York County identifies remains found in Hanover as missing man Mark Hicks

York County has finally put a name to the remains found in Hanover Borough: Mark Henry Hicks, the 39-year-old Thomasville man who disappeared in June 2025. The identification answers the first question in a case that has lingered for months, but it also sharpens the harder one, the one missing-person families always circle back to, what happened in the last hours before Hicks was seen alive.

Police were called to the 400 block of East Middle Street around 7:23 a.m. on April 16, 2026, after human remains were found near train tracks. Later reporting described the discovery as happening about 7:28 a.m. in a wooded area behind that address. Hanover Borough police said the remains were in a state of decomposition, and the scene drew help from the York County coroner, the York County District Attorney’s Office, county detectives, the York County Forensic Investigative Unit, the Penn Township Police Department, the Northern York County Regional Police Department and the York County Regional Police Department.

The identification did not come from a headline-grabbing DNA genealogy effort. The York County Coroner’s Office used dental records, comparing records for two missing people in the area before confirming Hicks’ identity. Hicks’ family was told on May 14, 2026, before the identification became public. For a case that had spent months as a name and a date on a missing-person flyer, that confirmation turned an uncertain search into a documented death investigation.

Hicks had last been seen on June 22, 2025. Family members said he went for a walk around 5 a.m. that morning and never came home. Another account placed him getting into a maroon truck with an ex-girlfriend. By July 2025, Hicks was still missing, along with Ben Garrett, and local reporting noted a broader cluster of disappearances in the Hanover area, including at least three men and a teenage boy reported missing over roughly six weeks.

The coroner later ruled Hicks’ manner of death a suicide and the cause of death as asphyxiation. That ruling closes one major gap in the case, but the timeline still runs through a long stretch of silence, from the June 22 disappearance to the April discovery along East Middle Street, where a set of remains in the woods finally became Mark Henry Hicks.