Barry Dewayne Christian was right-handed. But according to Oklahoma's medical examiner, the 54-year-old Republican candidate for State Senate District 38 shot himself in the head with his left hand — after first putting several bullet holes in the outside of his own truck.
The medical examiner checked the box for "suicide." The family checked the box for "absolutely not."
Christian, a drilling consultant from Sayre, Oklahoma, was reported missing on April 28 after failing to show up for a scheduled meeting. Two days later, on April 30, Beckham County deputies found him dead inside his gray Ram pickup truck in the Sandy Sanders Wildlife Management Area, a remote stretch of land near Erick, roughly two miles east of Highway 30. He'd been shot once in the head.
For more than three months, the cause of death remained officially undetermined while the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation looked into the case. Then, on August 11, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released its findings: suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound. The family says the release was done without their consent and without the investigating body's permission.
What followed was not quiet grief. It was public fury.
Christian's daughter Neleh posted a statement that read like someone who'd been preparing for a fight. "I am Barry Christian's daughter, and I will not quietly accept my father's name being attached to a conclusion that I believe is inconsistent with the circumstances surrounding his death," she wrote. She added that the OSBI is examining the death as a potential homicide. Her words were precise. They were not the words of someone who accepts a medical examiner's checkbox.
Then there's the truck. Barry Christian's gray Ram had multiple bullet holes on its exterior. The official theory requires you to believe a right-handed man picked up a gun with his left hand, shot up the outside of his own vehicle, and then turned the weapon on himself. Authorities reportedly tested only his left hand and sleeve for gunshot residue. Not his right. If you're going to conclude a right-handed man shot himself left-handed, you'd think you'd at least want to rule out the dominant hand. They didn't.
Christian's ex-wife Farrah went further. In a public post, she claimed OSBI investigators told the family directly that "they know it was staged." If that's true — and OSBI has declined to comment — then the state's own investigators and its medical examiner reached opposite conclusions about the same death scene. One agency says staged homicide. The other says suicide. Both can't be right.
Some will point out that medical examiners and criminal investigators operate independently, and that an ME's ruling doesn't necessarily close an investigation. That's technically accurate. It's also the kind of procedural distinction that looks a lot less reassuring when the dead man is a Republican candidate who ran on a platform of supporting President Trump, defending the Second Amendment, backing law enforcement, and opposing open borders — and when the people who examined the physical evidence are apparently telling the family it doesn't add up.
Bullet holes on the outside of the truck. A left-handed shot from a right-handed man. No residue test on the dominant hand. An investigating agency reportedly at odds with the examiner's conclusion. And a family that used the word "avenged," not "closure."
That's either the most unusual suicide in Oklahoma history, or it isn't one.