A Mississippi woman whose son disappeared more than a year ago only recently learned that he had never been missing and that authorities had found him quickly and buried him.
On May 20, 2022, Jonathan David Hankins hugged and kissed his mother, Gretchen, goodbye before saying he was leaving for a weekend trip with his friends. Jonathan, a meth addict, promised to come home for Sunday dinner and was known to leave for several days at a time, barred from entering the home while using the stimulant.
But Gretchen, along with Jonathan’s teenage daughter, became concerned that something had gone wrong, NBC News reported. Gretchen reported her son missing to the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office nearly two months later, on July 14. A search was announced on Facebook two weeks later, and the case was shared with local media outlets. Volunteers searched for him in the surrounding waterways but came up empty.
For more than a year, Gretchen contacted the sheriff’s office every few weeks asking for information about her son but was always told they had nothing new to report.
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“It was pain, mental pain, because I couldn’t imagine where he was at,” Gretchen told NBC. “I just couldn’t.”
During that time, Gretchen held out hope that her son was still alive, but that hope was shattered when NBC began investigating people who were buried in a Hinds County pauper’s field without families being notified. The outlet combed through a register of recent burials, compared it to a list of missing people, and found Jonathan’s name, along with others, on both lists.
After confirming that it was, indeed, Gretchen’s son, the outlet visited her at her home on December 4 and shared the tragic news, along with what they had learned.
According to NBC, Jonathan had been found dead in a hotel room near Jackson, Mississippi, just three days after he said goodbye to Gretchen. NBC didn’t report the cause of death.
Investigators verified his identity but neither the Hinds County Coroner’s office nor the Jackson Police Department informed his family. He was buried in a grave marked with the number 645.
“It feels like they threw him away like trash,” Jonathan’s aunt, Jennie Jones, told the outlet. “No caring. No feeling.”
The Hinds County coroner’s office failed to notify families in two other cases, and the Jackson Police Department adopted new protocols for notifications last month.
JPD spokeswoman Melissa Faith Payne told the outlet that it was the coroner’s responsibility to contact Gretchen.
“From the scene, the victim’s body was immediately turned over to the Hinds County Coroner’s office for further investigation, including an autopsy,” she told the outlet 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.”