Tulsa police say shootings may have been revenge

JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS

Asso­ci­ated Press

TULSA, Okla. — Two men were arrested Sun­day in a shoot­ing ram­page that left three peo­ple dead and ter­ror­ized Tulsa’s black com­mu­nity, and police said one sus­pect may have been try­ing to avenge his father’s shoot­ing two years ago by a black man.

Police iden­ti­fied both sus­pects as white, while all five vic­tims in the ram­page early Fri­day were black.

Police and the FBI said it is too soon to say whether the attacks in Tulsa’s pre­dom­i­nantly black north side were racially moti­vated. Police spokesman Jason Will­ing­ham said that inves­ti­ga­tors are con­sid­er­ing many pos­si­ble motives but based on Face­book post­ings, revenge appeared to be a factor.

In a Thurs­day update on Face­book that appeared to have been writ­ten by 19-year-old Jake Eng­land, he angrily blamed his father’s death on a black man and used a racial slur. He said Thurs­day was the sec­ond anniver­sary of his father’s death.

“It’s hard not to go off,” given the anniver­sary and the death of his fiancee ear­lier this year, the post­ing said.

“It’s appar­ent from the post­ing on the Face­book page that he had an ax to grind, and that was pos­si­bly part of the motive,” Will­ing­ham said. “If you read the Face­book post and see what he’s accused of doing, you can see there’s link between the two of them.”

The Face­book page had been taken down by Sun­day afternoon.

A fam­ily friend, Susan Sev­en­star, told The Asso­ci­ated Press that Eng­land was “a good kid” and “a good, hard worker,” who “was not in his right mind” after los­ing his father and the Jan­u­ary sui­cide of his fiancee, with whom he’d recently had a baby.

“If any­body is try­ing to say this is a racial sit­u­a­tion, they’ve got things con­fused,” said Sev­en­star, who described Eng­land as Chero­kee Indian. “He didn’t care what your color was. It wasn’t a racist thing.”

The Tulsa World reported that England’s father, Carl, was shot in the chest dur­ing a scuf­fle with a man who had tried to break into his daughter’s apart­ment. Eng­land later died.

The man charged in the shoot­ing is serv­ing a six-year sen­tence on a weapons charge, accord­ing to Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions records.

Act­ing on an anony­mous tip and backed by a heli­copter, police arrested Jake Eng­land and Alvin Watts, 32, about 2 a.m. Sun­day at a home in Tur­ley, just north of Tulsa. The two men were room­mates, and offi­cers went to their home, then fol­lowed them sev­eral blocks to another home, where they were arrested with­out inci­dent, police said.

Author­i­ties said they planned to charge them with mur­der and other offenses. Task force com­man­der Maj. Wal­ter Evans said that inves­ti­ga­tors recov­ered a weapon but that it was not clear who fired the shots. They also found a truck that had been burned.

Police pre­vi­ously said they were look­ing for a man in a white truck.

The Rev. War­ren Blakney Sr., pres­i­dent of the Tulsa NAACP, said the arrests came as a big relief. Black com­mu­nity lead­ers had met Fri­day night amid fear over the shoot­ings and con­cerns about pos­si­ble vig­i­lan­tism in retaliation.

“The com­mu­nity once again can go about its busi­ness with­out fear of there being a shooter on the streets on today, on Easter morn­ing,” Blakney said.

It was not imme­di­ately known if the sus­pects had lawyers.

Police Chief Chuck Jor­dan said the gun­men appeared to have cho­sen their vic­tims at ran­dom. Police iden­ti­fied those killed as Dan­naer Fields, 49, Bobby Clark, 54, and William Allen, 31. Two men were wounded but were released from the hos­pi­tal, Jor­dan said.

The shoot­ings come at a fraught moment for black Amer­i­cans. In late Feb­ru­ary, an unarmed black teen, Trayvon Mar­tin, was fatally shot by a neigh­bor­hood watch vol­un­teer in San­ford, Fla., rais­ing ques­tions about racial pro­fil­ing and touch­ing off protests across the nation.

While Tulsa police were reluc­tant to describe the shoot­ings there as racially moti­vated, City Coun­cil­man Jack Hen­der­son was not.

“Being an NAACP pres­i­dent for seven years, I think that some­body that com­mit­ted these crimes were very upset with black peo­ple,” Hen­der­son said. “That per­son hap­pened to be a white per­son, the peo­ple they hap­pened to kill and shoot are black peo­ple. That fits the bill for me.”

Posted by AP News on Apr 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.