On the afternoon of December 5, 2016, 21-year-old Ulises Lopez was found dead on the floor of his bedroom in a modest Oklahoma City home on Southwest 38th Street. His mother had come home to find the house ransacked and furniture overturned; she called for him and discovered him lifeless inside. Officers described clear signs of a prolonged struggle and deliberate violence. Lopez was bound with duct tape and zip ties, his lower face and head wrapped in layers of duct tape, one leg taped, and a belt was reported around his neck. Investigators treated the death as the city’s 69th homicide of the year.

Warrants later accused Lopez’s half-sister, Della Marie Nichols, of instigating a vigilante confrontation after she claimed Lopez had inappropriately touched her daughter. Prosecutors say Nichols persuaded her boyfriend, 35-year-old Adrian Escajeda, to go to Lopez’s home armed with a fake gun, duct tape, and zip ties to punish him. Escajeda was tried and convicted of first-degree murder; Nichols ultimately pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and received a prison term. With arrests and convictions recorded, the files list the case as solved. Does anyone have additional information about Ulises Lopez’s life or the events leading up to December 5, 2016?