A Stillwater woman who died Friday afternoon in an Arizona parachuting accident was an experienced skydiver, her brother said.

Ann Wick, 55, died around 4 p.m. Friday after “experiencing complications during descent” at Skydive Arizona, police said. The Eloy, Ariz., skydiving facility, billed as the largest in the United States, is about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix.

First responders initiated lifesaving measures, but Wick was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

Wick, a registered nurse, was an experienced parachutist who had jumped “300 to 400 times,” said her brother, Jeff Wallis, who lives in South St. Paul. She took up the sport around the same time she graduated from nursing school a few years ago, he said.

She had previously gone to Skydive Arizona to jump and had traveled there for the weekend to participate in an all-women’s jump, he said.

“She was traveling with a group of women, and she was on her fifth or sixth jump of the day,” Wallis said. “There was some complication. She had a chute malfunction of some sort, and she wasn’t able to release her tangled chute and get the emergency chute to activate.”

A team of paramedics from Canada were on site doing some training and they were able to get to Wick almost immediately, but “they couldn’t do anything to help her,” he said.Wick, a registered nurse, grew up in Burnsville and graduated from Burnsville High School in 1992, Wallis said.

She attended the University of Minnesota for a bit, but was critically injured in a car accident in 1993 in Minneapolis, Wallis said. “She was a passenger in the car and broke her pelvis,” Wallis said. “She was told she couldn’t have children.”

But son Charlie Wick, 23, was born in 2001, and daughter Rosalie, 22, came in 2002, he said.

In 2010, Ann Wick was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer, he said.

“Ann had some pretty major traumatic incidents in her life,” he said. “I think that’s probably why she has a little bit higher risk tolerance than the rest of us. When you have a near-death experience twice, I would imagine that would contribute to your risk tolerance being higher.”

“After going through all that, and then having this happen, it’s just so heartbreaking,” he said.

When she was 49, Wick decided to go to nursing school. “It was kind of her calling,” he said. “She decided after going through all that she wanted to go to nursing school and help others.”

Wick received her associate of science degree in registered nursing from Northwood Technical College in Rice Lake, Wis., in 2019 and her bachelor of science in nursing from The College of St. Scholastica in 2023.

She was a registered nurse at United Health Group in St. Paul, Wallis said.

Wick is survived by her children, Charlie and Rosalie Wick; her parents, Richard and Cookie Wallis of Apple Valley; and brothers David Wallis of Tucson, Ariz., Jeff Wallis of South St. Paul and Michael Wallis of suburban Chicago.

Funeral services are pending.

The cause of the accident remains under investigation. The Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies “will conduct a thorough review of equipment, procedures, and circumstances surrounding the incident,” Eloy police said in a news release.

Further details will be released as they become available, police said.