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“If it turns out that these four missing men are the remains in the river, then the focus of our investigation will shift from finding them to what happened to them.”
The Deep Fork River near Okmulgee, Okla., about 40 miles south of Tulsa. The police recovered four bodies from the river on Friday. News on 6
By Vimal Patel, New York Times Service
October 17, 2022 | 8:09 AM
Police in a small Oklahoma city found four bodies in a river Friday, three days after they said four men, all described as friends, had been reported missing.
The discovery of the bodies deepened the mystery surrounding the missing men in Okmulgee, a city of about 11,000 people about 40 miles south of Tulsa. Police said the bodies were males but were awaiting a medical examiner’s confirmation of their identities.
The Okmulgee Police Department said a passerby had noticed something suspicious in the Deep Fork River on Friday, leading investigators to find what appeared to be human remains protruding from the water.
Chief Joe Prentice said at a news conference Friday that he did not know whether the bodies were those of the four missing men but that he had notified their families of the discovery.
“If it turns out that these four missing men are the remains in the river, then the focus of our investigation will shift from finding them to what happened to them,” Prentice said. “If it is determined that it is not them, then we’ll have a separate investigation.”
Prentice said investigators had previously not considered searching the area where the bodies were found.
“All the information that we had up to this point indicated that our missing men, based on telephone data, had gone east leaving town and then ultimately south on 75,” he said, referring to Highway 75. “This is in the opposite direction.”
Authorities earlier in the week identified the missing men as Mark Chastain, 32; Billy Chastain, 30; Mike Sparks, 32; and Alex Stevens, 29, all of Okmulgee.
Police said Tuesday that all four were believed to have left Billy Chastain’s home on Okmulgee’s west side around 8 p.m. Oct. 9 on bicycles. Two of the men were likely carrying cellphones, but calls to them went straight to voicemail, police said.
Police said they had tried to locate the men using GPS.
In an interview with television station Fox 23, Prentice said one of the men had an app on his phone that placed his last known location at a salvage yard. The chief said investigators had scoured 25 acres of that area on foot and with search dogs and came up with “nothing remarkable.”
Residents reported sightings of some of the men around town, such as at a smoke shop on the south side of town Oct. 9 or at the YMCA on Tuesday, police said on Facebook. One person reported that all four men were seen walking along a street at 2 a.m. Tuesday. Police emphasized that none of the sightings had been verified.
“We have had many, many, many reports of sightings,” Prentice said Friday. “We haven’t been able to confirm any of them. I had one today that was in Monroe, Louisiana” — about 400 miles away.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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