On a mild Thursday night in early November 2011, Keandre Ellis, a 26-year-old African-American man, was spending the evening with his younger brother, Timothy McDowell, in a modest upstairs apartment in midtown Tulsa, just off 10th Street and St. Louis Avenue. The building at 1006 South Saint Louis Avenue was the kind of multi-unit place people passed every day without really seeing, its lights glowing softly against the fall darkness as traffic drifted by on nearby streets.
Inside, the brothers settled into the ordinary rhythms of a late weeknight, unaware that within hours the apartment would be filled with police, crime-scene tape, and the echo of unanswered questions that would follow their family for years. Shortly before midnight on November 3, 2011, neighbors heard commotion and then the sharp crack of gunfire, and a 911 call summoned officers to the property.
When officers stepped through the doorway, the quiet midtown building had been transformed into a crime scene. Keandre lay inside the home, mortally wounded by a gunshot to the chest, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Nearby, 22-year-old Timothy was gravely injured, fighting for his life after being hit multiple times; he was rushed to a Tulsa hospital and taken immediately into surgery, his survival uncertain in those first chaotic hours. A third resident in the apartment told police that she had been asleep when she woke to the sounds of a fight, followed by a gunshot, a detail that suggested some kind of confrontation in those last moments but left almost everything else unexplained.
In the first hours of the investigation, detectives struggled to piece together what had happened inside the apartment that night. Early reports reflected their uncertainty: they were not sure whether the gunfire had erupted during an argument inside the home or if the shots had been fired from outside, toward the apartment’s interior. What they did feel confident about was that this did not appear to be random; investigators told reporters they believed the victims knew whoever was responsible, suggesting that the violence had grown out of some prior connection or simmering dispute rather than a chance encounter.
As detectives canvassed the area and reconstructed the brothers’ final hours, one name quickly surfaced: 56-year-old Richard Mayne, a white man who owned or occupied the apartment and had been with the brothers earlier that evening. Witnesses and police reports placed Mayne at the residence shortly before the shooting, but by the time officers arrived he was gone. According to news coverage at the time, Mayne had left on foot, reportedly to walk to a nearby convenience store, and he never returned to the scene; from that point forward, police publicly described him as someone they were urgently trying to find. Broadcast and print reports circulated his age, height, and weight, asking anyone who recognized him to contact Crime Stoppers or the Tulsa Police Homicide Unit, and a crime-news aggregation site later cataloged him as “wanted for investigation” in connection with the shooting incident.
Over time, as the immediate urgency of the case faded from nightly newscasts, the story of what happened inside 1006 South Saint Louis Avenue on that November night began to reappear in a different form on crowdsourced crime and property-history websites. One widely shared summary, drawing on what it described as later testimony from Timothy, characterizes the attack as a robbery attempt: two men dressed head to toe in black, armed with guns, forcing their way into the apartment where the brothers were staying and opening fire as they tried to rob them. In that retelling, Timothy is said to have been shot five times and Keandre three times before the assailants fled into the night, leaving the small apartment spattered with evidence and the surviving brother to tell investigators what he remembered. The same community-written account portrays Mayne as having been identified as a suspect early on but “let go,” while noting that subsequent years brought no public announcement of charges, trials, or convictions tied to the case.
More than a decade later, the killing that shattered that midtown apartment remains officially unresolved. Online homicide and cold-case databases list Keandre’s death as a “death by force” in Tulsa, reiterating the basic facts of the shooting, Timothy’s critical injuries, and the lingering interest in speaking with Mayne, but they do not record any later arrest or prosecution for the crime. Community forum posts attached to those case entries speak of the pain carried by the family and the enduring mystery of Mayne’s disappearance from public view after he was first named as someone police wanted to find, reflecting a sense that the story simply stopped rather than ended. In those digital traces—the archived news articles, the crowdsourced summaries, the pleas for information—the night of November 3, 2011 sits frozen in time: a small apartment, brothers sharing a quiet evening, the sudden burst of violence, and an investigation that, at least in the record available to the public, has yet to deliver a clear answer about who pulled the trigger and why.
