Jose Miguel Lopez was a 29-year-old man from Oklahoma City who disappeared after a Friday night out at the OK Corral Club on June 9, 2017. He was last seen there around 11 p.m., dressed in a black cowboy hat, white shirt, jeans, and boots, driving his white 2014 Chevrolet Silverado. When he failed to come home, the concern of those close to him quickly turned into alarm, and by June 10 he had been formally reported missing to the Oklahoma City Police Department, prompting a search that focused
on both Lopez and his truck.
For several days there were no answers. Then, on June 13, officers searching in west Oklahoma City found a body beneath a bridge near Reno Avenue and Council Road, by the river. The remains showed obvious signs of trauma and injuries consistent with homicide. Within a short time, authorities identified the victim as Jose Miguel Lopez, the same man who had vanished after leaving the nightclub just days earlier. His death was counted as the 30th homicide in Oklahoma City that year, and detectives launched a full-scale homicide investigation, asking the public for tips while the community absorbed the news that the missing-person case had become a murder.
Investigators turned to technology to reconstruct his final movements. Using the GPS system in Lopez’s truck, police discovered the vehicle had been parked at the MacArthur Park Town Houses at 6100 N. MacArthur, where they found blood inside the cab and on a side step rail, confirming that something violent had occurred in or around the truck. GPS data and surveillance footage then sketched out a grim route: the truck appeared at a 7-Eleven near NW 23rd and MacArthur, where cameras captured a Black female getting out of the driver’s seat, then moved to a nearby business and motel before turning off toward a river trails access point along West Reno. From there, the truck traveled to the Eden Cove Apartments in Midwest City, where it sat for nearly half an hour. Meanwhile, Lopez’s cell phone was pinged, and officers later found his phone, identification, and credit cards discarded in a heavily wooded area near NE 10th and Sunnylane Road. His body was ultimately located just south of the river access area where his truck had briefly stopped, tying the truck’s path, the discarded belongings, and the dump site into a single narrative.
As detectives pieced together the evidence from video and GPS records, attention focused on the woman seen stepping out of Lopez’s truck. Surveillance images of her were released to the media, and she was soon identified as 24-year-old Jazmine Shawnte Howard, who lived at the Eden Cove Apartments. An arrest warrant was issued, describing charges of aggravated robbery and first-degree murder in connection with Lopez’s death, and Midwest City police ultimately took Howard into custody. Local coverage described her as the suspect in the killing of the missing man found under the bridge, and prosecutors in Oklahoma County charged her with first-degree murder for Lopez’s death.
The fuller story of what happened to Lopez emerged in court, largely from Howard’s own testimony. According to the record later summarized in appellate decisions, on the evening of June 9, 2017, Howard met Lopez outside an Oklahoma City bar. She agreed to provide sexual services in exchange for money, and Lopez drove her in his truck to a dark, secluded area away from public view. There, while she was performing oral sex, he abruptly got out of the driver’s seat, came around to the passenger side, opened the door, and pulled her head toward his crotch while also pulling on her arms. Howard testified that she was confused by his actions and frightened, alone with him in an isolated spot. In that moment, she drew a gun from her purse and shot Lopez once in the chest.
Howard later recounted that she did not leave Lopez’s body where he fell. Instead, she and her boyfriend returned to the scene, loaded his body into the truck, and drove to a nearby river bridge, where they dumped him over the side into the water below. Investigators would later find Lopez’s phone, identification, and bank cards thrown away in the wooded area in Midwest City, separate from where the body was ultimately recovered, reinforcing the prosecution’s theory that whoever killed him had tried to erase his trail and delay discovery. When his body was finally pulled from beneath the bridge days later, decomposition had already begun, and at trial prosecutors introduced disturbing photographs of his remains—images that Howard challenged on appeal as unfairly prejudicial but that the courts ultimately allowed to stand.
In Oklahoma County District Court case CF-2017-4447, Howard was tried before a jury on a charge of first-degree murder. Her defense argued that she had acted out of fear and sought jury instructions on self-defense and lesser forms of homicide. The jury was instead instructed, among other things, on second-degree “depraved-mind” murder, and it rejected her claim to outright justification. Howard was found guilty of second-degree murder, and in line with the jury’s recommendation, the trial court sentenced her to 30 years in prison and imposed a $10,000 fine. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed her conviction and sentence in January 2021, and a later federal habeas petition was dismissed, with the Tenth Circuit denying her request for a further appeal in 2023. Public inmate records indicate that she remains incarcerated in the Oklahoma County Detention Center, with no publicly listed release date.
What began as a routine night out for Jose Miguel Lopez ended in a secluded stretch of road, a bridge over a river, and a chain of evidence that slowly reconstructed the final hours of his life. The investigation that followed his disappearance—anchored by the technology in his truck, the cameras that watched city streets, and the forensic trail of his scattered possessions—ultimately led to the arrest and conviction of Jazmine Howard. Years later, the legal record preserves the stark outline of his last night: a meeting outside a bar, a drive into the dark, a single gunshot, and a body carried to the river, leaving behind a family who watched a missing-person alert turn into a homicide case and, finally, into a resolved but haunting story in the city’s history.
