Samuel Grisby was a 51-year-old Black man from Oklahoma City who had been born in Wichita, Kansas, on January 11, 1971, and built a life rooted in family, work, and familiarity with the city's north side. Funeral records list him as the son of Catherine and Eugene Grisby, educated at John Marshall High School, and working as a chef, a trade that often placed him in kitchens and back rooms while others gathered to eat. He had been married and later divorced from Trina Y.
Coleman-Hooks, and he was described as a father to daughters Bria, Brytanni, and Katy and to sons Rushae and Brandon, a man whose circle extended across children and extended family who would later leave condolences and prayers in his memory.
In the early hours of October 21, 2022, the quiet of the southeast side of Oklahoma City was broken by a call for help from the BestWay Inn, a motel near the intersection of Southeast 29th Street and the Interstate 35 service road. According to police, the call came in around 5:17 a.m., bringing officers to 3030 S. I-35 Service Road, where they found Grisby lying outside the hotel, on the ground near the first-floor rooms. He appeared to have been shot to death, and medics could do nothing for him at the scene. The killing was recorded by Oklahoma City police as the city's 64th homicide of 2022, a statistic that turned a single, bloody stretch of pavement into part of a broader story about violence in the city that year.
Detectives opened a homicide investigation as officers secured the motel and began gathering what evidence they could from the scene and its surroundings. Early coverage from local news described the case simply as a deadly shooting at the BestWay Inn, with police initially withholding the victim's name while they notified next of kin and searched for whoever had pulled the trigger. The motel's location, tucked near a busy interstate corridor, meant investigators had to sort through the movements of guests, staff, and passersby in those dark pre-dawn minutes, trying to reconstruct how Grisby ended up outside with fatal gunshot wounds while much of the city was still waking up.
Within days, police announced that the investigation had led them to two suspects. On October 24, 2022, Oklahoma City police and the U.S. Marshals Service moved in on a location in the 3500 block of Southwest 21st Street and arrested 30-year-old Jarret Johnson and 28-year-old Carion Lenox. News reports and a subsequent police bulletin state that both were taken into custody on first-degree murder warrants in connection with Grisby's death, and the official homicide update from the City of Oklahoma City lists each of them as arrested on a count of murder in the first degree in the same incident that claimed his life. At the time some outlets noted that formal charges had not yet been filed, underscoring that the case was still working its way through the justice system even as the arrests gave investigators named suspects to focus on.
While detectives and prosecutors turned to the legal questions raised by the shooting, Grisby's family and friends were left to confront a different kind of aftermath. Funeral arrangements through Temple & Sons in Oklahoma City were kept private, but the online obituary page filled with short messages from people offering condolences, invoking faith, and speaking of him as a loved one now “at peace” and free from pain. A memorial fundraiser organized in his name described a family trying to cope not only with sudden loss but also with the practical burdens that follow an unexpected death, asking for help to gather relatives, care for surviving loved ones, and honor his memory in a meaningful way. On gun-violence remembrance sites, his name appears alongside a simple notation that he was lost to gunfire in Oklahoma City on that October day, a brief line that belies the fuller story of a father, chef, and son whose life intersected with one violent act at a roadside motel and whose absence continues to echo through the people who knew him.
