4 bodies pulled from an Oklahoma river amid search for missing bike riders

By Jason Hanna and Raja Razek, CNN

(CNN) - The bodies of four males were found Friday in a river outside an Oklahoma city where authorities have been searching for four missing men -- though it wasn't clear if the remains are those of the missing, police said.

Friday's discovery outside the city of Okmulgee came as police have been looking for four local men who disappeared after, investigators believe, they left an Okmulgee home on bicycles Sunday evening.

Still, the city's police chief told the missing men's families of the remains' discovery as a courtesy before he alerted news media, he said.

"The natural (assumption), once the information gets out ... would be that their loved ones were found deceased," so he notified them while emphasizing he didn't know the bodies' identities, city Police Chief Joe Prentice said in a Friday news conference.

Police haven't said how the four dead males died; a medical examiner in Tulsa will conduct autopsies and make identifications, Prentice said on Facebook.

A passerby called police after seeing something suspicious in a river Friday afternoon outside Okmulgee, a city of about 11,000 people roughly a 35-mile drive south of Tulsa, Prentice said.

Police arrived and saw remains protruding from the river, Prentice said. Police initially said they didn't know how many bodies were there, though hours later they said four male bodies had been removed from the water.

Four friends reported missing this week

The bodies punctuate a deepening mystery for police in the eastern Oklahoma city: What happened to four friends who were reported missing from their hometown this week? And if the bodies aren't those of these four men, whose are they?

Four men living in Okmulgee -- Mark Chastain, 32; Billy Chastain, 30; Mike Sparks, 32; and Alex Stevens, 29 -- were reported missing by relatives Monday night or early Tuesday, Okmulgee police 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 8 p.m., police said in their initial release.

"All were reportedly on bicycles," the police statement reads, without elaborating about why they'd gathered or where they might have intended to go.

At least two were believed to have cell phones with them. Police tracked the path of Mark Chastain's phone "to an area south of Okmulgee, but was turned off or lost power," and "officers checked that area and found no sign of any of the men," the statement reads.

The river where the unidentified bodies were found Friday is not near the path indicated by the telephone data, Prentice told reporters Friday.

No bicycles were found near the river, Prentice said.

"All of the information we had up to this point indicated that our missing men -- based on telephone data -- had gone east leaving town, and then ultimately south. ... This (river) is in the opposite direction," Prentice said.

"We never considered this (river) as a search area," he said.

Prentice cautioned that the phone's path didn't necessarily have to be the path that the men traveled.

"I can tell you where Mark Chastain's cell phone went, but I can't tell you definitively whether he had it at the time," Prentice said Friday.

Police have received reports of sightings of the men after Sunday evening, but investigators -- including those checking surveillance videos in the area -- have not verified any of them, Prentice told reporters Friday.

CNN's attempt to reach the Tulsa medical examiner for comment Saturday was not immediately successful.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.