On the morning of September 19, 1979, at the edge of Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, airport police officer Garland L. Garrison, a 50-year-old White / Caucasian male, set out on what seemed like another routine call. He had spent seven years with the Will Rogers Airport Police Department, wearing badge number 003, part of the small force responsible for the roads and open fields that framed the airport.
Shortly after 8:30 a.m., dispatchers sent him and his partner, 24-year-old Officer Teresa Wells, to check on a woman and a young boy reported walking along South Meridian Avenue, throwing clothing into the roadway and behaving oddly near the airport’s fringe.
The pair drove to the 5400 block of South Meridian, just north of the airport, where they found the woman and child—later identified as 31-year-old Rita Silk Nauni and her ten-year-old son. Nauni and her boy had flown in that morning from Los Angeles and, instead of arranging ground transportation, she had decided simply to start walking toward Lawton, Oklahoma. As they trudged along the road, they discarded clothes to lighten their bags, an odd trail of belongings that had drawn the attention of motorists and airport personnel and led to the call. Garrison and Wells pulled up, stepped out of their patrol vehicle, and began trying to sort out who the pair were and why clothing had been left scattered along the roadside.
Accounts later recorded in court would differ on small details—whether Nauni and her son tried to run at first, or precisely how the confrontation unfolded—but they agreed on the core of what happened next. As the officers tried to place mother and child into their vehicle to investigate further and retrieve the discarded clothing, the encounter turned violent. Nauni began cursing and struggling, swinging her arms, spitting and trying to bite both officers. Officer Wells would testify that at that point she considered Nauni under arrest for assault on a police officer. In the scuffle that followed, Wells stumbled or fell into a shallow ravine at the roadside. The strap securing her service revolver broke, and in that moment of chaos Nauni kicked Wells in the stomach, reached for the loose weapon, and wrenched the gun free.
On the pavement above, Garrison was focused on the child, attempting to secure the boy in the patrol car and separate him from the escalating fight between his mother and Wells. It was in that fragile, divided moment—one officer hurt and disarmed, the other trying to shield a frightened ten-year-old—that Nauni came up with the revolver in her hand. Witnesses and later testimony differed about the exact order of the shots, but the broad outline remained consistent: Nauni opened fire, striking Garrison in the chest, in the area of his armpit, with Wells’ own service weapon, and shooting Wells in the leg. The quiet stretch of South Meridian that had moments earlier held only a woman, a child, and two officers was suddenly a crime scene, marked by the sound of gunfire and the confusion of a wounded partner and a gravely injured officer bleeding on the roadside.
Nauni did not stay at the scene. With her son still with her and the officers down, she climbed into the airport police patrol car and sped away, leaving the injured officers behind. The stolen cruiser triggered an immediate response. Oklahoma City police units converged on the area, and a brief pursuit ended when Nauni, behind the wheel of the airport unit, collided with other patrol cars and was forced to a stop. She was taken into custody there, arrested in connection with the shooting of Garrison and Wells and the theft of the police vehicle. Meanwhile, Garrison was rushed to South Community Hospital. Despite efforts to save him, the wound to his chest was catastrophic; he bled to death from the gunshot injury that morning, his “end of watch” fixed forever as September 19, 1979. Wells survived her leg wound and later recounted the struggle in court.
The investigation that followed pulled together the scattered pieces of that morning. Dispatch logs and testimony showed that airport and Oklahoma City authorities had been told they were dealing with what airline personnel described as a possible “mental patient,” a woman acting strangely with a child in tow. Medical records and witnesses described Nauni’s history of drug use and the possibility of mental illness; investigators also noted that laboratory tests taken on September 19 and 20, 1979, were negative for drugs then in her system. Prosecutors built a case around the sequence of events on South Meridian Avenue: the officers’ arrival, the attempted placement of Nauni and her son into the car, the sudden explosion of violence, the seizure of Wells’ weapon, the shots that killed Garrison and wounded Wells, and the flight in the stolen police vehicle.
When the case went to trial in Oklahoma County District Court, the stakes were immense. Nauni was charged with murder in connection with Garrison’s death and with shooting with intent to kill for the wounding of Wells. Her defense centered on her mental state: she claimed she had not been sane at the time of the shootings, and her lawyers pressed for extensive voir dire, raising concerns about media coverage, the involvement of police victims, and potential bias against a Native American defendant. The trial stretched over weeks, with nearly 870 pages of jury selection transcript and testimony from forty-two witnesses. Mental health experts presented clashing portraits of Nauni’s mind on that September morning—her side emphasizing psychological problems and prior drug use, the state’s experts insisting that she could distinguish right from wrong when she pulled the trigger.
In the end, the jury stepped back from the original murder charge but found Nauni guilty of manslaughter in the first degree for killing Garrison and guilty of shooting with intent to kill for the attack on Wells. They sentenced her to 100 years’ imprisonment on the manslaughter count and 50 years on the shooting charge. On September 19, 1983—four years to the day after the shooting—the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed both convictions, rejecting challenges to the jury selection, to the handling of psychiatric evidence, and to the instructions given on voluntary intoxication and insanity. The appellate judges noted that, despite conflicting testimony about her mental condition, there was sufficient evidence for the jury to conclude that Nauni knew what she was doing when she seized the gun, shot both officers, and fled in their car.
In the years since, Garrison’s name has been etched into the fabric of law enforcement memory. He is listed on the Officer Down Memorial Page, on dedicated airport law enforcement memorial rolls, and on online remembrances that describe how a call that began as a littering or welfare check turned into a fatal encounter. Other sites devoted to homicide and gun-violence victims preserve the bare facts of his death—his role as an airport officer, the road where he fell, the date that ended his career and his life.
Taken together, those records paint the picture of an officer who walked into a situation that seemed, at first glance, manageable: a woman, a child, some clothing scattered along a road near an airport. Within minutes it became a desperate struggle over a single handgun and the lives of two officers. The case left behind not only a trail of legal arguments and appellate opinions but a lasting sense of how quickly a routine call can twist into tragedy, and how a short stretch of pavement on South Meridian Avenue became the place where Garland L. Garrison never came home from work again.
