Kyriece Deshawn Hardeman, a 30-year-old Black / African American man, was born on October 15, 1990, in Wichita Falls, Texas, to Rhonda Joyce Hardeman-Williams and Willie Beamon Jr., the youngest in a large family that would later span Texas and Oklahoma. His life unfolded between those two states, rooted in close ties to his mother, siblings, and extended relatives, and he ultimately “transitioned unexpectedly” on May 3, 2021, leaving relatives and friends on both sides of the Red River
grieving his loss.
Growing up, Kyriece attended Frederick Douglass Senior High in Oklahoma City, where he established connections that would keep him linked to the city even while family remained in Wichita Falls. As an adult he made his living in landscaping, a physically demanding trade that suited him and became the foundation of his long-term ambitions. According to his obituary and memorial pages, he had been taking a range of online business courses and was actively planning to launch his own lawn-care service, trying to turn day-to-day work into a family-sustaining business. He was also a father, survived by two young sons bearing his name and legacy, and by numerous brothers, a sister, a grandmother, a network of aunts and uncles, and cousins spread across Texas and Oklahoma, all of whom later gathered to remember him at services organized through Ainsworth & Young Funeral Home.
On the evening of May 3, 2021, Kyriece was at a northwest Oklahoma City apartment complex in the 7200 block of Northwest 122nd Street near Rockwell Avenue, a community known as Forest Creek. That night, what began as a dispute between him and another man inside the apartment they shared or occupied together drew law enforcement's attention. Police and subsequent case summaries describe it as an argument between neighbors who lived in the same apartment, an everyday conflict that, for reasons never fully explained in public reports, spiraled into a deadly confrontation.
Shortly before 9 p.m., Oklahoma City police received a call about a shooting at the complex. When officers arrived, they found Kyriece in or near the parking lot suffering from a gunshot wound. First responders rushed him from the scene to OU Medical Center, but his injuries were too severe; he was pronounced dead at the hospital, another life in the city cut short by gunfire. Multiple outlets that later chronicled the case, including television news and online memorials, listed his death as the result of a violent shooting that turned a residential courtyard and parking area into a crime scene marked by police tape and shell casings.
The man accused of shooting him did not flee. Police reports and news coverage state that officers took a 45-year-old man into custody at the scene and quickly focused on him as the suspected shooter. KOCO and other local outlets reported that investigators believed the confrontation had started as an argument between the two men, escalating until the older man fired the shot that struck Kyriece. KOKH Fox 25 later identified the suspect as Curtis Jones, while News 9 named him as Curtis Eugene Jones III; he was arrested at the apartment complex, questioned by detectives, and booked into the Oklahoma County jail on a complaint of first-degree murder. Because the case was still in its early stages, at least one station initially declined to publish his name until formal charges were filed, underscoring that the legal process was ongoing even as the community already saw the episode as a clear instance of lethal neighborhood violence.
In the days that followed, police asked anyone with information about the argument or the shooting to call the homicide tip line, appeals that were echoed on local newscasts and in online write-ups. Homicide-tracking and victim-advocacy sites later added Kyriece's name to their rolls of people “lost to gun violence” in Oklahoma City, while detailed obituaries and memorial pages painted a fuller picture of the man behind the headline: a son and grandson, a brother and uncle, a father trying to build a small business and a stable future. Crime-tracking projects such as CrimeSolversCentral still list his case and invite updates, reflecting that, for many who loved him, the story did not end with an arrest; it continues in court records, family memories, and the unanswered questions that linger whenever a familiar argument ends not with reconciliation, but with the irreversible sound of a gunshot.
