Do you know who murdered Nathaniel? Nathaniel “Sam” Ball was a 61-year-old Black man living in a modest house on North Norfolk Avenue in Tulsa, a place familiar enough to his visitors that one of them stopped by on a late September day to buy liquor and check in on him. When that visitor stepped inside 3202 North Norfolk on September 28, 1999, the quiet of the home was broken by the sight of Ball lying on the floor, wounded and struggling.
He was still conscious long enough to tell the visitor that he had been shot, a brief, urgent admission that turned an ordinary errand into the beginning of a homicide investigation.
The shaken visitor rushed back out of the house to find a phone and call for help, leaving Ball alone on the floor of his residence. By the time emergency responders arrived, the man they had been sent to save was already beyond their reach; he was pronounced dead at the scene, his injuries traced to gunshot wounds inflicted inside what should have been the safety of his own home. Later accounts from cold-case investigators and advocacy groups would echo the same stark conclusion: Ball had been murdered inside his residence in Tulsa, shot to death without any immediate explanation as to why someone had targeted him there.
Retellings of the crime gathered over the years sketch a picture of a violent attack carried out from outside the house, with shots fired into the residence from a passing vehicle while Ball slept, the bullets tearing through the darkness and into the quiet of his bedroom. Those narratives describe him being struck and left gravely injured, the kind of wound that offers only a narrow window for survival. In some versions, the emphasis falls on the suddenness of the drive-by gunfire; in others, on the lonely final moments in which he lay on the floor, aware of what had happened to him but unable to escape it. Together, they form a grim composite of a life ended by gunfire that came without warning and from assailants who never stepped inside the house they turned into a crime scene.
In the years since Ball’s death, his name has remained on lists of unsolved homicides maintained by the Tulsa Police Department and by organizations dedicated to cold cases in Oklahoma, a reminder that his killer or killers have never been brought to justice. Police records and advocacy profiles consistently describe the case as unresolved, noting that no one has ever been publicly identified as a suspect and that investigators have never released even a basic description of the shooter. Public summaries of the file give no indication of any arrests connected to the killing, only the enduring image of an older resident found shot in his own home, his story kept alive by cold-case databases, memorial listings, and the hope that someone who knows what happened on that September day will one day come forward and finally fill in the silences that still surround his death.
