If you were following our coverage of the bizarre case of Dexter Wade in Jackson, Mississippi, you probably came away with some questions about exactly what’s going on down there. As you may recall, Wade went missing while out for a walk one night. His family contacted the police and waited anxiously to find out what had happened, only to later learn that an off-duty police cruiser had run him down, killing him. He had been buried in a pauper’s grave without his mother ever knowing about it until months later. The police in Jackson continue to claim that it was all a big misunderstanding and a lack of internal communications. Wade’s mother finally received an apology of sorts.

But how often could something like that possibly happen? To their credit, NBC News decided to open an investigation and find out. They filed requests for lists of missing persons in Mississippi and a list of unidentified or unclaimed bodies buried in a pauper’s cemetery. Then they compared the two lists. They immediately found a couple of matches and were able to notify the families. One of them was Jonathan David Hankins of Florence, Mississippi, a small suburb to the south of Jackson.

Gretchen Hankins was in bed on a Friday night in May 2022 when her 39-year-old son leaned down with a hug and kiss and told her he was going to meet friends for the weekend. He promised to return in time for Sunday dinner.

He didn’t come home.

Jonathan David Hankins’ mother and teenage daughter were accustomed to his leaving for a few days at a time; he suffered from meth addiction, and knew not to enter their house when he was using. But this time, something had clearly gone wrong. Gretchen went to the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office, where an investigator took a missing persons report.

If the Dexter Wade case seemed dodgy, the story of Jonathan Hankins is even worse. Three days after leaving home, Hankins was found dead in a hotel room. It is implied that he likely overdosed on drugs. The Jackson Police (again!) responded to the discovery along with the local Florence Police Department. Hankins had no ID on him but the coroner quickly identified him correctly through fingerprints. Despite having not only the name but the address where Hankins lived with his mother and sister, nobody visited or contacted them. The mother regularly contacted the police for more than a year but never learned that her son had been buried in a pauper’s grave marked with the number 645.

Amazingly, Jonathan Hankins wasn’t the only such case identified. In February of this year, 40-year-old Marrio Moore was beaten to death and discovered by police. His body was also left at the same coroner’s office for months before being buried at a penal farm in the pauper’s field. His family was easy to find, but they were never contacted, despite having filed missing person reports. Reporters were able to make the connection in a single day. How is this even possible?

The Jackson PD is once again claiming that they bear no responsibility for any of this. Their spokesperson said that Jonathan Hankins’ body had immediately been turned over to the Hinds County Coroner’s office and they never heard anything further from them about the case. Assuming that’s true, perhaps there is also a serious problem at the coroner’s office, but all of these families contacted the police asking where their missing relatives might be. Wouldn’t checking a list of unclaimed bodies be one of the first things they would do? And when the coroner is given a body, it’s typically a requirement to find someone to come down and definitively identify the deceased. The coroner would typically ask the police to do that, right?

When we originally covered the story of Dexter Wade, I was suspicious that the police might have been more involved in his death than we were being told and they were trying to cover it up. Now I’m not so sure. Either they have a serial killer in their ranks or we’re seeing some of the greatest levels of incompetence in a local police department that have ever come to light. It shouldn’t be the job of reporters to notify the next of kin when a person is found dead. If this is going on in Jackson, Mississippi, how many other police departments across the country are doing the same thing? It’s all simply too much for words.