Human remains found in Jackson, Mississippi claimed by family member, but questions remain

The aunt of a man whose decomposed body was found by firefighters responding to a brush fire in 2022 said she’s nearing closure after claiming his remains, though it is still unclear what happened to him.

Arkansas resident Carol Moody, whose nephew Andrew Bert Coker disappeared and whose remains were identified by a Texas forensics lab in January 2025, said she only learned of his fate after she happened upon a previous What Happened article about it.

“I was shocked,” she said at the time. “All I knew was that he was missing.” She then reached out, and a new chapter of the story began to unfold.

Over the course of three years, Coker’s remains had lain exposed in an empty lot, been taken to a morgue as an unidentified John Doe, then left unclaimed until Moody found out. After undertaking her own sometimes daunting research, she stepped up to the plate. She paid to have her nephew’s remains sent to a funeral home and cremated last week, and arranged for another relative to drive Coker’s father to the coroner’s office to sign the necessary papers, after which he will have an opportunity to take custody of the cremains, she said.

“Nobody should be left and not claimed,” Moody said. “He deserves for someone to care. Every person, regardless of what they’ve done, they’re still a person.”

Firefighters discovered Coker’s partially skeletonized remains, with what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the head, when they responded to the brush fire in a depressed neighborhood of west Jackson in July 2022. Moody said a death certificate she recently received from the Hinds County Coroner’s Office does not say whether the fire simply led to the discovery of the remains or had perhaps been intentionally set in an attempt to destroy them.

At the time of the discovery, it was not clear how long the body had been there, nor who the man was. Such crimes are not uncommon in Jackson, which has the highest murder rate in the United States, and Coker’s remains might never have been identified were it not for the involvement of a Mississippi expatriate named Carla Davis, a benefactor who funds investigations of unidentified remains in hopes of giving them a name.

When I first reported on the identification, it seemed logical that law enforcement officials would pursue the presumed homicide case now that they knew whose body had been found in the weeds, yet no one – not Davis nor Texas-based Othram Laboratories, with which she is affiliated and had helped identify the remains, or local government agencies -- responded to my queries about whether a murder investigation was underway.

Moody ran into similar problems. Her calls to Othram went straight to voicemail and no one returned them. She got no response from the Jackson Police Department nor the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office. Only when she reached out to the Hinds County Coroner’s Office did she begin to make headway.

“They were all so kind and helpful,” Moody said of the staff at the coroner’s office. The coroner, Jeremiah Howard, told her Coker’s death was “definitely a homicide,” she said. She did not ask how he was certain of that. Depending upon the angle of the bullet’s trajectory, a gunshot wound to the head could also be the result of suicide.

When Moody got through to the coroner’s office, she was distressed to learn that her nephew’s remains still had not been claimed. Had no family member claimed them, she said, he would have been buried in a pauper’s cemetery. So, she claimed them herself.

Soon after Moody got in touch with me, Janine Credit, who works for the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, also came upon the What Happened article and emailed to ask for contact info for a Coker family member. She had gotten nowhere with Othram and said it concerned a child of Coker’s who was in the state’s care. I referred her to Moody, who, after the two communicated, said there were three minor children in state custody who had been removed from their mother’s care and placed in foster care. Moody gave Credit names and numbers of local family members.

In its announcement that the remains had been identified, Othram noted that its scientists had collaborated with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the State Medical Examiner’s Office, though that was erroneous -- an MBI spokesperson said the agency was not involved. The spokesperson said the State Medical Examiner had submitted its autopsy report, together with Othram’s findings, to the Jackson Police Department. For whatever reason, JPD is not included in the Othram case summary.

Trying to get answers from JPD presented its own set of challenges. On its website, JPD lists an invalid phone number for its forensic crime lab and numerous calls to its homicide division and to an ostensible media contact went unanswered or ended up in voicemail and were not returned.

Few outlets had reported on the Othram announcement and those that did invariably used it to highlight the successful forensic investigation, with almost no details about the deceased nor whether his presumed murder would be further investigated.

According to Othram’s webpage on Coker, the lab launched its investigation after firefighters discovered the remains of “an adult male with likely European ancestry.” Available details were entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), and after no match was found to a known individual, the remains became known as Hinds County John Doe. Eventually, Othram used a DNA extract for forensic genome sequencing, and once the team had a DNA profile, undertook records research to develop new leads. Presumably, that included contacting one or more Coker family members.

Moody said the discovery of Bert Coker’s remains came less than a year after his brother Adam Coker, known as Blake, died in the Rankin County jail. She has been unable to find out what became of Blake Coker’s cremated remains or why he received no medical attention while jailed. She said he had been scheduled for release the following day, and because no one informed his family of his death, his father only found out when he arrived with plans to take his discharged son home.

According to this article, which cites an incident report, Blake Coker had been arrested for selling meth to an informant in September 2020. Jail security-camera footage obtained by Business Insider (requires subscription) reportedly shows him “pacing around a jail cell for hours and vomiting several times without anyone providing medical attention before becoming unresponsive and dying.” Moody said his death in September 2021 is now the subject of litigation and an investigation.

Moody said she has mostly lost touch with her Coker relatives in Mississippi, owing to a sad backstory involving her sister, who is now deceased, and Bert’s father, with whom she had three sons. She said that for a time the brothers lived with her in Arkansas. “Bert was a very sweet kid, but eventually he moved back to Jackson and got into all that stuff again,” she said, referring to drug use. He served time for a meth charge, she said, “whether he was cooking or selling, I don’t know.” He also fathered “at least two children” with a woman whom she did not name, who she said lost custody of them. Then Coker disappeared. She said no one filed a missing person report.

“They were a product of their environment,” Moody said of the brothers. “I chose a different path, but not everyone has that chance.”

Moody said her own mother abandoned her when she was three years old and later died of drug-related issues in Louisiana, and no one claimed her body. “I found out about it 14 years after the fact,” she said. Her mother’s cremated remains had been stored in a parish coroner’s office the entire time, and after Moody contacted the office, they shipped them to her. “They said I’d need to pay $15 shipping, which I did. They were in a box labeled ‘human remains,’” Moody recalled.

Moody was initially concerned that law enforcement authorities might not pursue a murder investigation into Bert Coker’s death. “Maybe to them it doesn’t matter because to them he was a nobody,” she said. “Plus, there’s so much crime in Jackson. But as a boy he was so sweet and precious. If he was murdered, someone murdered him. They should find them, because they’re a murderer and they’re out there. Even if they don’t care about Bert.”

Since then, Moody said she was told that Coker’s homicide was considered a cold case but that according to the county coroner a law enforcement investigation was underway. The coroner referred her to a detective handling it but so far, she said, “all I’ve gotten is voicemail. I’m hoping to eventually talk to this gentleman. I want to know what happened to him, and to know that his children are in a safe place.”

Bert Coker’s Facebook page offers a few details about him, including that he was Facebook friends with Joseph Spring, subject of a previous series of What Happened articles. Coker’s page also includes posted images of family members and friends, along with iconic images of heavy metal bands and Confederate flags.

Moody said that if for whatever reason no one picks up her nephew’s remains, she’ll make arrangements to have them shipped to her, as she did with her mother’s.

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Image: Andrew Bert Coker, cropping of photo on his Facebook page