Just after three in the morning on March 21, 2022, Amya Cornin, twenty-one, Nehemiah Jones, twenty-four, and Darrin Williams, twenty-seven, were shot inside Apartment 310 of a two-story complex in the 4100 block of Encampment Street, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans. A fourth person was found wounded. Five days later, on March 26, Shane Brown, twenty, was found shot dead in a canal near the intersection of Morrison and Gannon Roads in the Little Woods area of New Orleans East.
Tyrone Steele was arrested on April 4, 2022, at eighteen, in connection with two fatal shootings. He was later indicted over five deaths that prosecutors said had occurred within about forty-five days.
The state’s account of Encampment Street, as the appeals court later summarized it, was that Steele and an accomplice who has never been named spent time outside the apartment deliberating, went in through a window, and that Steele fired a large number of shots at the three people inside. Cornin alone was hit seven times. The case for Brown rested heavily on forensic work: a swab from the gearshift of Brown’s vehicle carried skin cells that a DNA analyst told the jury were 72.4 billion times more likely to be Steele’s than an unrelated person’s.
The trial ran for a week in Orleans Parish in March 2024, on ballistics, DNA, surveillance footage and social media posts. The jury deliberated about four hours and returned its verdict just after four in the afternoon of March 7: guilty of three counts of first-degree murder for Encampment Street, and of second-degree murder for Brown, a responsive verdict on a first-degree charge, together with aggravated burglary, conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and illegal use of weapons. It acquitted him of one count of second-degree murder, one count of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder and one weapons charge.
The acquittal concerned Donald McNeil, who had been shot in the back of the head and left in an abandoned house in the Seventh Ward. His mother, Larries Smith, testified at the trial. The district attorney’s announcement of the verdict the next day nevertheless listed McNeil among Steele’s victims and put the number of lives lost at five. Four convictions stand; the appeals court, because the jury had found him not guilty of McNeil’s death, left its facts out of its opinion altogether.
He was sentenced on March 15, 2024 to life imprisonment without possibility of suspension or parole, a mandatory term. He was twenty. His lawyer, Jerome Matthews, said some of the evidence had not been fairly presented and that there would be an appeal.
The Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed the second-degree murder conviction for Shane Brown in 2025. It sent the case back to the district court only to clarify the sentences on the firearm, conspiracy and aggravated burglary counts.
District Attorney Jason Williams, announcing the verdict, called Steele one of the most violent predators he had seen in New Orleans and said he had shown no remorse for crimes that involved stalking and mutilating his victims. That was the prosecution’s characterization in a press release, not a finding in the verdict.