Man Found Dead In SUV Is Tulsa's 68th Homicide, Police Say

Tulsa Police are investigating the city's 68th homicide after a man was found dead in a car along Highway 169 Wednesday morning.

The SUV was found just south of Interstate 44.

The family of 38-year-old Jason Harris reached out to News On 6 and said he is the man found dead in the car.

Police officially announced Harris as the victim Wednesday evening.

Investigators still have a lot of questions surrounding the case but are officially calling it a homicide and are looking for two others possibly involved.

Just after 5:00 Wednesday morning, a driver called police when they saw a wrecked Jeep on the side of Highway 169. When police arrived, they found a man in his 30s inside, dead from a gunshot wound.

10/4/2017 Related Story: Man Found Dead In SUV On Tulsa Highway

Sergeant Dave Walker believes the shooting occurred a couple hours before anyone called the police.

They found two shell casings in the area - one outside the jeep and one inside.

"Where the car ended up, the driver doesn’t have any easy access out of there, so we think we have two people. We have a driver and someone in the back seat. Then the backseat passenger gets out and confronts the victim and then the driver can exit the car," Walker said.

Part of the investigation is figuring out why they were driving along that stretch of 169 at 3 a.m. Walker believes there could be ties to drugs, gangs or possibly sex.

"The hotel chains at 31st and Memorial, at 51st and Yale. So those areas that we can check, but, that takes a lot of time," Walker said.

Police were on scene for hours Wednesday morning, trying to piece everything together as traffic backed up on 169.

Walker also believes the crime was not a planned one, so they made mistakes.

"It is now up to us to find what mistakes they made and try to exploit that to try and get a name with those mistakes, and that’s kind of what we do," he said.

Walker said they were able to find who the Jeep was registered to, but they told police they recently sold it to someone for cash and didn’t know anything about them.