3 Tulsa Strangers, Familiar to Struggle, Met Same Fate
Shortly after midnight on Good Friday here, Bobby Clark was standing at the corner, waiting for his brother. Dannaer Fields was walking home after playing dominoes at a friend’s house. William Allen was walking, too, headed home after visiting his brother.
In the close-knit world of north Tulsa, the three of them were strangers, two men and a woman who happened to be out on the streets late at night, in the middle of a mundane moment. But they had more in common than they could have imagined. The predominately black neighborhoods where they lived — home to crime, poverty and hundreds of abandoned, plywood-covered homes and businesses — have known struggle, and so did they.
Mr. Clark, 54, who as a teenager was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, used to be homeless and had moved in with his brother after getting evicted from the public-housing apartment where he lived. Ms. Fields, 49, overcame drug addiction; she, too, moved in with her brother after an eviction.
In a three-square-mile area of north Tulsa in the span of one hour on April 6, the authorities say, two men drove up to Mr. Clark, Ms. Fields and Mr. Allen, asked them for directions and then fatally shot them, part of a series of attacks that left three dead, two others wounded and terrified the second-largest city in Oklahoma. The five victims were black. One of the suspects, Alvin L. Watts, 32, is white, and the other, Jacob C. England, 19, is an American Indian who has also described himself as white.
On Friday, prosecutors formally charged Mr. England and Mr. Watts with hate crimes. The two men were each charged with three counts of first-degree murder, two counts of shooting with intent to kill and five counts of malicious harassment, the state’s hate-crime law. The shootings unfolded the day after Mr. England used a racial slur on Facebook to describe the man he believed had killed his father, Carl, in April 2010. Prosecutors declined to file homicide charges against the man who was a person of interest in the case, Pernell Jefferson. They determined that Mr. Jefferson, who is black, was justified using deadly force in self-defense under Oklahoma law.
In a statement on Friday, Doug Drummond, the first assistant district attorney for Tulsa County, said he would not comment about the specific evidence for any of the charges against Mr. England and Mr. Watts, both of whom the police said had confessed after their arrest on Sunday.
“Filing charges is the first step to obtain justice for the victims and their families,” Mr. Drummond said. “This is a tragic and senseless crime. Our office is committed to holding those responsible accountable for their actions.”
The potential punishment on each first-degree murder charge is life with parole, life without parole or the death penalty. Mr. Drummond said the decision whether to seek the death penalty against the two men will be determined later.
The charges were announced the day of the first funeral, for Mr. Clark. At a chapel not far from the scenes of the shootings, Mr. Clark’s brothers, relatives and several African-American leaders and Tulsa officials, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Mayor Dewey F. Bartlett Jr., gathered before his coffin to sing and pray. In his remarks to mourners and in an interview after the service, Mr. Jackson likened Mr. Clark’s death with those of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose murder in Mississippi in 1955 was a catalyst of the civil rights movement.
“Emmett Till was not famous,” Mr. Jackson said outside the Crown Hill chapel. “Trayvon Martin was not famous. And yet it is the power of the blood of the innocent that often is redeeming to us all.”