Jose C. Hurtado, a 43-year-old male, was found dead on September 13, 2014, inside his home in southeast Oklahoma City. Police were called to a residence in the 100 block of S.E. 34th Street after a report that a body had been discovered; when officers went inside, they found Hurtado with apparent gunshot wounds, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. The house, in a residential part of the city near South Santa Fe Avenue and Southeast Grand Boulevard, quickly became the center of a homicide investigation as detectives began working to understand who had come into Hurtado’s home and why the encounter had turned deadly.
In the wake of the killing, investigators treated the shooting as a deliberate act tied to other criminal behavior rather than a random incident. Their work led them to identify multiple suspects connected to what authorities described as a robbery that unfolded inside Hurtado’s home. The investigation first focused on 54-year-old Joseph Thomas Johnson, who was identified and arrested in connection with the homicide, marking the first major break in the case and establishing that more than one person was believed to have been involved in planning and carrying out the crime.
Several months after the shooting, the case erupted into public view again with a dramatic pursuit on the other side of Oklahoma City. In April 2015, Oklahoma City police, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and the U.S. Marshals pursued a white car down Rockwell Avenue near Northwest 23rd Street. During the chase, the driver rammed a marshal’s vehicle and a trooper’s car before the pursuit came to an end and he tried to run, only to be chased down and captured by officers. Authorities identified the driver as Hugo Gonzalez and announced that he was believed to be responsible for killing Hurtado, directly linking the high-speed chase to the unsolved September homicide in southeast Oklahoma City.
By that point, two other alleged accomplices, Joseph Johnson and Brooke McNew, had already been taken into custody the previous year. With Gonzalez now arrested, all three were charged in connection with Hurtado’s death, facing counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit a felony and robbery with a firearm. The charges painted a picture of a planned felony that escalated into lethal violence inside Hurtado’s own home, turning what began as a single gunshot killing in a southeast Oklahoma City residence into a multi-suspect case involving a prolonged investigation, earlier arrests of accomplices and a dangerous pursuit before the final suspect was brought in.
