The bodies of four men were found Friday in a river outside Oklahoma City as authorities are searching for four missing men — though it was not clear if they were the remains of the missing, police said.
Friday’s discovery outside the city of Okmulgee came as police are searching for four local men who have just disappeared, investigators said. BelieveThey left Okmulgee’s house on bikes Sunday evening.
However, the city’s police chief told the families of the missing to discover the remains as a courtesy before alerting the media.
“(Natural assumption) as soon as the information comes in… it will be that their loved ones have been found dead,” city police chief Joe Prentice said in a statement, so he informed them with the assurance that he did not know the identities of the bodies. Friday press conference.
The police did not say how the four men died. A medical examiner in Tulsa will conduct an autopsy and establish identification, Prentice He said.
Prentice suspects tampering with the deaths of those found in the river, he told CNN Saturday, but he did not go into details, nor did he respond directly to questions about whether there were signs of shock.
Prentice said a passerby called police after seeing something suspicious in a river Friday afternoon outside Okmulgee, a city of about 11,000 people, a 35-mile drive south of Tulsa.
Prentice said police arrived and saw remnants protruding from the river. Police initially said they don’t know the number of bodies, though hours later He said Four male bodies were removed from the water.
Four friends have been reported missing this week
Corpses punctuate a deep police mystery in eastern Oklahoma City: What happened to four friends reported missing from their hometown this week? And if not the bodies of these four men, who are they?
Four men live in Okmulgee – Mark Chastain, 32; Billy Chastain, 30; Mike Sparks, 32; and Alex Stevens, 29 – were reported missing by relatives on Monday night or early Tuesday, at Okmulgee Police He said.
“All four are close friends and are believed to have left Billy Chastain’s home on the west side of Okmulgee” on Sunday, October 9, around 8pm, police said in their initial release.
“All of them were on bicycles,” the police statement said, without explaining why they had congregated or where they might have intended to go.
At least two men are believed to have been in possession of mobile phones. Police were able to trace at least one phone to the east of the town and then south, but the phone was eventually switched off or the power went out, police said.
Data shows the phones went to two rescue yards — one about 5 miles from the river, and the other 10 to 12 miles from the river, Prentice told CNN Saturday. Police did not say whether the phones were recovered.
“We did not consider this (the river) a search area,” he told reporters on Friday because the phone data was not close to the river.
And Prentice cautioned that the phone tracks were not necessarily the same as the men’s.
Prentice said Saturday that no bikes were found.
Police received reports of sightings of the men after Sunday evening, but investigators — including those who examined surveillance videos in the area — did not verify any of them, Prentice told reporters Friday.
CNN’s attempt to reach a medical examiner in Tulsa for comment on Saturday was not immediately successful.
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