Spencer Alexander Young, a 31-year-old White/Caucasian male from Enid, Oklahoma, grew up in the city where he was born in August 1991 and became known as a deeply creative soul. Family and friends remembered him first as an artist: he sketched and designed tattoo art for years, and many people in Enid carried his work with them permanently on their skin.
Over time he built a reputation not only for that artistic talent but also for his skill as a mechanic, someone who could bring engines back to life with the same care he gave to his drawings. He was part of a close family, with his mother and siblings around him, and he was also a father, with two sons who were frequently mentioned in memorial tributes after his death.
On the morning of May 25, 2022, a routine day in Enid turned sudden and catastrophic. Around 9:39 a.m., a 911 call brought Enid Police Department officers, along with the Enid Fire Department and Life EMS, to a residence in the 600 block of West Cherokee Avenue. There they found Spencer suffering from a gunshot wound to his right leg and in critical condition. First responders treated him at the scene and rushed him to Integris Bass Baptist Hospital, but despite emergency care he was pronounced dead at the hospital. According to information released by police and echoed in later news summaries, the shot was believed to have been fired accidentally while he was handling a firearm, and investigators at the scene treated the wound as self-inflicted rather than the result of an assault.
Law enforcement and later data compilations on gun incidents categorized the case as an accidental, self-inflicted shooting with no perpetrator. The Gun Violence Archive lists the incident as an accidental shooting resulting in death, specifically noting it as a self-inflicted, non-suicidal discharge with “no perp,” reinforcing that investigators did not identify another person as responsible for the fatal shot. Publicly available summaries and memorial pages that link back to the original news reporting also describe the event in the same way, as a tragic accident rather than a homicide. In the records that are accessible, there is no indication of any suspect being named, no mention of charges being filed, and no record of arrests connected to his death; all available information points to authorities concluding that the firearm discharged unintentionally while in Spencer’s own possession.
In the days that followed, Spencer’s family and friends gathered to say goodbye. Funeral services were organized through Henninger-Hinson Funeral Home in Enid, with plans for his burial at New Home Cemetery near Nash, Oklahoma, a rural resting place that connected him back to the wider family roots noted in cemetery and obituary records. Those remembrances emphasized the pieces of him that remained in the world: the tattoos he had designed, the engines he had repaired, the children and relatives who would carry his memory, and the community that continued to speak of his quick creativity and hands-on skills. Even as official records reduced the tragedy to the language of an accidental discharge, the people who knew him remembered a man whose life had been woven into the daily fabric of Enid, and whose loss left a visible absence in the families, garages, and tattoo designs he touched.
