A look back over the decade shows Tulsa’s sporadic pace of homicides, which police say is one reason killings are hard to predict and prevent. In 2002, for example, the city saw 35 homicides, but the next year the total nearly doubled. Sixty-nine people — the largest number in Tulsa’s recorded history — were killed that year.

Sometimes the city will go weeks without a homicide; other times detectives literally go from scene to scene.

The longest period without a homicide during the decade was the 72 days between Sept. 27 and Dec. 8, 1999.

The deadliest day occurred nearly 10 years ago — a day Maurice King said he remembers like it was yesterday.

On the morning of Feb. 12, 1999, his sister Markita King was preparing her children, Ebonie, 4, Essynce, 2, and Marjonna, 8 months, to be picked up by their father, Edwin Bell of Oklahoma City.

Fleeing an abusive relationship, the 22-year-old woman had left Bell three months earlier and moved to Tulsa to live with her aunt.

Bell, 23, arrived that morning along with his mother, Linda Farris, 45. Sometime before 10 a.m., he killed Markita King, all three girls and his mother and then turned the gun on himself in the Kings’ apartment at 1925 N. Gary Ave.

Markita King’s sister went to the apartment about 10:30 a.m. to check on the family because she had known that Bell was coming and feared for their safety. She saw a motionless baby on the floor and fled to call the police. Chilling police radio dispatches revealed the discovery of one body after another.

Police said it was the largest mass killing attributed to one person in recorded Tulsa history.

Maurice King, who was 21 at the time, had to drive several miles to the scene after learning that four members of his family had been killed.

“It was hard getting there, but the thing that hit me was when I got to Pine and Harvard and I saw all the news trucks and all the people,’’ he said.

As he walked up, a police officer met himand took him closer, where he saw that the door to the apartment was ajar.

“I could see my little niece’s legs where she was lying on the floor. That is when I really lost it,’’ he said.

Maurice King, now a probation officer in Dallas County, talks to people he supervises about the impact of his family’s domestic violence- related slayings.

“I have had a couple of guys who were doing the same kind of thing. I told them about what happened, and they really seemed to turn their lives around,’’ he said. “As much as I can, I really try to share what I know about the situation. If I don’t share, I am not doing anybody justice.’’

One of six people who died in a domestic murder-suicide is taken out of an apartment at 1925 N. Gary Ave. on Feb. 12, 1999.

Harold Alexander (left) and Chaplain Danny Lynchard (right) comfort Fannie King at the scene of a murder-suicide at 1925 N. Gary Ave., where six people—including four members of King’s family — died on Feb. 12, 1999.