Sunday morning, members of Salem Baptist Church arrived to find a suspicious car in the lot occupied by an unresponsive man.
Pearl River County Corner Derek Turnage said the members of the church noticed the vehicle in the lot when they arrived Sunday morning to prepare the church for Sunday services. When they looked inside they found an unresponsive man still in the vehicle and called emergency personnel. Turnage said the initial investigation that followed speculates the man died as a result of suicide by a single a gunshot.
During that investigation, it was learned that the deceased, identified as 21-year-old Devin Michael Hingle of Picayune, had left home the previous day, but never returned, leading the family to file a missing person’s report, Turnage said.
Chief Deputy Shane Tucker with the Pearl River County Sheriff’s Department said, so far, all that is positively known is that Hingle died from a singe gunshot wound to the head.
Turnage said that while Hingle’s cause of death is suspected to be due to suicide, the case is still under investigation.
Tucker said investigators will not be able to determine a definitive cause of death until they receive results from the medical examiner’s autopsy and they gather more evidence.