The Miller County Sheriff's Department was notified just minutes after the alarm reached Hope City Police. Arkansas State Police Officers Charley Boyd and Max Tackett got the call on their radio and were the first officers at the scene. Some of the reports were contradictory. One of the officers said that they found Starks still slumped in the blood-soaked chair, and that the chair had caught fire from the electric heating pad. "Smoke was filling the room and was coming up all around the man and between his legs." Yet Sheriff W. E. Davis said that when officers arrived at the scene, they found the chair on fire, but Starks' body was not burned because it had fallen on the floor.