A Mississippi mother lays her son to rest more than a year after his burial in a pauper’s grave

This article is part of “Lost Rites,” a series on America’s failed death notification system.

MENDENHALL, Miss. — Gretchen Hankins arrived at a rural church cemetery early Saturday afternoon and walked along a row of granite headstones, reading out each name. One marked the spot where a cousin was buried. Another listed her brother’s name, and another her uncle. Next to her mother’s headstone, she arrived at a freshly dug grave that would soon, finally, hold her only son.

“I know it’s just the body,” she said. “But everybody needs a place you can go to sometimes to tell your family members you love them after they’re gone.”

It had been more than 17 months since Hinds County authorities declared the body of her 39-year-old son, Jonathan David Hankins, “unclaimed” and had him buried in a pauper’s field outside the Hinds County jail work farm in Raymond, an hour’s drive away.

That grave was dug by inmates and marked only by a number — 645 — hand-painted on a metal post.

This is how Mississippi’s most populous county handles the remains of those who do not have money for a funeral or family to claim their bodies. But Jonathan, like several other men buried in the pauper’s field in recent years, did have friends and family who would have claimed him — if only they’d been told he was dead.

For more than a year and a half after her son disappeared from their Rankin County home in May 2022, Gretchen searched and prayed that he would come home. She filed a police report a few weeks after he went missing and pleaded for help on social media. A friend uploaded Jonathan’s name and image to a public database of missing people. Volunteers searched nearby waterways with sonar, thinking they might find him and his car submerged below.

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