CNN
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The our bodies of 4 males had been discovered Friday in a river exterior an Oklahoma metropolis the place authorities have been looking for 4 lacking males – although it wasn’t clear if the stays are these of the lacking, police stated.
Friday’s discovery exterior town of Okmulgee got here as police have been in search of 4 native males who disappeared after, investigators consider, they left an Okmulgee residence on bicycles Sunday night.
Nonetheless, town’s police chief instructed the lacking males’s households of the stays’ discovery as a courtesy earlier than he alerted information media, he stated.
“The pure (assumption), as soon as the data will get out … could be that their family members had been discovered deceased,” so he notified them whereas emphasizing he didn’t know the our bodies’ identities, metropolis Police Chief Joe Prentice stated in a Friday information convention.
Police haven’t stated how the 4 useless males died; a medical expert in Tulsa will conduct autopsies and make identifications, Prentice stated on Fb.
A passerby referred to as police after seeing one thing suspicious in a river Friday afternoon exterior Okmulgee, a metropolis of about 11,000 folks roughly a 35-mile drive south of Tulsa, Prentice stated.
Police arrived and noticed stays protruding from the river, Prentice stated. Police initially stated they didn’t know what number of our bodies had been there, although hours later they stated 4 male our bodies had been faraway from the water.
The our bodies punctuate a deepening thriller for police within the japanese Oklahoma metropolis: What occurred to 4 associates who had been reported lacking from their hometown this week? And if the our bodies aren’t these of those 4 males, whose are they?
4 males dwelling in Okmulgee – Mark Chastain, 32; Billy Chastain, 30; Mike Sparks, 32; and Alex Stevens, 29 – had been reported lacking by relations Monday evening or early Tuesday, Okmulgee police stated.
“All 4 are shut associates and are believed to have left Billy Chastain’s residence on the west facet of Okmulgee” on Sunday, October 9, round 8 p.m., police stated of their preliminary launch.
“All had been reportedly on bicycles,” the police assertion reads, with out elaborating about why they’d gathered or the place they could have supposed to go.
At the least two had been believed to have cell telephones with them. Police tracked the trail of Mark Chastain’s telephone “to an space south of Okmulgee, however was turned off or misplaced energy,” and “officers checked that space and located no signal of any of the boys,” the assertion reads.
The river the place the unidentified our bodies had been discovered Friday just isn’t close to the trail indicated by the phone information, Prentice instructed reporters Friday.
No bicycles had been discovered close to the river, Prentice stated.
“All the data we had up up to now indicated that our lacking males – based mostly on phone information – had gone east leaving city, after which finally south. … This (river) is in the other way,” Prentice stated.
“We by no means thought of this (river) as a search space,” he stated.
Prentice cautioned that the telephone’s path didn’t essentially must be the trail that the boys traveled.
“I can inform you the place Mark Chastain’s cellphone went, however I can’t inform you definitively whether or not he had it on the time,” Prentice stated Friday.
Police have acquired experiences of sightings of the boys after Sunday night, however investigators – together with these checking surveillance movies within the space – haven’t verified any of them, Prentice instructed reporters Friday.
CNN’s try to achieve the Tulsa medical expert for remark Saturday was not instantly profitable.