On March 7, 2024, an Orleans Parish jury in New Orleans convicted Tyrone Steele, then 20, of murdering four people in March 2022. Three of them, Darrin Williams, 27, Nehemiah Jones, 24, and Amya Cornin, 21, were shot together in an apartment in the Gentilly area of the city in the early hours of March 21, 2022. The fourth, Shane Brown, 20, was found shot dead in New Orleans East on March 26. The jury returned three verdicts of first-degree murder for the apartment killings and one of second-degree murder for Brown. It found Steele not guilty of a fifth killing with which he had been charged, the death of Donald McNeil in March 2022.
Steele was 18 when he was arrested. Prosecutors built the case on ballistics, DNA, surveillance footage and social media. At its center was an Instagram account that, investigators testified, belonged to Steele and carried posts about the killings, including a detail police had kept from the public. He was sentenced to life without parole. In June 2025 the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the conviction for Brown's murder, the only murder conviction he challenged.
The New Orleans Police Department gave Steele's date of birth as May 5, 2003. Little else about his upbringing, schooling or family was reported.
He was already known to the police and prosecutors before 2022. Court records cited by FOX 8 (WVUE) in New Orleans show that in May 2020, when he was 16, he was arrested on a charge of attempted second-degree murder. On April 7, 2021, the district attorney's office dropped the adult charge, and the case moved to juvenile court. The outcome of the juvenile case was not reported; the district attorney's office declined to comment on it.
In May 2021 the police department published his photograph and asked the public for help finding him. Homicide detectives had identified him as a person of interest in a killing in New Orleans on February 16, 2021, the department said, and wanted to interview him; he was not wanted on any criminal charge at that point. On June 17, 2021, according to the same court records, Steele was booked on a charge of second-degree murder. On December 9, 2021, prosecutors refused the case, meaning they declined to bring charges. Whether the booking and the February killing were the same case has not been reported.
When Steele was arrested in 2022, the NOPD superintendent, Shaun Ferguson, acknowledged the earlier case. "There was a case in which he was arrested and it did not go as we had wished," he said, adding that detectives would take another look at it, WWL-TV reported. The district attorney's office said that Steele had "remained on our radar."
The appeals court opinion in his case, drawing on the trial testimony of the lead detective, describes a quarrel weeks before the killings. On February 27, 2022, Steele and Darrin Williams argued outside a store in New Orleans, and the argument turned into an exchange of gunfire in which Steele was slightly hurt. Messages later recovered from the Instagram account linked to him said he "felt played." Casings recovered after that shooting were later linked by ballistics to the casings found after the killings of March 21.
At the time of his arrest, Steele was also booked on a charge of aggravated criminal damage to property over a shooting on February 27, 2022, the police department said. FOX 8 reported that the aggravated burglary charges booked against him stemmed from an incident on February 26. At trial, Davis presented the February confrontation as the motive for the attack on Williams.
Darrin Williams, Nehemiah Jones and Amya Cornin were shot and killed in an apartment in the Gentilly area early on Monday, March 21, 2022. The Orleans Parish Coroner's Office identified them after autopsy.
According to the evidence summarized by the appeals court, two people entered the apartment unlawfully, and the evidence indicated a single shooter. None of the three victims was armed. Forensic pathologist Erin O'Sullivan, who performed the autopsies on March 22 and 23, testified that each of the three died of gunshot wounds and classified each death as a homicide.
Little has been made public about who the three were beyond their names and ages. The mothers of Nehemiah Jones and Amya Cornin testified at the trial in 2024. On the day of the killings, police released surveillance images of two people seen leaving the complex and asked the public to help identify them, FOX 8 reported. Tips were to go to the homicide detective on the case, Nicholas Davis, who later led the investigation.
A man named in court as Donald McNeil was also shot and killed in New Orleans on March 21, 2022. Steele was later charged with his death and acquitted.
Shane Brown was 20. His mother testified that he went out one night and did not come home, and that he stopped answering her messages. She traced his phone to an apartment complex, saw his gray Nissan Altima in the parking lot, and reported it to the police. Officers later told her that he had been found dead.
Shane Brown was found in New Orleans East on March 26, 2022. The autopsy by Cynthia Gardner, the deputy chief forensic pathologist, on March 28 found that he had died of a gunshot wound, and she classified the death as a homicide. Brown was first listed as unidentified until the coroner's office named him.
The case was led by Detective Nicholas Davis and Sergeant Robert Barrere of the NOPD Homicide Unit, with Detective Kevin Burns. The district attorney's office later credited the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI with work on the case, and the police chief described it as an example of agencies working "in tight coordination" under the department's violent crime initiative.
Surveillance video from the Gentilly complex, Davis testified, showed two people at the apartment that night, the shorter of them in a white shirt under a black hoodie, and a gray Nissan Altima leaving at about the time of the shooting.
