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New Orleans Jury Convicts Tyrone Steele of Four 2022 Murders, Including an Encampment Street Triple Killing

The 20-year-old was found guilty in the deaths of Darrin Williams, Nehemiah Jones, Amya Cornin and Shane Brown and acquitted in a fifth killing. Life was mandatory.

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Tyrone Steele in a booking photograph

Two figures loitered outside a window at an apartment complex in the 4100 block of Encampment Street in New Orleans in the early hours of March 21, 2022, trying to get a window open. Both were carrying guns when they climbed into Apartment 310, but investigators later concluded that only one of them fired. Darrin Williams, 27, was probably asleep, a detective later testified, on the living room couch when the first shots hit him. A light came on in the bedroom, more shots followed, and Nehemiah Jones, 24, and Amya Cornin, 21, were later found there, holding each other beside the bed. Then, the detective testified, came a third round of shots into Williams. He was hit eighteen times.

On Thursday, March 7, 2024, an Orleans Parish jury found Tyrone Steele, 20, guilty of first-degree murder in all three deaths. Jurors had begun deliberating around noon and returned their verdict just after 4 p.m. They also convicted Steele in the death of Shane Brown, 20, returning second-degree murder on a count indicted as first-degree murder, and found him guilty of aggravated burglary, conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and illegally discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. They acquitted him of the second-degree murder of Donald McNeil, of a conspiracy count and of one firearm count. The convictions carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole, and sentencing was set for March 15.

Brown was last seen alive on the same day as the triple killing. A Ring doorbell camera on Spain Street recorded him with Steele that day, Brown in the Polo shirt he would be found in. Brown's gray Nissan Altima was the car that surveillance cameras caught speeding away from Encampment Street at about the time of the shooting, and Steele had been driving it ever since. When Brown did not come home, his mother tracked his phone to an apartment complex and found his car in the lot. On March 26, his body was found in a canal near Morrison and Gannon roads in the Little Woods area of New Orleans East, with a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Nearly the whole back seat of the Altima was covered in his blood, and a swab from the gearshift carried Steele's DNA.

Much of the case came out of an Instagram account, "omerta.07," that a detective tied to Steele through photographs and videos of him, recordings of his voice and the tattoos on the back of his left hand. After the killings the account posted pictures of the apartment window, photos of Jones and Williams, and a boast that used Williams's and Jones's nicknames. Two posts, the detective testified, held details that had not been made public, including that there had been only one shooter. As for motive, the detective pointed to a February 27, 2022, shootout between Steele and Williams at Spider's Meat Market, and investigators ballistically matched the casings from that exchange to the triple killing. A Glock handgun found in the house where Steele was arrested on the evening of March 30, 2022, was used, the evidence showed, both on Encampment Street and in Brown's death.

Steele called no witnesses. In closing, his lawyers argued there was no substantial evidence linking him to the crimes. After the verdict his attorney, Jerome Matthews, said some of the evidence had not been fairly presented and that he planned to appeal.

Court records cited by FOX 8 show that Steele had been accused of violence before. He was arrested for attempted second-degree murder in May 2020, a case the district attorney's office dropped on April 7, 2021, when it was transferred to juvenile court. He was booked with second-degree murder on June 17, 2021, and the district attorney's office refused that prosecution on December 9.

Williams's first name appears as Darrin in FOX 8's reporting and as Darren in the appeals court's opinion. FOX 8 described the conspiracy count Steele was acquitted on as conspiracy to commit second-degree murder; the indictment as summarized by the appeals court lists it as conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The district attorney's office has said Steele killed at least five people, but the jury acquitted him in McNeil's death. Sentencing was scheduled for March 15, 2024; the court record shows the sentences were imposed on March 18.

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