Ryan Brown, a 25-year-old White male from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was killed on September 23, 2020, in a shooting that quickly developed into a homicide investigation involving three local men. That Wednesday night, the Osage County Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call reporting an unresponsive man at a residence within the Bartlesville city limits in Osage County. Deputies, Bartlesville police and emergency medical personnel responded, and Brown was pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators determined that he had suffered multiple gunshot wounds, and authorities publicly said they suspected foul play while the investigation was still in its early stages.
Over the following days, investigators conducted interviews and developed information pointing to Trevon Lewis and Eric Bartley as being involved in Brown’s killing. The investigation eventually led authorities to an apartment complex in Bartlesville. On September 30, exactly one week after Brown was found dead, Osage County deputies, assisted by the Bartlesville Police Department, located Lewis and Bartley at the complex. A third man, Deante Williams, was identified by officers as he was leaving the apartment complex in a vehicle and was detained. All three were arrested in connection with Brown’s death.
The initial criminal cases treated Lewis and Williams as the principal murder defendants. Both were charged with first-degree murder, while Bartley was charged with being an accessory to first-degree murder. As the prosecution moved forward, the allegations also connected the killing with an attempted armed robbery. Court proceedings stretched well beyond 2020. By August 2021, Lewis and Williams had appeared for a preliminary hearing in Osage County, where prosecutors presented testimony and evidence against them. A defense request to continue the hearing was denied, and both men were ordered to stand trial in district court. They remained jailed at that point on six-figure bonds. Bartley, meanwhile, had entered a not-guilty plea to the accessory charge.
Lewis’s case ultimately resulted in a conviction and a severe prison sentence. In 2022, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder, along with an additional five years for attempted robbery with a weapon. The sentencing established that the prosecution of Brown’s death was not limited to the shooting itself but included the attempted armed robbery associated with the homicide. Proceedings had taken roughly two years to reach that stage after delays in the case.
Williams’s case continued separately and eventually went before a jury. In May 2023, jurors found him guilty of first-degree murder and robbery with a weapon in connection with Brown’s killing. The jury recommended that Williams receive life imprisonment for the murder and an additional 20 years for the robbery conviction. The verdict made Williams the second of the two principal defendants to be convicted in the case, following Lewis’s life sentence.
Bartley’s prosecution followed a different path because he had been accused as an accessory rather than charged as one of the two principal murder defendants. Public reporting confirmed his arrest, the accessory-to-first-degree-murder charge and his not-guilty plea, but the available reporting located for this synopsis did not establish a later trial result, dismissal, plea agreement or sentence in his case. By October 2022, local reporting specifically noted that no updated disposition for Bartley was available.
The investigation that began with a nighttime 911 call about an unresponsive man therefore resulted in three arrests within a week of Brown’s death and eventually produced murder convictions against Lewis and Williams. Lewis received a life term plus five years for attempted armed robbery, while a jury later convicted Williams of murder and armed robbery and recommended life plus 20 years. The publicly available reporting reviewed here does not provide a comparably definitive final outcome for Bartley’s accessory case.
