Cristian Amaya Hernandez, a 38-year-old man, was found dead on the morning of July 8, 2022, in an east Tulsa neighborhood where the day was just beginning to stir awake. Around 7 a.m., Tulsa police officers were called to the area near East Admiral Place and South Garnett Road after a report of a person down. When they arrived, they discovered Hernandez with a single gunshot wound to the head, his body lying near a modest home in a stretch of residential streets not far from the busy
intersection. The killing would be recorded as Tulsa’s 44th homicide of the year, another life abruptly folded into the city’s growing tally of violence.
As detectives began piecing together what had happened, attention quickly focused on the house along South 108th East Avenue, a place that had already drawn the scrutiny of law enforcement in the past. Records would later describe Hernandez as having been shot to death inside his home there, suggesting that whatever unfolded that night started within those walls before spilling into the broader investigation that followed. Homicide detectives, working alongside the Tulsa Police Department’s Fugitive Warrants Unit, moved swiftly. By the evening of the same day, their search had identified another 38-year-old, Justin Wade Malone, as the primary suspect. Not long after 9 p.m., officers arrested Malone and booked him on a tribal hold for first-degree murder, signaling that jurisdictional issues tied to Indian Country law were already shaping where and how the case would be prosecuted.
In the months that followed, the story of what investigators believed happened inside Hernandez’s home became clearer through federal court filings and grand jury indictments. Prosecutors alleged that on the evening of July 8, 2022, Hernandez and Malone became embroiled in an argument inside the east Tulsa residence. At some point during that confrontation, Malone is said to have taken up a firearm and shot Hernandez, ending the dispute in an instant and leaving the victim dead. The home itself, according to federal authorities, was more than just a place to sleep; it was described as a drug-involved premises where methamphetamine and fentanyl were distributed and used, casting the killing against a backdrop of addiction and the illicit drug trade.
The case did not center on Malone alone. Federal indictments named both Malone and a woman, Devon Marie Larocca, as having roles in what happened before and after the fatal shot. Grand jury documents charged them with second-degree murder in Indian Country and causing death by using and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence, as well as voluntary manslaughter in Indian Country and maintaining a drug-involved premises. They were further accused of evidence tampering and acting as accessories after the fact, with prosecutors alleging that after Hernandez was killed, Malone and Larocca worked together to strip the crime scene of firearms and surveillance cameras and to erase security footage in an attempt to obscure what had taken place in the house that night.
Over time, the stark legal language of the indictments gave way to negotiated resolutions. In federal court, the case reached a turning point when Malone chose not to face a jury over the original murder counts and instead entered a guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter, formally accepting responsibility for causing Hernandez’s death with a firearm during their confrontation inside the home. Larocca, whose alleged role focused on the operation of the house and the efforts to hide what had occurred, admitted guilt to maintaining a drug-involved residence and to a single count of evidence tampering. Separate reporting indicates that Larocca later received a federal prison sentence of more than four years after pleading guilty, underscoring that her punishment, while less than what might accompany a murder conviction, still reflected the seriousness of helping sustain the drug house and attempting to erase traces of Hernandez’s killing.
What began as a grim early-morning discovery near Admiral and Garnett ultimately revealed a complicated story of a man shot to death in his own home, a suspect arrested before the day was out, and a case that migrated from a local homicide investigation to the federal courts. Behind the formal language of indictments, plea agreements, and sentencing orders lies the quieter reality that the life of Cristian Amaya Hernandez ended in a sudden flash of violence, and that his death drew a chain of consequences for those accused of pulling the trigger and helping to conceal the truth of what happened in that east Tulsa house.
