A 43-year-old Oklahoma City man has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison after investigators used ballistics testing and license plate camera footage to tie a gun found in his car to a drive-by shooting at an occupied home. Marree Kavon Currie was stopped by police for not wearing a seatbelt in Oklahoma City on August 22, 2025, and told officers a gun was inside his vehicle before detectives seized the weapon. Investigators later connected that same firearm to a shooting that sent multiple gunshots into a home just over a week earlier.
U.S. District Judge David L. Russell handed down the 144-month sentence on Tuesday, along with three years of supervised release, according to the Department of Justice. Currie had pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm, a charge that stemmed directly from the August 2025 traffic stop.
Seatbelt Stop Unravels Into A Federal Gun Case
Oklahoma City police officers pulled over Currie's vehicle after noticing he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, according to KOKH. Currie told the officers a gun was inside the car, and detectives seized the weapon on the spot. Investigators say ballistics testing tied that gun to a drive-by shooting at a home, and public records show Currie's vehicle was captured by the city's Flock camera system within blocks of the shooting scene before it happened, the station reported.
Federal prosecutors say the shooting took place on August 14, 2025, when multiple gunshots were fired into the occupied home, eight days before Currie's traffic stop. A digital extraction of his cell phone showed it was powered off 10 minutes before the shooting and turned back on 10 minutes afterward, which authorities characterized as a deliberate effort to evade cell tower location tracking. The case was investigated jointly by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Oklahoma City Police Department and the Moore Police Department.
A Long Felony History Behind The Federal Charge
Court records tied to the case detail Currie's felony history in Oklahoma County District Court. That history includes a 2001 conviction for malicious injury to property, a separate 2001 conviction for placing bodily fluids on a government employee, a 2007 conviction for drug possession with intent to distribute, and a 2022 conviction for felon in possession of a firearm.
Federal law affords tougher penalties for repeat offenders caught with guns than many state statutes carry. After passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the maximum statutory penalty for felons possessing firearms under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) rose from 10 to 15 years, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. That expanded ceiling gave Judge Russell room to hand down a sentence longer than what a comparable state charge would typically allow.
Oklahoma City's Own Flock Camera Debate Still Unresolved
The case lands as Oklahoma City's Flock camera program faces mounting scrutiny at home. The city first contracted with Flock Safety in July 2023 to deploy 90 automated license plate readers at high-density intersections, at an annual cost of $270,000 covered by the Police Sales Tax Fund, according to Oklahoma City Free Press. A March internal police department memo obtained through public records requests acknowledged the department had no written access control policies, transparency reports or internal audit guidelines for the system, the outlet found. That transparency gap fueled enough public pushback that city leaders pulled a proposed Flock contract renewal from Monday's City Council agenda so staff could revise the agreement, according to Oklahoma City Free Press.
State Rep. Tom Gann has opened an interim legislative study into how Oklahoma cities deploy automated license plate readers and whether the practice complies with state limits on vehicle data, as Hoodline reported this spring. The scrutiny now stretches beyond city hall: in Congress, Representative Thomas Massie has pushed to cut federal funding to cities that keep expanding Flock networks, while Bartlesville leaders recently chose to keep their camera system even as they swapped out two units for a different vendor.
The Currie case now stands as an example of how ballistics, digital forensics and camera footage can combine to crack a violent crime that might otherwise go unsolved. Yet the same Flock network cited in that outcome remains at the center of the still-unresolved contract dispute now playing out at Oklahoma City Hall.
