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 in a two-storey complex in the 4100 block of Encampment Street, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans. A third person was also 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 said by prosecutors to have occurred within about forty-five days.
The trial ran for a week in Orleans Parish in March 2024. The prosecution case rested 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 and one of second-degree murder, 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 count he was acquitted of concerned Donald McNeil, who had been shot in the back of the head and left in an abandoned house in the Seventh Ward. The district attorney’s own announcement of the convictions named McNeil among the victims and put the number of lives lost at five. The jury had found him not guilty of that killing the day before. This archive counts four.
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.
District Attorney Jason Williams, announcing the verdict, said Steele had shown no remorse and described crimes that involved stalking and mutilating his victims. That was the prosecution’s characterisation in a press release rather than a finding recorded in the verdict, and the trial record as reported does not set out what it refers to.