Jarrick “Hammer” DeShawn Hageon was a 28-year-old Black / African American male from Durant, Oklahoma, whose life ended in gunfire on March 2, 2020, turning an ordinary Monday into a day the town would not forget. That morning, the quiet of the Stonebrook Circle neighborhood was shattered by the sound of shots inside a home where Jarrick should have been safe.
Around 11 a.m., police were called to the residence on reports of gunfire, and when officers stepped through the doorway at 1125 Stonebrook Circle they found him already dead inside, the scene marking the sudden and violent close of a young life known by friends and family simply as “Hammer.”
In the confusion that followed, a juvenile at the scene told officers a name—someone they said had pulled the trigger. That name was Kyon Gray. As investigators worked quickly to piece together what had happened in the house, patrol units spread out across Bryan County looking for Gray. A few hours later, around 2 p.m., officers spotted a vehicle on Highway 70 and moved in. When they stopped the car, they took Gray into custody, bringing the person identified by the young witness off the road and into an interrogation room. During questioning, Gray admitted to shooting Jarrick, an admission that gave detectives a stark and chilling confirmation of what had unfolded in the Stonebrook Circle home that morning.
Even as Jarrick’s death was being processed at the house, the day’s violence had not yet revealed its full scope. About an hour after Gray’s arrest, authorities found a vehicle off the roadway near the 2500 block of Sunnyside Road. Inside was Jessica Espinoza, also shot dead, linking the quiet residential killing on Stonebrook Circle with another loss just a few miles away. Investigators came to believe that the same suspect who had admitted to killing Jarrick was responsible for Jessica’s death as well, turning the case into a double homicide that weighed heavily on the Durant community.
As word of the shootings spread, schools were placed on precautionary lockdown, and neighbors tried to make sense of how a day that began like any other had descended into tragedy. In the months and years that followed, legal proceedings against Gray continued, a slow, methodical process moving through the courts as family, friends, and community members sought justice for Jarrick and the woman whose death was tied to the same violent chain of events. The killings left a scar on Durant: a home on Stonebrook Circle remembered not for the ordinary life it once contained, but for the moment when a young man known as “Hammer” was taken, and a community was forced to confront the devastating consequences of a single day’s violence.
