Tyronne McKinnis died in New Orleans on February 9, 2024, after police were called to the Tulane-Gravier area just before sunrise. Officers arrived around 6:55 a.m. to the 700 block of South Galvez Street on a report of an unresponsive person and found McKinnis at the scene; emergency medical personnel pronounced him dead there. Tyronne McKinnis was a 60-year-old Black man.
In the first hours of the case, investigators treated what they found as an “unclassified death,” a label often used when the cause isn’t immediately clear. As detectives worked the scene and followed up on what they learned, the department said the investigation shifted—what initially looked uncertain was later determined to be a homicide. In the middle of that early scramble, police publicly sought help locating a person they believed might have crucial information, identifying Edward Hayes as a person of interest and stressing that he was not wanted on charges at that time, but that detectives wanted to interview him about what he knew.
Less than two weeks after McKinnis was found, police announced they had made an arrest. The New Orleans Police Department said detectives identified Joel Warren as the alleged perpetrator and took him into custody on February 20, 2024. According to the department, Warren was booked into the Orleans Parish Justice Center on one count of second-degree murder.
