Arnuflo Miguel McClellan was found wounded in Oklahoma City on March 10, 2019; the wound proved fatal and he died after being taken to a hospital. Arnuflo Miguel McClellan, age 30, was the victim of a shooting that night, and local news outlets later listed his death among the city’s gun-violence homicides.
What began as a late-night scene of flashing patrol lights and investigators picking through the quiet of a neighborhood turned into a longer investigation as detectives worked to
piece together who had been with McClellan that evening and why. In the months that followed, police developed leads and witnesses that pointed to other people connected to the incident; those lines of inquiry ultimately led to a criminal complaint alleging murder.
On July 2, 2019, authorities announced the arrest of Steven Dewayne Berry on a murder complaint in connection with the March 10 killing, a development that drew new attention to the case and to witness statements police said helped tie Berry to the scene. The arrest came after an investigation that police described as building from tips and witness accounts; the complaint accused Berry of involvement in the shooting that cost McClellan his life.
McClellan’s story also carried echoes of earlier violence: reporting from the previous year shows he had been booked in connection with a separate, serious shooting investigation in 2018, a case in which another person was killed and multiple people were wounded. That earlier arrest and the 2019 shooting together painted a picture of a life enmeshed with the same patterns of violence his city’s emergency crews and detectives confronted night after night.
