Demetrius Andre Spratt was a 20-year-old Black man from Oklahoma City whose short life traced a path from his birth in Albuquerque, New Mexico, through Oklahoma schools and into work caring for others. He grew up in a large blended family, remembered alongside his mother Dianna, his father Ronnie, and several brothers and sisters, and attended schools including Putnam City North High School.
In young adulthood he worked as a CNA in home health care, assisting mentally disabled children and caring for babies, a job that fit the way friends and relatives described him: outgoing, goofy, soft-hearted and deeply loyal, a quiet but handsome young man who loved his family. To those closest to him he was “Chunky” or “Tubby,” nicknames that show up again and again in the tributes they left after his death, where they talk about him as a little brother, a cousin, and a son who was “one of the best in the world.”
In the early morning hours of August 13, 2019, the quiet of the Bennett Ridge Apartments, near Northwest Expressway and North Rockwell Avenue on the northwest side of Oklahoma City, was broken by gunfire. Around 2:30–2:35 a.m., police were called to reports of a shooting at the complex. Officers arrived to find Demetrius suffering from a gunshot wound; there was nothing they could do. He was pronounced dead at the scene, his life ending in the parking-lot darkness of the place he had been visiting or staying, far from the warmth of the homes and hospital rooms where he had spent his days caring for others.
Investigators quickly began to piece together what had happened in the minutes before the shots were fired. Witnesses and family members described an altercation between Demetrius and another man, and one local news outlet reported relatives saying the confrontation had started as an argument about a girl that spiraled out of control. Police accounts later summarized the conflict more generally as “some type of altercation” between the two men that escalated to violence, ending with Demetrius shot and his assailant fleeing into the night. No one else at the apartment complex was injured, but the single loss was enough to echo through his family, his neighborhood, and the wider city.
Within hours, the search for a suspect focused on 24-year-old Mantraz Mentray Jones of Oklahoma City. Police said Jones fled the scene immediately after the shooting, triggering a manhunt that stretched into the morning. Later that day, officers conducting a traffic stop in south Oklahoma City took Jones into custody. According to subsequent summaries of the case, the investigation concluded that the fatal gunshot had followed the argument between Jones and Demetrius at Bennett Ridge, and Jones was arrested and charged in connection with the homicide.
In the months and years after the shooting, the official description of the case has been distilled into a few stark lines: a 20-year-old man from Oklahoma City, shot to death at an apartment complex in the middle of the night, after an argument that should never have turned deadly. On memorial sites, though, the portrait is fuller. There, Demetrius is remembered not only as a victim but as a caregiver who loved babies, a young man who worked with vulnerable children, a cousin and “big brother” figure who made people laugh and who was “always sweet and respectful.” Candles lit in his name and messages from grieving relatives and friends suggest a circle of people who still feel the absence of the shy, goofy CNA who once moved through their lives so quietly, and whose death on that August morning became another entry in Oklahoma City’s long, painful record of gun violence.
