Michael Leonhardt, a 47-year-old Black man, was shot to death late on the night of November 19, 2016, during a violent home invasion in southwest Oklahoma City. Around 10:30 p.m., officers were called to a single-story home in the 1300 block of SW 21st Street after reports of gunfire. When they entered the residence, they found two men dead inside: Leonhardt and 38-year-old Marcus Green, both from Oklahoma City.
The scene suggested a sudden eruption of violence—spent shell casings, signs of a chaotic struggle, and the eerie stillness that follows a brief but intense burst of gunfire.
In the days immediately after the shooting, authorities publicly released the names and ages of the two men but initially offered little else. Early news reports emphasized that detectives were still piecing together what had happened inside the house that Saturday night, with no arrests announced and no clear motive shared. Neighbors in the southwest Oklahoma City neighborhood described hearing multiple gunshots and seeing police flood the street as patrol cars and crime scene units converged on the small home. What had begun as an ordinary November evening for residents on SW 21st Street ended with the block cordoned off by yellow tape and investigators working late into the night under the harsh glare of portable lights.
As detectives dug into the case, a more complicated story emerged. According to investigators, the violence was tied to a planned robbery and possible drug activity centered on the house where the killings occurred. Police came to believe that Leonhardt had not simply been an unintended casualty, but was involved in a home invasion attempt that went fatally wrong. Their working theory was that he entered the residence alongside another man, and that gunfire erupted inside the home, leaving both Leonhardt and Green mortally wounded. The case, which had begun as a mystery with two unidentified bodies, was rapidly reframed as a deadly intersection of crime, retaliation, and desperation.
Investigators soon focused on 31-year-old Christopher Dion Norfleet, who had turned up at the hospital suffering from gunshot wounds consistent with being injured during the same incident. By early January 2017, an arrest warrant had been issued for Norfleet on two counts of first-degree murder, with police alleging that he and Leonhardt had forced their way into the southwest Oklahoma City home that night. Authorities said that during the attempted robbery, shots were exchanged inside the residence, killing both Leonhardt and Green while Norfleet was wounded but survived. The felony-murder charges reflected investigators’ view that, because the deaths occurred during the commission of a violent felony, Norfleet bore criminal responsibility for both fatalities.
A second man, 51-year-old Vincent Edward Byrd, was later named as an accomplice. According to court documents and local reporting, a white vehicle was seen fleeing the scene after the shooting. Officers stopped the car a short distance away and found Norfleet inside, bleeding from his wounds, with Byrd behind the wheel. Byrd told investigators he had driven to the complex with Norfleet and Leonhardt, that the two men had left his sight, and that he later heard gunshots before Norfleet ran back to the car and urged him to drive away. Prosecutors ultimately charged both Norfleet and Byrd with two counts of first-degree murder and multiple counts of felon in possession of a firearm, casting them as participants in the ill-fated robbery that ended with Leonhardt and Green dead on the floor of the SW 21st Street home.
Publicly available records and homicide-tracking resources now classify the case as solved, pointing to the arrests and charges against Norfleet and Byrd as the resolution of the investigation into the deaths inside that southwest Oklahoma City house. What remains in the historical record is the stark outline of that November night: a planned home invasion, a burst of gunfire inside a modest home, two men left dead where they fell, and two others pursued through hospital corridors and courtrooms as the justice system sought to account for the violence that claimed Michael Leonhardt’s life.
