Frank Hayworth, a 24-year-old Black man from Oklahoma City, was shot to death in the summer of 2007 during a brief, violent encounter inside a house in the northeast part of the city. On the night of July 3, officers were dispatched after reports of gunfire in the area. When they arrived at the residence, they found Hayworth inside, mortally wounded from the shooting.
The discovery of his body in that house, with no immediate suspect in custody, turned a routine shots-fired call into a homicide investigation that would stretch on for months.
Detectives quickly began piecing together what had happened inside the home before the shots rang out. Early indications from police suggested that the killing appeared to be gang-related, placing it within a pattern of retaliatory or dispute-driven violence that had troubled portions of northeast Oklahoma City. The location of the shooting and the manner in which Hayworth was killed led investigators to believe he had been deliberately targeted rather than caught in random crossfire. Even as they processed the crime scene and interviewed potential witnesses, they were working under the assumption that the gunman was someone already known to law enforcement.
Within days, the investigation began to focus on a 32-year-old man named Alfonzo Bullock Jr. Police described Bullock as a career criminal who had spent much of the previous thirteen years cycling in and out of prison on drug and weapons convictions. According to Oklahoma City police and the state Department of Corrections, he was well known in the local criminal underworld and went by the street name “Ace.” Based on what detectives learned from witnesses and other evidence, they obtained a first-degree murder warrant for Bullock, formally naming him as the man they believed responsible for Hayworth’s death at the northeast Oklahoma City house. Authorities warned that he might still be in the metropolitan area and emphasized his history of serious offenses as they worked to track him down.
The search for Bullock stretched on for months after the warrant was issued. Nearly a year after the shooting, in May 2008, Oklahoma County sheriff’s deputies finally located him at a house in northwest Oklahoma City. Acting on the outstanding warrant, they arrested the 32-year-old and booked him on a first-degree murder allegation in connection with the July 3, 2007 killing of Hayworth. The arrest marked a turning point in the case: the man police had long suspected of pulling the trigger was now in custody, facing prosecution for a homicide that had begun as a late-night burst of gunfire in a quiet neighborhood and ended with a young man dead inside a modest northeast-side home.
