Police Conduct Internal Investigation In Finding of Missing Man’s Body

RichardHablePolice found the remains of a missing man’s body underneath his mobile home early Thursday morning after the man’s 80-year-old neighbor said she had been trying to convince people there was something wrong since May.

According to the neighbor, who doesn’t want to reveal her identity, she hadn’t heard from Richard Hable for a couple days back in May and went to his home. She had forgotten to bring a house key Hable had given her, so she asked the man renting a room there if he had a key. The man told the neighbor Hable had evicted him and took the key from him.

The neighbor asked the renter to wait there and she went back to get her spare key. When she came back, the roommate and another man were leaving Hable’s home.

The neighbor said she asked the men if Hable was in the home, but they said he wasn’t and that she didn’t need to go in the house and a can of paint had been poured in there.

The neighbor came back a couple days after with another neighbor to go inside the home. There they found blood on the door and a lot in the home with the bucket of pain poured in the middle of the blood, the neighbor said. She called police the next day.

The neighbor said when police arrived that they told her the substance was transmission fluid, even when she argued that transmission fluid is greasy and not dry. Officers told the neighbor they were going to leave because they didn’t see anything suspicious, she said.

The neighbor convinced officers to look inside the home after telling them about the men leaving the unit. They told her the same thing about the stuff on the floor being transmission fluid and not blood. The neighbor said they suggested a missing person’s report be filed, but only a family member could do so and Hable hadn’t been gone long enough.

Months later, Hable still hadn’t been heard from.

In August, the neighbor tried to call police after a neighbor told her there had been a sheriff’s deputy at the unit trying to serve Hable a subpoena for court appearance in one of his criminal cases.

Officers arrived at the neighbor’s house and she told them about Hable’s missing. She followed officers to the mobile home and when they still said the substance was oil, the neighbor told them to send it to the lab.

Police then filed a missing person’s report on Aug. 20.

 

 

According to police, an internal investigation is being conducted into whether all procedures and policies in the case were followed. The findings will be made public once available, they said.

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