candy Ezzell, a state lawmaker who worked with Tunnell just weeks earlier to address coyote problems on her ranch in southern New Mexico.

Ranchers across New Mexico are mourning the two men, and an account is set up to help defray Tunnell’s funeral expenses at Pioneer Bank in Roswell.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report