Do you know who murdered Reginald? In Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the night of May 27, 1999, Reginald Leonard Young, a male African-American / Black resident, was driving a borrowed vehicle westbound along 27th Street North from Cincinnati Avenue when his ordinary trip turned into an ambush. Around 10:50 to 10:55 p.m., as he approached the area of 100 East 27th Street North, he reported hearing approximately ten gunshots ring out in the darkness and suddenly felt a bullet tear into his back.
Despite the shock and chaos, Young managed to call 911 himself, telling dispatchers that he had been shot while driving and describing the direction he had been traveling moments before everything spiraled out of control.
The gunfire left him unable to maintain control of the car. The vehicle veered off the roadway and slammed into a house at 112 East 27th Street North, bringing his frantic drive to a violent stop in a residential neighborhood. The single gunshot wound did not kill him that night, but it shattered his life; the injury to his back left him paralyzed from the waist down. From that point forward, Young lived with profound, life-altering complications, his days marked by the physical and medical consequences of the shooting.
Nearly four years passed between the night of the ambush and the day those injuries finally claimed his life. On May 10, 2003, Young died, and the Oklahoma medical examiner ruled that his death was directly caused by complications from the gunshot wound he had suffered in 1999. Tulsa authorities formally treated the case as a homicide linked to that original attack, and the details of his shooting and the subsequent crash continued to live on in official summaries and cold case files long after his death.
Investigators have never publicly identified who was behind the gunfire that night. The records describe only that Young heard a burst of shots and was struck in the back; they do not name any suspects, do not point to a clear motive, and do not indicate that anyone was ever arrested in connection with the case. Law enforcement agencies and nonprofit investigators now list his killing among Tulsa's unsolved homicides, and the Tulsa Police Department continues to categorize it as a cold case, urging anyone with information to come forward. Community-focused sites and cold-case organizations have taken up his story, repeating the same sparse but haunting facts: a borrowed car, a sudden volley of gunfire on a neighborhood street, years of paralysis and medical struggle, and a death that remains without justice because whoever fired those rounds into his back has never been brought to account.
