The family members of a Navy chief were left brokenhearted and bewildered after his body was found in his apartment in Texas three long years after he passed away.

According to WFAA reports, Doris Stevens was struggling to cope with the mysterious death of her son, Ronald Wayne White, who had been missing for three years.

“I can’t hardly cope with it, to be honest with you,” she said to WFAA. “I can’t get past three years. … I can’t hardly deal with it.”

The former Navy chief’s body was discovered on the kitchen floor of his apartment. It was maintenance workers just wanting to solve a water problem who found the corpse, an officer with the DeSoto Police Department told PEOPLE.

“Maintenance men were trying to get into the apartment because they noticed that the water usage was non-existent for some time, so they suspected that there was some type of issue with the water main,” the officer told the outlet.

When they tried to go into White’s apartment, it was dead-bolted from the inside. “They forced entry into the apartment and that’s when they found the deceased in his kitchen on the floor,” the officer said, adding that the workers contacted the police right away and “noticed that his decomposition was advanced.”

The officer noted that White “had been there obviously for some time. There were cobwebs and dead bugs all over the apartment.”

According to the Medical Examiner who arrived at the scene, there were no signs of foul play and the decomposition “appeared to be over two years old, closer to three.”

Despite the growing concern about her son’s disappearance, the discovery came as a huge shock to his mother.

“My son would call me at least twice a month,” she told WFAA. “He would call me from Egypt. He would call me from the Philippines. He would call me right from Dallas.”

But when White didn’t answer her call in 2017, Stevens said she couldn’t pay for a private investigator. She then conducted a search of her son’s previous addresses and the most recent was in Glenn Heights, Texas.

She also didn’t want to file a missing person case as her son traveled all the time.

“All them days, holidays, I just suffered,” Stevens expressed. “Because nobody wanted to help find him.”

When she finally got word of where White had been all those years, she said: “When the medical examiner told me three years, my knees gave away. Three years? And that’s what I can’t get past in my brain.

“My biggest question is, how in the world could my son have been dead in that apartment and nobody knows anything?”

Stevens also told the outlet that she and White’s children, adults, had no idea that the former Navy veteran had been staying there.

“No family member that we know of reached out to us to check on him, to check his welfare,” the officer said. “We’re waiting for answers just to see what [the apartment building’s] protocols are, in terms of checking on their residences and what they did.”

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