Lenox Richardson, a 44-year-old Black/African American man, was fatally shot on November 22, 2025, during a midday crime spree that stretched from Moore into northeast Oklahoma City. Around 12:24 p.m., Oklahoma City police received reports of gunfire in the 2100 block of Northeast 26th Street, near NE 26th and Martin Luther King Avenue. Responding officers found Richardson shot; investigators later said he had been targeted by a passing driver who pulled up, opened fire, and then sped away,
making him one of three homicide victims linked to the same rampage that day.
According to police and local news reports, the violence started hours earlier at an apartment complex in Moore, where officers responding to shots fired just after 4 a.m. found a man wounded and 18-year-old Serenity Sandra Renee Burton dead from gunshot injuries. Authorities identified the shooter in that attack as 34-year-old Deante Hawthorne, who lived in the apartment with Burton and her boyfriend and fled in a vehicle before officers arrived. Later that morning, Moore police were called again to a different complex near Northeast 12th Street and Eastern Avenue, where an unresponsive man was discovered in a parking lot; he was taken to a hospital and later died, and investigators learned his vehicle had been stolen and entered it into a national database. That stolen vehicle was eventually recovered at the scene of a carjacking in Oklahoma City, tying the earlier Moore incidents to the later shooting that claimed Richardson’s life.
Oklahoma City police say Hawthorne drove the stolen vehicle into the city, then carjacked a white pickup near Northwest 11th Street and May Avenue before heading toward the northeast side. In the area of NE 26th Street and Martin Luther King, investigators believe he saw Richardson outside, stopped, and shot him without any known prior connection or provocation before driving away. At the time of the most recent updates, detectives had not identified a clear motive for why Richardson was targeted or why the suspect carried out the broader series of attacks, describing the shootings as essentially random acts of violence within a continuous crime spree.
Shortly after Richardson was killed, officers spotted Hawthorne driving near Southeast 44th Street and Eastern Avenue, triggering a high-speed pursuit that ended when he crashed near Interstate 240 and Eastern while traveling the wrong way. Police say he got out of the wrecked vehicle and tried to carjack additional motorists at gunpoint on the interstate. During that confrontation he was struck by one truck, then a second vehicle, but got up still armed with a pistol, at which point an Oklahoma City police sergeant, identified in reports as Sgt. Beloncik, shot him around 12:51 p.m. Hawthorne was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, and the officers involved were placed on administrative leave pending standard review of the shooting. With the only identified suspect deceased, there have been no arrests in Richardson’s killing, though police have continued asking witnesses and motorists who were on I-240 during the final confrontation to contact the homicide tip line as the investigation remains open.
In the days following the crime spree, officials and news outlets reported that three victims—Burton, the man who died after the earlier medical episode linked to a stolen car, and Richardson—were dead, along with Hawthorne himself. Memorial pages have been created online to honor Richardson, including an entry on the National Gun Violence Memorial that lists him as lost to gun violence in Oklahoma City on November 22, 2025, with dozens of virtual candles lit in his name, a sign of the grief and support expressed by family, friends, and community members as they process the sudden and violent loss of his life.