Barrere found Brown's Altima at the apartment complex his mother had pointed to. Surveillance there showed a man arriving in the car and walking toward an apartment carrying a maroon backpack, which matched a backpack later seized from Steele's home. Doorbell camera footage from March 21 showed Steele together with Brown. Barrere testified that the Altima matched the car seen leaving the Gentilly complex after the triple killing.
A DNA analyst from the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab, Justin Manuel, tested a swab from the Altima's gearshift. He told the jury that it carried skin cells matching Steele's profile, and that the result was 72.4 billion times more probable if the DNA came from Steele than if it came from an unrelated person.
The heart of the case was an Instagram account under the name "omerta.07." Detectives obtained its contents with a search warrant. Davis testified that it held photos and videos of Steele and clips of his voice, and that no one else appeared in its posts. Some posts showed the apartment building.
After the killings, according to the testimony, the account posted photos of Jones and Williams with a caption boasting of having shot them, naming Williams by the nickname "Duke" and Jones as "Lil Miah." Another post showed the police be-on-the-lookout image released after the shooting, captioned "don't know I was one shooter." The detective told the jury that investigators had not made public that a single person had fired the shots.
To tie the account to Steele, Davis pointed to tattoos on the back of the user's left hand that matched Steele's, private messages that addressed the account holder as "Tyrone," and a post showing a white shirt and black hoodie like those worn by the shorter suspect in the surveillance video. On cross-examination he conceded that he had no photograph of Steele actually making the posts, and that his identification rested on these circumstances.
The account also linked Steele to Brown. After his arrest, Steele told detectives that he did not know Brown. But Barrere testified that messages between Brown's Instagram account and Steele's, dated March 20, 2022, the day before the triple killing, discussed bullets and carrying out a shooting. Barrere said he found no other suspect in Brown's death.
On the evening of March 30, 2022, officers of the NOPD Special Operations Division found Steele at a home in the city. Police called out the SWAT team at about 7:17 p.m. after receiving information that he might be armed. Seven people, Steele among them, came out and surrendered without incident; no one was hurt and no shots were fired. A search under a warrant turned up seven firearms, which were sent for ballistic testing, and narcotics. Investigators also found a gold bracelet connected to Nehemiah Jones. Several associates detained in the operation were not booked in the killings, WWL-TV reported.
Steele was booked on four counts of first-degree murder, one count of conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and one count of aggravated burglary, and was held without bail at the Orleans Justice Center. On April 4, 2022, Ferguson and District Attorney Jason Williams announced the case at a joint news conference. A special grand jury had returned an indictment on the four first-degree murder counts and the burglary counts; Assistant District Attorney Alex Calenda presented the case, despite power outages at the district attorney's office caused by a recent tornado. "We are identifying true, true, violent offenders and targeting them intentionally and purposefully," Ferguson said, adding that Steele and his associates might be linked to other violent crimes. Williams called Steele "one of the most violent offenders in New Orleans."
On April 27, 2022, homicide detectives presented the death discovered on March 21 to the special grand jury, which indicted Steele on a charge of second-degree murder. The coroner had still not released the victim's name, the police department said.
The indictment on which Steele was tried was dated April 27, 2022, and contained ten counts. They were the second-degree murder of Donald McNeil; illegal discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence; conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and aggravated burglary, both with an unindicted co-conspirator identified as S.B.; the first-degree murders of Darrin Williams, Nehemiah Jones and Amya Cornin, also with S.B.; the first-degree murder of Shane Brown; conspiracy to commit first-degree murder with a second unindicted co-conspirator, D.S.; and a second count of illegal discharge of a firearm. Neither S.B. nor D.S. was charged in the indictment. Steele pleaded not guilty to every count on June 16, 2022.
The trial opened on Monday, March 4, 2024, before Judge Benedict J. Willard in Section C of Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. Assistant District Attorneys Corbin Bates and Corey Tassin prosecuted the case. Jerome Matthews was among his defense attorneys. The state called ten witnesses. Steele called none.
Prosecutors presented Steele as the man who planned and carried out a series of killings that took in acquaintances and strangers, and they laid out guns, bullets and casings for the jury, FOX 8 reported. The jurors heard from Davis, Barrere, the DNA analyst and the two pathologists, and from the mothers of Brown, Jones and Cornin. Donald McNeil's mother and the detective in his case also testified. In closing, the defense argued that there was no substantial evidence linking Steele to the killings. "We're talking about Mr. Steele's life, freedom, and future," the defense team said. "Not guilty is a just verdict."
The jury began deliberating at about noon on Thursday, March 7, 2024, and returned just after 4 p.m. It found Steele guilty as charged of the three first-degree murders, the aggravated burglary, the conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and one count of illegal discharge of a firearm. On the first-degree murder count for Shane Brown, it returned the responsive verdict of second-degree murder. It found him not guilty of the second-degree murder of Donald McNeil, of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and of the second firearm count.
After the verdict, Matthews said some of the evidence had not been fairly presented and that the defense would appeal.
