Jasper County Sheriff’s investigators are trying to get more information about a man found dead in an offshoot of Turkey Creek east of Duquesne late on Tuesday.
Jasper County Sheriff’s Capt. Derek Walrod said Ronnie J. Genandt, 33, Joplin, was found floating in a slough area that was connected to, but an off-shoot of Turkey Creek on east Seventh Street near the Travis Acres area near Duquesne.
Walrod said the sheriff’s office got the call from the people who discovered it at about 5:35 p.m. on Tuesday.
He said a man found what looked like either a fully-clothed body or a mannequin floating in the water, and called his father to the scene. His father called the sheriff’s office.
“We found a white male floating in a slough,” Walrod said on Wednesday. “We’ve sent him for an autopsy that’s being conducted today so we’re waiting on that to determine a cause of death.”
Walrod said they identified the man through pictures shown to friends or family.
Walrod said family members said they last saw Genandt a couple of weeks before Christmas, but investigators talked to friends who last saw him in the first week of January.
Officers were still waiting on the autopsy reports to determine a cause of death.
“We don’t have anything to suggest it’s foul play at this time, but we don’t have anything that says it isn’t either,” Walrod said. “We’re treating this as a homicide investigation, like we would with any death under suspicious circumstances like this one, considering his age and that he was out in the middle of nowhere.”
