For nearly two years, Kenneth Jordan’s family lived with an agonizing question: where was he? Now they have an answer that has left them with new questions and deep anger. Jordan was reported missing after he was last seen in late July 2024 on Allenby Street in Prichard. The Sept. 6, 2024, missing-person report was, at the time, one of many such cases the Prichard Police Department handles each year. For Jordan’s family, it marked the beginning of an agonizing, drawn-out search.
The family spent those two years the way most families of missing people do — calling hospitals, checking with acquaintances, circulating photos, and waiting for a phone call that never came. They had no way of knowing that the answer to their question had already been found, filed and forgotten in a laboratory queue: their uncle’s remains had been recovered in Prichard within weeks of his disappearance and had been sitting, unidentified, at the state’s forensic agency ever since.
Courtlyn Boykin, Jordan’s niece, said the family learned only last week that Jordan’s remains had actually been found in Prichard shortly after that missing-person report was filed, back in August. She said she still doesn’t know exactly where he was found, why it took so long for authorities to identify him, or why her family is only now finding out.
“I feel angry. I’m so mad because we — it just seems like my uncle was treated so inhumanely,” Boykin said. “And he had people out there looking for him, his loved ones. We were wondering where he was, and this whole time he was at the medical examiner’s office, and we could have laid him to rest almost two years ago.”
Two agencies, two explanations
According to what Boykin has been able to piece together, the Prichard Police Department sent Jordan’s remains to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, which eventually made a DNA match confirming his identity. But she said she has received conflicting explanations for why the identification process dragged on so long.
Boykin, who recently moved to Birmingham, said the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences told her family that the delay stemmed from the Prichard Police Department failing to respond to requests tied to the missing-person report. However, she said Prichard police told her they have no record of ever receiving such a request from the state agency.
The conflicting accounts have left the family without anyone to hold accountable — each agency pointing at the other, each claiming to have done its part. In missing-person cases, the paperwork trail matters as much as the evidence trail: investigators are supposed to collect family reference samples, push descriptive details into state and national databases, and keep the case file active so that when a medical examiner’s office needs a comparison, someone is there to provide it. Somewhere in that chain, in Jordan’s case, the links failed to connect — and no one has yet explained precisely where.
Capt. Maxine Mark, who is currently overseeing daily operations at the Prichard Police Department, declined to comment on the case when asked. The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences referred questions to the agency’s public information portal. A request for comment submitted through that portal had not received a response as of publication.
The silence from both institutions has deepened the family’s frustration. For a small city police department, a missing-person case that ends at the state morgue is a routine administrative handoff; for the family on the other end, it is the difference between a grave they can visit and a poster they keep printing. Boykin said the family’s repeated questions — to the police department, to the state agency, to anyone with a file — have produced, so far, more versions of the story than answers.
“Someone dropped the ball”
For Boykin and her family, the unresolved question of accountability is almost as painful as the loss itself. “No family should have been waiting almost two years to find that their loved one’s remains had already been found, but just unidentified,” Boykin said. “We went this whole time wondering if he was alive, wondering if something had happened to him. … Someone dropped the ball, and I think that’s the answer that I’m looking for. Like, who or what agency dropped the ball here?”
The question is the same one posed by families across Alabama who have waited out identification backlogs, and it has no comfortable answer. Identification of unidentified remains depends on a relay between agencies: the agency that recovers remains must send complete records and samples to the forensic system; the forensic system must test and enter the results; and the agency that filed the missing-person report must supply family DNA and case updates so the match, when it happens, can be made quickly and communicated. A breakdown at any point strands a family in limbo — not because the science failed, but because the coordination did.
Cases involving unidentified remains and missing-person reports depend heavily on coordination between local law enforcement agencies and the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, which handles DNA testing and identification for the state. Delays or communication breakdowns between agencies can leave families in limbo for months or, as in Jordan’s case, years.
The state’s forensic system carries a heavy load. The Department of Forensic Sciences performs death investigations and laboratory work for law enforcement agencies across Alabama, many of them small departments without their own medical examiners, and its caseload has been a recurring subject of legislative attention. Small cities like Prichard — a community of fewer than 20,000 people that has weathered decades of fiscal strain — depend entirely on that state system, which makes the quality of the paperwork they send into it all the consequential.
