She just wanted to make it through Tuesday morning alive. Instead, the woman found herself behind the wheel of a Nissan Frontier pickup truck, dodging bullets fired by the man sitting right next to her — her own boyfriend. What unfolded next on the streets of north Tulsa was the kind of nightmare that most people only ever see in movies.
It was just past seven in the morning when Tulsa police got the call. Officers were dispatched to the intersection of 36th Street North and North Hartford Avenue around 7:22 a.m. after reports of an injury crash. But this wasn’t your ordinary fender-bender. Investigators say Mitchell Folsom, 50, had opened fire on his girlfriend while she was driving, right there inside the moving truck. The poor woman panicked — and honestly, who could blame her? The truck began swerving violently on and off the road before slamming into a Ford F-150 at the intersection. That F-150 didn’t just get hit — it flipped completely over and rolled onto its side. The two people inside that truck, completely innocent bystanders just going about their morning, were rushed to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. They had no idea they were about to get dragged into someone else’s domestic horror story.
After the crash, Folsom climbed out of the wrecked Nissan. But before he took off running, he looked at his girlfriend — the woman he’d just shot at — and said something that sent chills down the spines of everyone who heard it later. “I’m not going back to prison,” he told her. Just like that. Cold as ice. Then he bolted.
What happened next only made things worse. Rather than running away from people, Folsom ran straight toward the driver of the Ford F-150 — the same truck he’d just caused to flip — while pointing a gun directly at that person. That’s not a man trying to escape. That’s a man who had already decided how his morning was going to end. Officers pursued him as he fled behind Walt Whitman Elementary School. School officials immediately put the building on lockdown, keeping hundreds of kids sheltered in place while cops combed the surrounding area looking for an armed and clearly dangerous man.
They eventually found him in a pond nearby. Officers called out to him, ordering him to come out of the water. Folsom made a threatening move. Police opened fire. Just like that, it was over — but only after emergency crews waded in and pulled him from the water, his body riddled with multiple gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead right there at the scene.
Through all of it — the bullets, the crash, the chaos, the lockdown — his girlfriend survived. The woman Folsom aimed a gun at that morning made it out alive. The two people in the F-150 made it out alive. The kids at Walt Whitman Elementary went home safe. And yet, the trauma of what happened on that quiet Tuesday morning in north Tulsa isn’t something that just disappears when the police tape comes down. For the girlfriend especially, the memory of hearing those words — “I’m not going back to prison” — right before everything exploded into violence, is something she’ll be carrying for a very long time.
The officers who pulled the trigger have been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in situations like this. Tulsa police are still searching the pond for the firearm Folsom was carrying. Once investigators wrap things up, everything gets handed over to the District Attorney’s Office, who’ll decide whether the shooting was legally justified. Most folks in Tulsa, though, aren’t exactly holding their breath on that one.
