They were dressed as utility workers, so they could be in the neighborhood without raising much suspicion. It was about ten in the morning on Tuesday in Prue, Oklahoma, and the two ‘linesmen’ knocked on the front door of a home.
When the door was opened, the two burst in and tied up the two residents there, and then started hauling valuables out of the home, including a large number of guns. The invading burglars intended to use the big GMC van of their victims to carry off the loot.
They untied one of the residents to take as a hostage. Once their victim was forced into the van, the trio sped away. A short time later, the victim left tied in the house worked himself loose and called the police. He reported that he knew where the gunmen were headed – to a house at 22nd and South Oswego in Tulsa – where they intended to “do harm.”
By the time the police got to the address, the gunman and his hostage had already arrived, and a man later identified as 31-year old Billy Joe Hammons was holding a gun to the hostage’s head. When Hammons spotted the police, he immediately began firing shots, and that’s when it really got crazy.
With the steering wheel in one hand and a gun blazing in the other, Hammons navigated toward Yale Avenue, and at 21st Street, he wheeled into the parking lot of the Walmart food store, where he threw the transmission into Park and ran inside.
When shots rang out inside the Neighborhood Market, shoppers screamed and ran for the doors. Witnesses said the man with the gun fired shots into the air at first, and people just scrambled. A crowd of shoppers got outside only to find the gunman had followed them out. The shoppers raced back in.
Hammons, still wielding his gun, ran to a nearby Chinese restaurant, the Panda Express. He approached a compact car where a driver sat behind the wheel and banged on the window with his gun. When the small car’s door finally opened, Hammons fired inside, killing 24-year old Sufeng He, an engineering student at the University of Tulsa. Mr. He, a resident of China who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, died at the scene.
Rather than stealing the car of the driver he had just killed, Hammons ran over to a pickup in the same parking lot. The owner quickly offered to give up his vehicle, once his wife and child were out of it. When Hammons climbed in and drove off, police were firing guns after him, hoping to head the gunman off.
With one fatality left behind in the parking lot behind him, Hammons careened away in the pickup, traveling nearly two blocks before he crashed into a telephone pole at 22nd and Yale. There were reports that a gunshot was heard.
Cautiously, members of a special police unit approached the crashed pickup, not knowing whether Hammons was holed up, just waiting to shoot again. It was about 2:15 Tuesday afternoon. The first officer reached the window and looked inside.
Hammons was dead behind the wheel.
As yet, no one knows why Billy Joe Hammons went wild on Tuesday, but the police, the friends and family of Mr. He, and the Walmart shoppers are talking about it still.
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