FBI in Tulsa: Too Early to Talk About Hate Crimes
Tulsa police say there is a connection between shootings that terrorized the city’s black community and the shooting of a suspect’s father by a black man.
Two men have been arrested in the Friday shootings that left three dead and two seriously wounded.
Police have said they are looking at a possible Facebook posting by one of the suspects, 19-year-old Jake England, that suggests he was angry over the killing of his father by a black man two years ago.
Task force commander Maj. Walter Evans says investigators know there’s a connection between the two cases, but he and others at a Sunday news conference stopped short of calling Friday’s shootings racially motivated.
The FBI special agent in charge of Oklahoma says it’s too early to talk about hate crimes.
Two men were arrested Sunday in a deadly string of shootings that spread fear in Tulsa’s black community, and police said they were looking at a possible Facebook posting by one of the suspects that suggested he was angry over the killing of his father by a black man.
Acting on an anonymous tip, police took the suspects into a custody at a home just outside town around 2 a.m. Authorities said they planned to charge them with murder and other offenses in a series of shootings early Friday that left three people dead and two critically wounded, all of them black.
Police identified both suspects as white but said investigators have yet to establish whether the attacks on the city’s predominantly black north side were racially motivated, as many in the community feared.
However, police spokesman Jason Willingham said investigators are looking at a Facebook page in which it appears one of the men, 19-year-old Jake England, expressed anger over his father being shot and killed by a black man. Willingham said police were aware of the page but he could not say for certain it was England’s.
A Thursday update on the Facebook page noted it has been two years since England’s father died and “it’s hard not to go off” between that anniversary and the death of his fiancée earlier this year.
A friend of the family, Susan Sevenstar, told the Associated Press that England’s fiancée had killed herself in January. The Facebook page had been taken down Sunday afternoon.
The other man arrested was identified as Alvin Watts, 32. It was not immediately clear whether the men had attorneys.
The Rev. Warren Blakney Sr., president of the Tulsa NAACP, said the arrests came as a big relief.
“The community once again can go about its business without fear of there being a shooter on the streets on today, on Easter morning,” he said.