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Nick Oxford for The New York Times
Jacob C. England's home in rural Tulsa where Alvin Watts lived with him. They were arrested in nearby Turley, officials said.
By MANNY FERNANDEZ and CHANNING JOSEPH
Published: April 8, 2012
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TULSA, Okla. — Late on Thursday afternoon, Jacob C. England, 19, posted a message on his Facebook page, expressing grief — and anger — over the second anniversary of his father's death. Mr. England's father, Carl, was shot on April 5, 2010, at an apartment complex here, and the man who was a person of interest in the case, Pernell Jefferson, is serving time at an Oklahoma state prison.
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Tulsa Police Department/Tulsa World, via Associated Press
Jacob England, left, and Alvin Watts have been arrested in connection with multiple shootings in Tulsa.
Mr. England is a Native American who has also described himself as white. Mr. Jefferson is black.
"Today is two years that my dad has been gone," Mr. England wrote, and then used a racial epithet to describe Mr. Jefferson. "It's hard not to go off between that and sheran I'm gone in the head," he added, referring to the recent suicide of his 24-year-old fiancée, Sheran Hart Wilde. "RIP. Dad and sheran I Love and miss u I think about both of u every second of the day."
Hours later, the authorities say, Mr. England and his friend and roommate, Alvin Watts, 32, waged what city leaders believe was a racially motivated shooting rampage in the predominantly black neighborhoods of north Tulsa early Friday morning, driving through the streets in a pickup truck and randomly shooting pedestrians. Three black people were killed, and two others were wounded in the attacks.
Mr. England and Mr. Watts, who is white, were arrested early Sunday morning after investigators received tips to the state's anonymous Crime Stoppers line, the authorities said. They will face three counts of first-degree murder, they said, and two counts of shooting with intent to kill.
At a news conference in downtown Tulsa on Sunday, police officials said it was too early in the investigation to say precisely what motivated Mr. England and Mr. Watts, and they stopped short of describing the shootings as hate crimes.
"You can look at the facts of the case and certainly come up with what would appear to be a logical theory, but we're going to let the evidence take us where we want to go," said the Tulsa police chief, Chuck Jordan.
In Tulsa — a city of 392,000, about 62,000 of whom are black — the shootings shocked, frightened and angered many black residents on Easter weekend and prompted an intense manhunt. The authorities formed a task force called Operation Random Shooter, made up of more than two dozen local, state and federal investigators from the Tulsa Police Department, the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office and the federal Marshals Service. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also joined the investigation.
Jack Henderson, a city councilman who is black and whose district includes all of the shooting sites, said that before the arrests, many in the area were terrified.
"A lot of people in my community have been calling me, afraid that they couldn't go outside, didn't know if they could even go to church, didn't know if they could go to the grocery store," Mr. Henderson said at the news conference.
"With these two people off the streets, people in my community as well as the rest of this city can feel that they are safer," he said.
Tulsa officials said the shootings were unlike anything the city had ever seen in its modern history. None of the victims knew one another, and all of them were shot within a few miles. Mr. Henderson said he had heard from constituents that in one of the shootings, the suspects had approached their victims at random and asked for directions. "When they turned around to walk away, they just opened fire," Mr. Henderson said.
In 1921, Tulsa was the scene of a riot that is one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in the nation's history, in which a mob of white Tulsans destroyed a black neighborhood and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of black residents.
After the Friday shootings, city leaders said that the anger in the black community had reached the point where people were talking about taking the law into their own hands. Asked on Sunday if he feared any sort of uprising, Chief Jordan replied: "I have much more faith in my fellow Tulsans than that. I think they let us do our job."
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Manny Fernandez reported from Tulsa, and Channing Joseph from New York.
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