Esteban Hernandez, a 29-year-old Hispanic/Latino man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was living in a small home off East Admiral Place when the night of July 23, 2020, changed everything. He had made a life for himself in Tulsa, but his ties stretched back to Missouri, where family and friends would later gather to say goodbye after his death.
Not long after midnight, emergency crews were called to a residence near Admiral and Yale. It was around 12:45 a.m.
when EMSA responded to a report of a shooting, and Tulsa police officers arrived to find a man lying inside the home with a gunshot wound, already beyond saving. What investigators would learn is that this was Esteban’s home at 4440 E Admiral Place 1/2, and the quiet, dimly lit space had just become the scene of a deadly confrontation.
According to investigative records and later summaries, a 33-year-old man named Joseph Williams went to Esteban’s home that night because he believed Esteban had stolen his car. What began as an argument over property and an alleged debt escalated quickly. Inside the house, the dispute grew heated until Williams drew a gun and fired multiple times, striking Esteban again and again. In those chaotic moments, a woman who was present in the home witnessed the shooting. Williams then forced her to leave with him at gunpoint, turning the already horrific scene into a kidnapping as well, before fleeing with her from the house.
The woman, terrified, managed to place a call to her sister, her voice distressed but unable or unwilling to explain fully what had just happened. Worried by the tone of that call, the sister went to the address on East Admiral Place. When she arrived, she walked into the home and found Esteban’s body, prompting the call to police that would formally open the homicide investigation.
Detectives quickly pieced together what they could from the scene. Law enforcement noted the presence of chemicals and other items that suggested possible clandestine drug activity or dumping, details that added another layer of complexity to the case but did not change the stark reality that Esteban had been gunned down in his own home. As officers worked the case through those early morning hours, they identified Williams as their primary suspect and moved to locate him.
By later that same day, Tulsa police announced that they had taken a person of interest into custody and formally identified him as Joseph Tyrell Williams. Investigators said that Williams and the victim had been arguing over an alleged debt, a motive that intertwined with his belief that his car had been stolen. Williams was booked into the Tulsa County Jail on a charge of first-degree murder, and, according to reporting summarized by later case compilations, he was also charged with kidnapping after forcing the female witness from the home at gunpoint. In statements described in those reports, he told authorities that he had panicked and shot someone he believed was a car thief, an explanation that did little to lessen the gravity of the charges against him.
While the criminal case against Williams moved into the courts, Esteban’s loved ones were left to pick up the pieces. An online fundraiser was launched to help cover the costs of bringing his body from Oklahoma back to Springfield, Missouri, where a service was planned at Sacred Heart Catholic Church before his burial at Rivermonte Memorial Gardens. Friends described the hardship of saying goodbye so suddenly and the weight of arranging his burial far from the place where he died. On the National Gun Violence Memorial, Esteban’s name appears among those “lost to gun violence” on that July day, with candles lit in his memory by people who knew him and by strangers who only knew the outline of his story. What remains is a portrait of a life cut short inside a small Tulsa home, a fatal collision of fear, anger and a gun that turned a dispute over a car into a killing and left a family grieving hundreds of miles away.
