Leroy Coleman Jr., a 29-year-old Black man, was spending the evening of November 18, 2016, at the Holiday Express Motel on West Charles Page Boulevard in west Tulsa, where he lived and worked as the motel's maintenance man. He shared Room 102 with his wife, Chanel, making a modest home out of the small unit near the parking lot and office. That Friday night, a loose gathering of people were drifting between rooms at the motel, drinking and using drugs in Room 103 as the hours slid toward 9:30
p.m. Among those present were Rodney McGee, another guest at the motel, and James “Jay” Mahdavi, a man known around the property and to some of the people staying there. An argument broke out in Room 103 between Mahdavi, McGee, and Mahdavi's uncle, Garland Funkhouser, serious enough that the room's resident, Rodney Brummett, told Mahdavi to leave. Mahdavi did walk out, but the tension did not leave with him.
Not long after he was forced out of Room 103, Mahdavi returned to the motel armed with a. 22-caliber handgun. Surveillance footage later played in court showed him crossing the parking lot toward McGee, who was outside near the motel rooms. The video captured Mahdavi approaching McGee and firing a single shot into his head, killing him in the parking lot. Witnesses inside Room 103 heard the loud crack of that first gunshot. Inside Room 102, Leroy and Chanel also heard the noise; from their small room they could not see what had happened, only that something was wrong outside. Leroy, sitting on the edge of the bed in front of the window, reached for the curtain to look out and see what the commotion was. As he pulled the curtain back, Mahdavi walked around the corner of the building, raised the gun toward Room 102, and fired through the glass. The bullet passed through the window and struck Leroy in the neck, dropping him where he sat.
The scene that followed was chaotic. One of the people in Room 103, Levi Dunkin, opened the door after hearing the gunfire and, by his later testimony, found himself just a few feet from the shooter as Mahdavi stood outside, the pistol still in his hand. Dunkin recognized him immediately and would later tell others in the room that “Jay did it,” a phrase that traveled quickly among those who had been drinking together only hours earlier. Inside Room 102, Chanel had just watched her husband fall after the shot came through the window, turning an ordinary night in their tiny room into a crime scene. Emergency responders arrived to find McGee dead in the parking lot and Leroy gravely wounded. McGee was pronounced dead shortly after midnight, while Leroy was rushed to a hospital, where he initially clung to life but died two days later from his injuries.
From the start of the investigation, police focused on piecing together the relationships among the people in Rooms 102 and 103 and those who had been drifting in and out that night. Witnesses described the earlier argument, the order that Mahdavi leave Room 103, and the way he returned to the property afterward. Surveillance video from the motel provided a stark visual record: it showed Mahdavi leaving after the dispute, then later coming back, confronting McGee in the parking lot, and walking along the building to fire the shot into Room 102. Several people who knew Mahdavi well, including family members and acquaintances from the motel, later identified him on still images from that footage as the man with the gun. With that combination of eyewitness testimony and video evidence, detectives publicly named James “Jay” Mahdavi, then 53, as the suspect in the double shooting and warned the community that he should be considered armed and dangerous.
For several days, Mahdavi remained at large while police followed tips and watched places he was known to frequent, including homeless camps along the Arkansas River. News reports showed his photo and described his physical appearance, asking anyone who saw him to call authorities. The break came on the night of November 25, when a tip led officers to his uncle's house near 218 South 33rd West Avenue in west Tulsa. There, a relative told police that Mahdavi was hiding in an attic space above a shed in the backyard. Officers surrounded the property and tried to talk him out, but he refused, telling them he was not going to surrender. After a brief standoff, officers used pepperballs to force him from the cramped hiding place. Mahdavi emerged and was taken into custody. He was booked on two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Leroy and Rodney, and according to local reports, was held in the Tulsa County jail without bond.
The case moved from motel parking lot and cramped rooms to the courtroom, where prosecutors laid out the sequence of the night using surveillance video, witness accounts, and forensic evidence. A Tulsa County jury ultimately convicted James Mahdavi on two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Leroy Coleman Jr. and Rodney McGee. The jury recommended life imprisonment without the possibility of parole on each count, and the trial judge ordered those sentences to run consecutively, effectively ensuring that Mahdavi would never be released from prison. Years later, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed the case and affirmed both the convictions and sentences, leaving intact the legal judgment that Leroy's death, born from a brief argument and a moment of retaliatory rage at a budget motel, would be answered with the harshest non-capital punishment available under state law.
