This article was originally published in the Mississippi Free Press
JACKSON, Miss.—A year after the death and burial of Dexter Wade without his family’s notice sparked a national outcry and accusations of a Jackson police coverup, his mother says she still doesn’t have complete answers about what happened to her son.
“They say he got killed on the freeway, but I don’t have no knowledge of what actually happened. We don’t have no idea, no clue. All we know is that they said he was hit on the freeway. Somebody hit him,” Bettersten Wade said at a rally near the police precinct in downtown Jackson on Wednesday morning.
Friends and family joined her, holding up signs bearing Dexter Wade’s face.
“Who was the officer?” one of Wade’s loved ones shouted from the crowd.
Although the Hinds County Coroner ruled his death an accident, Bettersten Wade said the Jackson Police Department still has not given her the name of the officer who struck and killed her son.
“I haven’t heard anything about charges against nobody,” Wade told reporters. “They’re just accepting it as an accident.”
Unidentified JPD Officer Killed Wade Last Year
NBC News reporter Jon Schuppe first reported on the death and burial of Dexter Wade last year.
Wade, a father of two, was walking along Interstate 55 in Jackson on the night of March 5, 2023, when an off-duty Jackson Police officer driving along the highway struck and killed him, officials say.
Bettersten Wade filed a missing person’s report with the Jackson Police Department on March 14, 2023, posted to Facebook about her missing son and reached out to police officers several times in the following months asking for an update on his whereabouts.
They told her they had none.
It was not until August 2023 that an investigator told Bettersten Wade that her son was dead.
Although the Hinds County Coroner’s Office had ruled his death an accident and was able to positively identify him within days, the 37-year-old man’s body remained in a morgue until the County buried him in late July 2023 in a pauper’s grave at its penal farm behind the county jail in Raymond, Miss.
In the aftermath, officials with both the Jackson Police Department and Hinds County Coroner’s Office denied responsibility for the mixup.
LaGrand Elliott, an investigator with the Hinds County Coroner’s Office, told NBC News that he passed what he’d found—a phone number and an address—to the Jackson Police Department’s accident investigation unit so they could notify Bettersten Wade of her son’s death.
Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba said during his 2023 State of the City Address that the City investigated the matter but did not find “any police misconduct in this process or that there was any malicious intent.”
“There was a lack of communication with the missing person’s division, the coroner’s office and accident investigation. Because of that, they were unable to find (Dexter Wade’s) 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,” the mayor said on Oct. 23, 2023.
Bettersten Wade, who was previously on the City’s radar after her brother George Robinson died following a police encounter in 2019, said on Oct. 30, 2023, that she could not believe officers had trouble locating her son’s next-of-kin.
“How could you not say this is a vendetta? I put in a missing person’s report. There’s my address; there’s my phone number. How could they not put all that together?” Bettersten Wade said at a press conference on Oct. 30.
Mississippi law stated at the time that county authorities in the areas where a deceased person is located “shall make reasonable efforts to notify members of the decedent’s family or other known interested persons, and, if the dead body or portion thereof shall not be claimed for burial or cremation by any interested person within five (5) days of the aforementioned written notice, the board of supervisors or coroner shall, as soon as it may think appropriate, authorize and direct the burial or cremation and burial of the residue of such dead body or portion thereof.”
Bettersten Wade had county authorities exhume his body for an independent autopsy. The independent examiner’s report would later reveal that Wade had an ID and prescription medication labeled with his name on it in his pocket at the time of his death.
‘Not Doing Their Job At All’
Jon Schuppe’s subsequent reports for NBC News would reveal that Dexter Wade was just one of several men who authorities approved for burial at the site without alerting their next-of-kin.
Gretchen Hankins and Mary Moore Glenn, the mothers of Jonathan David Hankins and Marrio Moore, respectively, each later revealed that they also didn’t find out until months after their son’s deaths that authorities had buried them in the pauper’s field, too.
“I feel like Rankin County and Hinds County (officials) are not doing their job at all,” Gretchen Hankins said during a press conference at Stronger Hope Baptist Church on Dec. 20, 2023.
She said she had reached out to the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department several times in the months before Schuppe informed her that he had died and been buried.
Speculation about a police coverup and misinformation about a “secret graveyard” in Jackson spread for weeks on social media.
In the weeks after NBC News reported Wade’s story, JPD Chief Joseph Wade shared that the agency had no documented death-notification policy before that point.
“We have several policies that we have to revise, create and change,” he said during a Nov. 13, 2023, press conference.
‘Families Want and Deserve Transparency’
The Department of Justice announced on April 4, 2024, that it would assist both the Jackson Police Department and the Hinds County Coroner’s Office with creating new death notification policies.
“Families want and deserve transparency and the opportunity to make decisions about their loved ones’ burials,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
The federal government decided to assist the local agencies after news reports indicated a public perception that racial animus or other factors played a role in the burials, a DOJ press release said.
“Through technical assistance, we aim to ensure that officials are able to deliver death notifications and make decisions regarding burials in a timely and trauma-informed way that complies with federal civil-rights law,” Clarke continued.
Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart, who held the seat for the last 25 years, announced on Sept. 30, 2024, that she plans to retire at the end of this year, three years before her current term was set to end.
She has not said whether the debacle over the pauper’s grave burials factored into her decision to retire. Stewart has never spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding how Wade and the other men were buried in the county pauper’s field without their families’ knowledge.
While standing on the steps of the police precinct on Wednesday morning, Bettersten Wade said she wished Stewart well and reiterated her belief that the Jackson Police Department was most responsible for the failures.
“There were a lot of mistakes made but it started with JPD,” she said. “JPD should be held responsible.”
Capital City reporter Shaunicy Muhammad has an enduring interest in social-justice issues, class inequality, Africana studies and cultural storytelling. Her educational background includes a journalism degree from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. Her time as an undergraduate student culminated with the production of the senior research project “Black Unrest, Riots and How Newspapers Frame the Narrative of African American Social Protest,” which analyzed patterns in the narratives reporters used when explaining the social unrest and uprisings after the deaths of Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Shaunicy formally served for two years, in Atlanta, Ga., and Buffalo, N.Y.,, respectively, as an Americorps member focused on facilitating safe learning environments for youth experiencing behavioral and/or emotional challenges in traditional and alternative classroom settings. Additionally, her work history includes experience in marketing and corporate communications in the nonprofit sector. She is reporting on the capital city with a year-long focus on causes, effects and solutions for systemic inequities in South Jackson, supported by a grant from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. Email her at shaunicy@mississippifreepress.org.
