This week, a Mississippi woman said in an interview that her son who was reported missing last year was discovered dead days after his disappearance and buried in a “pauper’s field” without her knowledge.
According to NBC News, Gretchen Hankins' 39-year-old son Jonathan David Hankins left their home in May 2022 to spend the weekend with friends. He said he would return on Sunday. Jonathan Hankins never returned.
Gretchen Hankins noted that her son suffered from meth addiction and was known for leaving their home a few days at a time. This time, however, she felt that something “had clearly gone wrong.”
When her son never returned, Gretchen Hankins called the Rankin County Sheriff's Office and reported her son missing. A search was announced on Facebook, through the local media, and posted on a national database. Volunteers began searching for Jonathan Hankins.
For more than a year, Gretchen Hankins called the sheriff’s office for updates about her son. Each time, she was reportedly told that there were no developments.
“It was pain, mental pain, because I couldn’t imagine where he was at,” Gretchen told NBC. “I just couldn’t.”
A Mississippi man had been missing since May 2022.
— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 12, 2023
Every few weeks, his mother contacted the sheriff's office with no luck.@NBCNews solved the mystery in a matter of minutes.
He was buried in a pauper’s field without his family’s knowledge. https://t.co/s2o0PhYh7j
NBC News figured out what happened to Jonathan Hankins this fall by examining documents related to people being buried in a “pauper’s field” in Hinds County, Mississippi (via NBC News):
NBC News solved the mystery this fall in a matter of minutes. As part of an investigation into people being buried in a Hinds County pauper’s field without their families’ knowledge, reporters examined a register of all the recent burials and compared it with a publicly available list of missing Mississippians. Jonathan’s name was on both.
After obtaining documents through public records requests to confirm the match, NBC News visited Gretchen at home in Florence, Mississippi, on Dec. 4 and shared what reporters had learned: Jonathan had been found dead on May 23, 2022, three days after leaving home, in a hotel room in nearby Jackson. Investigators quickly verified his identity. But the Hinds County coroner’s office and the Jackson Police Department, which both responded to the scene, failed to tell his family, and the county buried him in a grave marked only by a number: 645.
“It feels like they threw him away like trash,” Jonathan Hankins’ aunt, Jeannie Jones, told NBC. “No caring. No feeling.”
Reportedly, the Hind’s County coroner’s office has been under fire for its handling of two other cases where families were not notified about their loved ones.
Melissa Faith Payne, a spokesperson with the Jackson Police Department, told NBC that they were not responsible for contacting Jonathan Hankins’ family after he was discovered dead.
“From the scene, the victim’s body was immediately turned over to the Hinds County Coroner’s office for further investigation, including an autopsy,” Payne said in a statement. “To this day, the Jackson Police Department has had no further communication with the Hinds County Coroner’s office concerning this case. We were never notified of the victim’s cause of death or identity.”
NBC reported how a man named Dexter Wade was struck and killed by a cop car and buried in a pauper’s grave unbeknownst to his family, who reported him missing. In another case, the family of a man named Marrio Moore said that he was beaten to death in Jackson and buried at the same cemetery. The family went eight months with no knowledge of what happened.
“I want people to know that somebody is not doing their job and making folks go through what I’ve been through,” Gretchen Hankins told the outlet.
“She lived in torment not knowing where her baby is, thinking that her baby is out there,” Jeannie Jones added.
Turns out, staff at a Motel 6 on Interstate 55 in Jackson discovered Jonathan Hankins’ body in one of the rooms on May 23, 2022. This was three days after he left home. According to documents obtained by NBC, investigators noted that he’d been dead “for a couple of days” and did not find an ID. He was identified through fingerprints at the Hinds County morgue (via NBC News):
The coroner’s investigator said he forwarded the information to a Jackson detective for notification of the man’s next of kin. (The Jackson police spokesperson said the department never received this information.) The documents estimate that he died May 21 but do not mention a cause of death or results of toxicology tests, and the coroner’s office has not provided that information.
There is no indication in the documents of what efforts, if any, the coroner’s office or the Jackson Police Department made to contact Jonathan’s family.
On Aug. 26, 2022, the coroner’s office asked the Hinds County Board of Supervisors for permission to bury Jonathan’s body in a pauper’s field at the county penal farm. The board approved the request nearly two weeks later.
This fall, when NBC reporters approached Gretchen Hankins with their discoveries, she drove to Jackson and called the Hinds County coroner’s office in hopes of seeing photos of her son. A few minutes later, the investigator who handled Jonathan Hankins’ body called her and told her they did not have photos of his body. The investigator told her to contact the police and that it was the police’s responsibility to inform her that her son had died.
The next day, Gretchen Hankins went to the Jackson police headquarters. There, she saw images of her son’s body after he died.
“They let him lay there and buried him in an unmarked grave when he would have been claimed that same day,” Thomas Goolsby, one of Jonathan Hankins’ friends who led the search for him, said. “He had loved ones. He had family.”
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