By Logan Langlois
JACKSON, MS — An appalling situation of 215 bodies discovered buried under unmarked graves in a pauper cemetery behind a jailhouse located in Hinds County, Mississippi is spreading across news and social media. The identities of many of the deceased have not been determined, largely due to the reported lack of proper record-keeping having been done by the jail. Relatives attempting to identify bodies have reported that they’ve been told they will have to pay a fee. Many of the families believed that their loved ones were merely missing persons or serving their sentences in jail, not knowing that they had died until recently.
“It’s like they just threw him out like trash,” said the mother of Gretchen Hankins on Fox affiliate WBLT. “Just like they did with the others.”
Relatives of the deceased have said they would have happily claimed the bodies of their loved ones had they been notified by authorities. Family members have reported this experience has left them with trauma and less trust in their government. Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney representing several of the families of the deceased including Marrio Moore, Jonathan Hankins, and Dexter Wade is joined by the senior pastor of the Christ Tabernacle Church and A New Day Coalition for Equity and Black America national leader Reverend Hosea Hines in public outcry.
The case of Dexter Wade has made national headlines, as it was recently discovered that he was hit by an off-duty Jackson police officer with his squad car, and then buried at the pauper’s graveyard. Unaware that the 37-year-old had been struck by the officer on March 5th, Wade’s family would file their first missing person report for Dexter on March 14th, more than a week after the crash. They would continue following up until learning their son had been killed on August 24th.
Then, the Wade investigation took another disturbing turn when Dexter’s mother Betterson Wade had an independent autopsy done on her son’s body. It was then she learned that despite police reports claiming Wade had no identification on him, he in fact had his driver’s license and several credit cards on his person. Reverend Al Sharpton said in a recent MSNBC interview that these revelations only leave one to guess at some kind of cover-up that may have involved more people than just the off-duty driver.
“I really am outraged beyond words,” Sharpton said in the interview.
Both Hines and Crump ask why the families of the deceased were never notified regarding the death of their loved ones by the Hind County coroner’s office or the Jackson Police Department, both of which blame the other for the shortcoming. Crump is also calling for a federal investigation into the disturbing find and why many of the deaths have seemingly not been investigated properly. Many of the grave sites were unnamed, only to be identified by a numerical marker like a metal rod, which raised concerns regarding the respect shown to the deceased during their handling. Evidence showed that the bodies were also buried unceremoniously and without embalming fluid, with inmates of the jail being brought out to the unkept plots to dig additional graves.
NBC News has published a list of pauper burials in Hinds County since 2016 in an effort to help families who think their loved ones may be located in the newly discovered burial site. Crumb and other civil rights activists such as attorney Dennis Week and Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed advocate the potential violation of civil rights in cases such as Dexter Reeds including failure to notify the family and burying him without permission.
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