Tomas Contreras, a 23-year-old Mexican man, was shot to death on Saturday, October 24, 2015, in rural western Canadian County near Hinton, Oklahoma, later remembered online among those lost to gun violence that day. In the darkness of the early morning, what had begun as another quiet weekend in that stretch of countryside turned into a short, violent episode that would leave one man dead, another badly wounded and investigators racing to understand who had opened fire and why.
A few
hours before the killing, authorities say a trailer home in rural Caddo County was riddled with bullets, though no one there was hurt. From that first shooting, investigators would later trace a grim path: they believe two suspects moved on into neighboring Canadian County and arrived at a small home just west of Methodist Road on West Reno, outside Hinton. Inside were Contreras and another man, Luis Armando Granillo Morales, when shots erupted again. One of the men, badly injured but still able to move, managed to leave the scene, make his way to a gas station in Hinton and call for help, pulling law enforcement toward the bloodshed they had fled.
Deputies and investigators followed that call back to the home and found the aftermath of the attack: Contreras gravely wounded and Morales suffering from gunshot injuries. Contreras did not survive, dying of those wounds, while Morales was rushed to OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City for treatment. In the first days that followed, authorities said little publicly. Early reports spoke only of one person dead and another injured after linked shootings in Caddo and Canadian counties; no arrests had been made, no suspect descriptions were given and even the names of the victims were initially withheld as detectives tried to piece together what had happened between the trailer in Caddo County and the home outside Hinton.
As interviews accumulated and physical evidence was examined, the investigation began to narrow onto a single name. An eyewitness, according to deputies, identified the shooter as Valentin Monuz Gonzalez, a Hinton resident known by several aliases, including Martin Gonzalez and Heraldo Garcia, who owned and operated a local business called Martin’s Detailing and Construction. The Canadian County Sheriff’s Office obtained an arrest warrant for Gonzalez on charges of first degree murder in Contreras’s killing and shooting with intent to kill in the wounding of Morales, saying the attack had taken place around 5:30 that morning at the West Reno home. Deputies publicly described him as someone whose troubles with the law stretched back years: he had been deported from the United States in 2003 on weapons charges, had reentered illegally under an assumed name and, more recently, had applied for legal resident status in May 2015 only to be denied. With the warrant in hand, investigators warned that he should be considered armed and dangerous and said they believed he might be trying to make his way back to Mexico.
The tension of that manhunt eased within days. After news of the warrant and the public appeal for information, Gonzalez went to authorities and surrendered to deputies in Canadian County, giving up the brief freedom he had maintained after the shooting. With his arrest, the narrative of Contreras’s death shifted from the frantic search for a suspect to the slower, procedural march of the criminal justice system, as prosecutors prepared to press the murder and shooting charges tied to the killing outside Hinton.
Years later, the public record of Contreras’s life and death, at least in the news, remains slender: a young man identified by name, nationality and age, gunned down in the pre-dawn hours with a companion who lived to tell investigators what had happened. Online, his story lingers mainly through brief case summaries and memorial pages that list him among the many people killed with guns on that October day, where visitors can light digital candles and see his name alongside others lost in similar bursts of violence.
