Robert Damel “Rob” Sapp, a 28-year-old man from Catoosa, Oklahoma, was known as a hardworking hydro-test technician for AXH Air Coolers who had been born on March 8, 1987, in Palm Springs, California, to Cleveland and Betty Sapp. On a night in May 2015, he went to visit a friend in Owasso, Oklahoma, a casual visit that would end in tragedy. His life is now remembered in memorial listings and case summaries that mark May 18, 2015, as the date of the fatal shooting that ultimately claimed
him, even as some local reports note that he succumbed to his injuries the following morning in a Tulsa hospital.
In the early hours of May 18, Owasso police officers were called to the Brookwood Apartments, located in the 1400 block of North Birch Street near 86th Street North and Highway 169. Inside one of the apartments they found Rob with a single gunshot wound to the head, and another adult man — his friend, later identified as Sean Askey — still at the scene. According to police and later news coverage, Askey told authorities that he had been handling a. 22-caliber rifle when it went off, striking Rob in the head while the two men were together in the apartment; some later accounts described the pair as “playing a game” when the weapon discharged.
Rob was rushed from the apartment to St. John Hospital in Tulsa, where doctors fought to keep him alive. The following morning, on May 19, 2015, he died from the catastrophic head wound. Local outlets reported that the Tulsa County Medical Examiner's Office took custody of his body for an autopsy, and that the Owasso Police Department's investigation was expected to be lengthy and complex before being turned over to the Tulsa County District Attorney's Office. Even as regional memorials and databases fixed his date of loss to May 18, the day of the shooting, police and news reports emphasized that he actually died the next morning after a brief struggle in the hospital.
In the first days after the shooting, the man who had called 911 was described publicly only as the “alleged shooter,” said to be cooperating with investigators, and no charges were immediately announced. As the investigation progressed, authorities identified him as Sean William Askey of Owasso. About a year after the incident, prosecutors charged Askey with first-degree manslaughter, heat of passion, in Rob's death, and also with reckless conduct with a firearm. Coverage of the charging documents highlighted that the state believed Askey's handling of the. 22 rifle went beyond a simple mishap, alleging that his conduct with the weapon created the circumstances that led to his friend being shot in the head.
The case continued through the courts into 2016, where Askey's earlier claim — that the gun went off accidentally while he was handling it — remained the central point of his defense even as he faced the manslaughter charge. In May 2016, he chose to plead guilty to manslaughter in the first degree in connection with Rob's death. The following month, a judge sentenced him to a total of ten years, with three years to be served in prison and the remaining seven years suspended, formalizing the state's conclusion that Rob's killing was a criminal act rooted in recklessness rather than a purely blameless accident. In the public record that remains, Rob's story is that of a young friend whose ordinary night at a friend's apartment ended with a single shot from a. 22 rifle and a courtroom reckoning that followed, leaving family, friends, and a community to mourn a life cut short.
