Dazmeontae Sayles was a 16-year-old Black male from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, born on April 21, 2000, and raised in a large family that included his mother Rozina, his father Michael, several brothers and a sister. He attended Oklahoma Centennial High School, where he was a junior, and those who knew him later remembered a boy who could make them laugh even when they were hurting, someone whose presence helped friends through their own losses and difficult days.
On a hot Sunday night in early August 2016, Dazmeontae was at his family’s home in the Summit Ridge Townhomes, near Northeast 115th Street and the Broadway Extension in northeast Oklahoma City. As the night settled in, sometime around 11:00 to 11:30 p.m., there was a sound at the front door — reports say he heard a knock and went to answer it, still inside the safety of his own home. In the same moment that an ordinary gesture of opening the door began, at least one person approached the residence and opened fire, sending bullets ripping through the front door and into the house.
Shots tore through the doorway and windows of the apartment, striking Dazmeontae as his family’s home suddenly became the center of chaos and terror. Neighbors heard the gunfire and the shouts that followed. Inside, loved ones and first responders tried to bridge the unthinkable gap between injury and survival, and he was rushed to a nearby hospital. Despite those efforts, he was pronounced dead shortly afterward, his life ending within hours of the attack that had begun with nothing more than a knock at the door.
In the hours and days that followed, the crime scene on Northeast 115th became a place of police tape and unanswered questions. Investigators documented the bullet holes in the front of the residence and began the painstaking work of trying to learn who had come to that door and why. At Oklahoma Centennial High School, classmates were met with crisis counselors, and students marked their grief with small acts of remembrance, like wearing white ribbons in his honor. Neighbors, some of them parents of teenagers themselves, spoke of how easily such violence could shatter any family, struggling to make sense of how an ordinary Sunday night could turn into a permanent absence.
Police said early on that they had little to go on. The accounts from law enforcement emphasized that the shots were fired through the front of the home and that there was no clear or definitive description of the person or people responsible. No one was in custody in the immediate aftermath, and authorities urged anyone with information to call the homicide tip line, hoping that a neighbor’s memory or a stray detail might break the case open. Years later, case-tracking sites and public records still list Dazmeontae’s killing as an unsolved homicide, with no public indication that any suspect has been identified, arrested, or charged for the shooting that ended his life.