What the family wants now
Jordan’s family says they now intend to press both the Prichard Police Department and the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for a full accounting of what happened and why it took so long for them to learn the truth. The family’s requests, Boykin said, are specific: where exactly were the remains found, when were they recovered, what requests went unanswered and who received them, and why the notification to the family came last — after two years — rather than first, when the report was filed.
The answers matter beyond one family’s closure. Every unidentified-remains case in the state runs on the same administrative machinery, and a documented failure in one case is evidence for fixing the system in all of them. Advocates for missing-persons families have long pushed for exactly this kind of auditing — requiring local agencies to confirm that missing-person files are complete, that family reference DNA has been collected, and that the case has been entered into the national databases that coroners’ offices and medical examiners consult when they cannot identify a set of remains.
National systems exist precisely for cases like Jordan’s. Federal databases allow agencies to upload profiles of unidentified remains and DNA samples from missing-persons families, and a routine cross-check can resolve cases that stumped a single department. Whether Jordan’s remains and his family’s reference samples were ever entered into those systems — and if not, which agency was responsible — is among the questions the family says it will keep asking.
For now, the family is doing what the system failed to do for two years: keeping the case moving. They have laid Jordan to rest at last, and they have begun assembling their own record of the paperwork, the phone calls and the contradictory accounts. South Alabama News will continue to follow this story as more information becomes available.
A familiar pattern in small cities
Jordan’s case arrived in Prichard’s police department the way hundreds of cases do, in a city whose department handles missing-person reports, burglaries and everything else with a fraction of the staff its neighbors field. Prichard sits just north of Mobile in Mobile County, a city that has struggled for decades with shrinking revenue and an aging population, and its police department has long operated under budgets that make dedicated cold-case or missing-persons units an impossibility. In departments like that, one detective may carry the entire caseload, and the routine follow-ups in a report like Jordan’s compete every day with the emergency that just came in.
None of that, the family acknowledges, changes the arithmetic of what happened: the report was filed on time, the remains were recovered on time, and the two files never met for nearly two years. The systems designed to bridge exactly that gap — internal flagging, state databasing, national cross-checks — exist because small departments cannot do it alone. Jordan’s case shows what happens when the bridging depends on requests that, as Boykin describes it, one agency says it made and the other says it never received.
Advocates note that the practical fixes are inexpensive by the standards of government: a standing requirement that every missing-person report be paired with a collected family DNA sample within a set period; automatic entry of both profiles into the state and federal databases; and a periodic audit that flags any case where one profile exists without the other. Where such protocols have been adopted, unidentified-remains backlogs have shrunk — because the science is rarely the bottleneck. The bottleneck, almost always, is a form nobody filed.
The waiting, and the anger
For families, the peculiar cruelty of a delay like this one is that it is invisible. Boykin and her relatives spent two years checking the usual places and asking the usual people, never knowing that the system had already answered their question in the summer of 2024. They planned no funeral because there was no date; they kept Jordan’s phone number active, kept his name circulating, kept hoping. Grief without a body, counselors who work with such families say, is its own category of loss — hope refuses to close, and the family stays suspended between searching and mourning.
When the notification finally came, it carried no ceremony: the remains had been identified, the file could be closed, the family could proceed. What it did not carry was an explanation, an apology, or an account of which agency owned the failure. That absence is what Boykin says she cannot accept — the loss of her uncle was grievous but survivable; the discovery that he had been found, tested and shelved while his family searched, without anyone telling them, is what she describes as inhumane.
The family’s next steps are practical. They intend to request records from both agencies, to ask the city’s leadership — beyond the department’s acting leadership — to review how the case was handled, and to keep the story public until the questions have answers. They have also begun hearing from other families in similar situations, which has only reinforced their determination: a case that gets audited and explained is a case that cannot repeat itself quietly.
Two years is a long time to wonder. It is also, for the officials whose file cabinets hold the answer, a long time to say nothing — and the family’s message to both agencies is that the passage of time has not softened the question, only sharpened it. They know where Kenneth Jordan was found. What they still do not know, and intend to find out, is how the system managed to lose the answer for two years while they were asking for it.