CROCKER, Mo. – The Missouri State Highway Patrol confirms it has reopened an investigation into a 2022 overdose death after concerns with how a small-town police department handled the case. Now, a Wildwood couple is hoping it can finally get answers three years after their son died.

Jeffrey Pratt Jr. died in Crocker, Missouri, in 2022. The county coroner declared the death a drug overdose, but case records raise serious questions about the investigation.

“He was a great kid. Liked by everyone. He was a football hero, and I would say he was a leader,” Jeffrey Pratt Sr. said.

Pratt Jr. was a bright teen, but as a young adult, he fell into addiction. He reached out to his dad for help.

“He told me, ‘Dad, how do you expect me to get sober in a house full of drug addicts?’ So, he got an apartment in Crocker to start a new life,” Pratt Sr. said.

On the morning of Jan. 4, 2022, Pratt’s girlfriend said she found the 27-year-old dead inside their apartment bathroom. Two Crocker police officers responded. The mayor, who had recently fired the police chief and was the acting police chief at the time, was also there, taking pictures of the scene. Crocker police said they found drugs in the apartment and a needle mark on Pratt Jr.’s inner elbow. The coroner called it an overdose.

FOX 2 News has reviewed the case, and the evidence is not so clear.

“It’s a big failure,” former Crocker Police Chief Regina Utley Arrington said of the investigation.

The death was seemingly ignored for months, until Chief Arrington came into the position. One day in May 2022, she got a call from Pratt Sr.

“In my heart of hearts, I think if this had been done like it should’ve been done, he wouldn’t have so many questions that keep him up at night,” Arrington said.

She is no longer with the police department or involved in this case. But she was working on it at the time. After talking to Pratt Sr., Arrington wrote in her supplement report that she could not find a file on this case.

“The reports weren’t done, supplements weren’t done, evidence wasn’t tagged, it hadn’t been sent to the lab. Nothing was tested. It was just starting from scratch on something that you weren’t even there for initially,” she said.

The Pratt family provided FOX 2 with the case file they obtained through the state’s Sunshine Law. The earliest documented incident report of Pratt’s death was dated May 11, four months after Pratt died.

FOX 2’s Chad Mira went to the police department for answers, but it was closed down. The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office took over policing the area earlier this month. But, any speculation about the death could be laid to rest with the coroner’s toxicology report.

“My office wasn’t equipped to handle blood draws and examinations, things to that extent, so we relied on the funeral homes to pull our blood samples,” Pulaski County coroner Roger Graves said.

Graves said he requested a blood sample from the funeral home. But he wrote in his report narrative that when he went to collect the blood sample, the funeral home had lost it, even though he said an employee named Leo Kloeppel told him it was ready for pick-up. So FOX 2’s Chad Mira went to the funeral home, but the door was locked.

On the phone, someone with the funeral home said Kloeppel had not worked there for several years. FOX 2 found a breach of contract lawsuit that states Kloeppel was fired from the funeral home in November 2021, two months before Pratt died. When FOX 2 pointed that out to Graves, he looked into it.

“That’s the number he gave me when I took office, come to find out the phone was not his, it actually belonged to the funeral home and it was for the on-call guy,” Graves said.

FOX 2 took the case to retired Warren County Coroner Roger Mauzy to get another opinion. He said the blood sample is imperative.

“Without that, it’s strictly speculation, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that,” Mauzy said.

But that was not the only problem he found with the case. FOX 2 showed him all of the photos the police took at the scene of the death. There were photos all over the apartment but only three pictures showed Pratt’s body. Mauzy said, in his opinion, that is not enough.

Graves showed FOX 2 that, as part of his investigation as coroner, he had taken his own, more thorough set of photos. He provided more information on how he came to his conclusion about the drug overdose.

“There were two capsules found there on the sink that were open. One of them had all of its contents gone. There was a spoon with some burnt residue in it as well and lying next to him was a needle and syringe with a clear liquid in it,” Graves said.

In a written list of evidence in the police incident report, police say they recovered a silver tube of eight pills, a syringe, a spoon, pipe, and foil, all with residue and more. But several of the items do not have an evidence tag number and are not pictured in any photograph reviewed by FOX 2.

The only evidence photographed in the case file is a single pill. The date of the photo is July 2022, six months after Pratt died. It appears to be the same pill that Crocker sent to the state crime lab for testing. According to a highway patrol report, the lab did not receive the pill until the end of July. It did test positive for fentanyl.

But for Pratt Sr., that is not enough to prove it was in his son’s system when he died. Now, three years later, his wounds are still fresh.

“I feel like I could get a phone call from him at any moment. That day will never happen again. A few things I’d like to say to him still,” Pratt Sr. said.

He hopes a new investigation will finally provide him with more answers.

“There is no closure. I have no closure. I’d like to know how my son actually died,” Pratt Sr. said.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol confirmed it has reopened the case. Due to the new investigation, the City of Crocker declined an interview. Due to a threat of litigation, the city’s former mayor and acting police chief also declined an interview.