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Police are a shameful and shameless bunch but this is a new low even for them.
According to NBCNews, a Jackson, Mississippi police officer fatally struck a 37-year-old Black man named Dexter Wade as he attempted to walk across I-55. The last time Bettersten Wade, Dexter’s mother, saw her son was on the night of March 5, 2023, when he left her house. One day later, she reported him missing and she didn’t find out what actually happened to him until 172 days later.
The NBC report states that police knew Dexter’s name and his mother’s name but failed to contact her. The Clarion-Ledger reports that Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba addressed this failure during his State of the City speech this past Thursday. Lumumba said that police had difficulty identifying Jackson despite the fact that a pill bottle with his name on it was later found on his person. For some unknown reason, police didn’t even attempt to search him for proper ID.
“Somewhere in the process of them trying to locate that number, Mr. Wade’s mother days later filed a missing persons report. And the failure was that ultimately there was a lack of communication with the missing person’s division, the coroner’s office and accident investigation,” Lumumba said. “They were unable to find his family within an expeditious period of time and he was later buried once the coroner went to the Hinds County Board of Supervisors in order to get permission to do so.”
Lumumba went on to call the incident “an insult to that trauma” that Ms. Wade has endured for almost 6 months. However, he also went out of his way to insist that there was absolutely no police misconduct says the Ledger.
“It’s important that we learn from these circumstances and that we identify ways to improve communication, but it is also important that we don’t confuse the community of issues of police misconduct and circumstances which honestly was an unfortunate and tragic accident,” Lumumba said.
Sorry, sir, but neither we nor ubiquitous civil rights attorney Ben Crump are giving your officers the benefit of the doubt.
Via WJTV:
“Dexter’s story is a living nightmare for any mother. ââThe secrecy surrounding his death, the alleged concealment of vital information, and the callous burial in a pauper’s field without his mother’s knowledge are not just oversights – they are a grave miscarriage of justice. The fact that Dexter’s tragic end involved an off-duty police officer only deepens the wounds of this community and raises troubling questions about the integrity of those entrusted with upholding the law,” said Crump.
We are locked in on this case and will provide more updates as information becomes available.
