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This text is a part of “Misplaced Rites,” a collection on America’s failed loss of life notification system.
MENDENHALL, Miss. — Gretchen Hankins arrived at a rural church cemetery early Saturday afternoon and walked alongside a row of granite headstones, studying out every title. One marked the spot the place a cousin was buried. One other listed her brother’s title, and one other her uncle. Subsequent to her mom’s gravestone, she arrived at a freshly dug grave that will quickly, lastly, maintain her solely son.
“I do know it’s simply the physique,” she mentioned. “However everyone wants a spot you’ll be able to go to typically to inform your loved ones members you’re keen on them after they’re gone.”
It had been greater than 17 months since Hinds County authorities declared the physique of her 39-year-old son, Jonathan David Hankins, “unclaimed” and had him buried in a pauper’s subject exterior the Hinds County jail work farm in Raymond, an hour’s drive away.
That grave was dug by inmates and marked solely by a quantity — 645 — hand-painted on a steel submit.
That is how Mississippi’s most populous county handles the stays of those that wouldn’t have cash for a funeral or household to assert their our bodies. However Jonathan, like a number of different males buried within the pauper’s subject lately, did have family and friends who would have claimed him — if solely they’d been advised he was useless.
For greater than a 12 months and a half after her son disappeared from their Rankin County dwelling in Might 2022, Gretchen searched and prayed that he would come dwelling. She filed a police report a number of weeks after he went lacking and pleaded for assistance on social media. A good friend uploaded Jonathan’s title and picture to a public database of lacking folks. Volunteers searched close by waterways with sonar, pondering they may discover him and his automotive submerged beneath.
The entire time, authorities in neighboring Hinds County held the reply, however they didn’t share it.
Jackson police had discovered Hankins useless from an overdose in a motel on Might 23, 2022, solely days after he went lacking. The Hinds County coroner’s workplace recognized him primarily based on fingerprints quickly after, information present. A deputy coroner mentioned he forwarded the knowledge to police, however police say they by no means bought such data.
The information don’t say what efforts, if any, the coroner’s workplace or the Jackson Police Division made to contact Jonathan’s household earlier than the county buried him that September.
Gretchen lastly discovered of her son’s loss of life and burial in December, after NBC Information discovered Jonathan’s title on a listing of people that’d been given pauper’s burials and shared the knowledge together with her as a part of the information group’s investigation into botched loss of life notifications. After viewing images confirming it was Jonathan’s physique, she joined a rising variety of outraged households who’ve found months or years after the truth that their relations had been buried within the Hinds County pauper’s subject.
Just like the others, Gretchen needed to pay the county $300 to reclaim her son’s stays. Final week, she visited the pauper’s cemetery to observe a crew exhume his physique, solely to be turned away from the jail web site by a sheriff’s deputy. Whereas there, Gretchen confronted Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart, demanding to know why the county by no means contacted her.
Grisham-Stewart advised Gretchen the lapse was not her fault.
“If I fall wanting in search of folks, I apologize,” she mentioned. “I don’t know how one can discover folks.”
“But it surely’s your job,” Gretchen replied, “and once you take that job on, you’re purported to learn to try this.”
Gretchen and the opposite aggrieved relations have demanded solutions and employed attorneys. Gretchen hopes to channel her anger to power modifications and forestall this from occurring to different households.
On Saturday, she was centered on a extra fast process: giving her son the funeral he’d been denied.
Mourners started arriving round 1 p.m. Saturday on the small Simpson County cemetery throughout the road from the Baptist church that Gretchen attended together with her siblings as a toddler. She wasn’t certain how many individuals would present up, she mentioned. She hoped those who beloved her son regardless of his faults could be there.
“Jonathan wasn’t good,” she mentioned moments earlier than a hearse arrived with the casket. “He simply didn’t deserve what he bought.”
By the point pallbearers carried Jonathan’s casket to the graveside, about 50 folks had gathered for the ceremony. An uncle from out of state. A good friend who’d grown up calling Jonathan by his nickname “Stitches” — referring to an notorious childhood harm. A cousin who’d been amongst these posting to Fb, asking for assist discovering him.
Thomas Goolsby, who’d supplied a $15,000 reward for details about Jonathan’s whereabouts, eulogized his greatest good friend as a loving son and devoted father who struggled to beat dependancy.
“Jon was man,” Goolsby mentioned. “He was typically a misunderstood man.
He was a co-worker. My greatest good friend. He was my therapist. He was my brother.”
After family members sang “Wonderful Grace” and headed for his or her automobiles, a crew started to decrease Jonathan’s casket into the bottom.
Her son was lastly dwelling, Gretchen mentioned, buried alongside relations quite than strangers.
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