Mayhue Smith, a 55-year-old Black/African-American man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was attacked on June 1, 2014, when a stabbing left him gravely injured. Emergency responders found him alive but in critical condition, and he was rushed for medical treatment as detectives began piecing together what had happened. Publicly available reports do not go into detail about the argument or circumstances that led to the violence, only that it was a stabbing serious enough to immediately raise concerns about whether he would survive.
In the days that followed, Smith did not recover well enough to return home. Instead, he was transferred to a long-term care facility in Inola, a small community east of Tulsa, where he lived under ongoing medical supervision. According to later case summaries, his condition never fully improved after the attack; the injuries he suffered on June 1 continued to shape the course of his remaining life. After several months in care, he died in early October 2014, with October 3 noted in some summaries as the date he succumbed to the complications of the stabbing. Local homicide statistics for that year later counted his death among Tulsa’s 2014 killings, even though the assault had occurred many months earlier.
Police did identify a suspect in the stabbing: a man named Thurman Archibald. Contemporary coverage of Tulsa’s 2014 homicide report described Archibald as the suspect in the June attack on Smith and noted that investigators and the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office were reviewing whether the case should bring additional charges once Smith’s death was classified as a homicide. Court records show that Archibald was formally charged in Tulsa County District Court in case CF-2014-2562 with two counts arising from the June 1 incident—assault and battery with a deadly weapon and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon—both tied to the date of the stabbing. Those counts were later dismissed at the request of the state in December 2014, a move that often signals prosecutors are reconsidering how to proceed or preparing to refile under different charges.
Separate booking information for Archibald lists an arrest for second-degree manslaughter in Tulsa County, which aligns with the pattern suggested by the homicide report: an initial non-fatal assault case followed by reconsideration once Smith’s death was officially linked to the injuries from the stabbing. However, the publicly accessible online records do not clearly show how any later manslaughter case concluded—whether it resulted in a conviction, a plea, a dismissal, or some other outcome—and news coverage after the 2014 homicide report provides no widely available follow-up. As a result, the portrait that emerges from open sources is of a man stabbed in early summer, kept alive for months in long-term care, and ultimately counted among Tulsa’s homicide victims for 2014, with a named suspect who was arrested and charged in connection with the attack but whose final legal fate remains unclear in the records that can be seen today.