The district attorney's office issued a statement the next day under the heading "2022 serial murders." It said a jury had convicted Steele after a weeklong trial and listed five victims, including Donald McNeil, describing him as having killed at least five people over more than a month. That count is the prosecution's own characterization; the jury acquitted him in McNeil's death. "We have removed one of the most violent predators that I've ever seen in New Orleans," Williams said in the statement, adding that the convictions brought "a measure of closure and justice." FOX 8 likewise described the case as a string of killings that claimed five lives over 45 days.
The four murder convictions carried mandatory life terms. On March 18, 2024, according to the appeals court, Willard sentenced Steele to life at hard labor without benefit of parole, probation or suspension of sentence on each of the three first-degree murder counts, and to life at hard labor without benefits on the second-degree murder count for Brown. On the remaining counts he imposed 20 years at hard labor for illegal discharge of a firearm, 20 years for the conspiracy and 30 years for the aggravated burglary, to run consecutively. The district attorney's office had announced the sentencing for March 15. Defense counsel objected to the automatic life sentences and to the consecutive terms, and filed a motion for appeal the same day; the court granted it on March 20, 2024.
On appeal Steele was represented by Mary Constance Hanes of the Louisiana Appellate Project, and the state by Assistant District Attorney Zachary M. Phillips. He challenged only his conviction for Brown's murder. The court noted that he did not appeal the convictions connected to the triple killing.
He raised three arguments. First, he said the evidence in Brown's death was wholly circumstantial and did not rule out a reasonable alternative: that someone connected to the victims of the triple killing had killed Brown in retaliation. The court disagreed, writing that "the record is completely devoid of any evidence to show a reasonable hypothesis of innocence." It went further. Because Steele had not objected to second-degree murder as a responsive verdict, the court asked whether the evidence would have supported the greater charge, and found that it would have supported first-degree murder, pointing to the specific intent to kill that Steele had shown in the triple killing. On that basis it affirmed the lesser verdict.
Second, he argued that the Instagram material had not been properly authenticated. The court held that the state had offered enough for a reasonable juror to find the account authentic: photos, voice clips, the matching tattoos, posts about the crimes, and messages calling the user "Tyrone." It distinguished an earlier case in which the state had offered no authentication evidence at all.
Third, he argued that the trial judge should have declared a mistrial because of that material. Since the court had found the evidence properly admitted, it found no prejudice and no ground for a mistrial, which it called "an extreme remedy."
On June 12, 2025, the panel of Judges Paula A. Brown, Tiffany Gautier Chase and Dale N. Atkins affirmed the second-degree murder conviction for Shane Brown. Reviewing the record for errors on its face, the court found that the trial judge had attached a no-benefits condition to sentences on the firearm, conspiracy and burglary counts that the governing statutes do not allow, and that the record did not make clear which sentences the judge meant. It sent the case back to the district court only to clarify those three sentences. Because the jury had acquitted Steele in McNeil's death, the opinion set aside the facts and testimony about that killing and did not discuss them.
As of the appeals court's decision in June 2025, Steele was serving life without parole for the murders of Darrin Williams, Nehemiah Jones, Amya Cornin and Shane Brown.
May 5, 2003: Tyrone Steele born, according to the New Orleans Police Department.
May 2020: Arrested at 16 on a charge of attempted second-degree murder.
February 16, 2021: A killing in New Orleans in which police later name Steele as a person of interest.
April 7, 2021: Prosecutors drop the attempted murder charge; the case moves to juvenile court.
May 24, 2021: NOPD publishes his photograph as a person of interest; he is not wanted on charges.
June 17, 2021: Booked on a charge of second-degree murder.
December 9, 2021: Prosecutors refuse the second-degree murder case.
February 27, 2022: An argument between Steele and Darrin Williams turns into an exchange of gunfire; Steele is grazed.
March 20, 2022: Instagram messages between Steele's and Shane Brown's accounts discuss bullets and a shooting, according to trial testimony.
March 21, 2022: Darrin Williams, Nehemiah Jones and Amya Cornin are shot dead in an apartment in the Gentilly area. The same day, police find the body of a man later identified as Donald McNeil.
March 26, 2022: Shane Brown is found shot dead in New Orleans East.
March 30, 2022: Steele is arrested after a SWAT callout; seven firearms are seized.
April 4, 2022: Arrest and indictment on four first-degree murder counts announced at a joint news conference.
April 27, 2022: Special grand jury returns the ten-count indictment, including the second-degree murder count in McNeil's death.
June 16, 2022: Steele pleads not guilty to all counts.
March 4, 2024: Trial opens before Judge Benedict J. Willard.
March 7, 2024: Jury convicts him of three first-degree murders and one second-degree murder, with burglary, conspiracy and firearm counts; acquits him of McNeil's murder and two other counts.
March 18, 2024: Sentenced to life without parole on each murder count, with consecutive terms on three other counts.
June 12, 2025: Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal affirms the Brown conviction and remands only to clarify three non-murder sentences.