People have been buried behind a Mississippi jail since 2016, attorney says
npr.org
npr.org
An investigation would be a very good idea just to make sure that none of those bodies were being dumped there by the prison or by the police. Especially since the police were lying to families about the "missing" relatives that ended up there.
Bettersten Wade told the anguishing story of how, months after she filed a missing persons report about her son, Dexter Wade, she was finally told that her son was dead at age 37. The police also told her that county officials had buried him in the local pauper's field, she said.
Police investigators said Dexter Wade had been struck and killed by an SUV driven by an off-duty Jackson Police Department officer on Interstate 55, just hours after his mother last saw him. The police report said Wade was on foot at the time.
These things happen.
It’s hard to understand the mindset of casual incompetence and corruption if you’re not from there. Local government runs on nepotism and good ol boys networks - it’s such a standard ingrained practice that it is not even surprising or cause for concern when you notice it. It’s part of why these areas stay perpetually poor and get brain drained to hell
They have their own laws
"It's not a placed to dump inconvenient bodies, it's just a place where at least some of the bodies are people of known identity who were killed by police or corrections officers that cleared themselves of wrongdoing and somehow forgot to tell anyone."
Very reassuring. I think we can all agree that this isn't worth investigating because Mississippi has always been a place bereft of racial bias and government corruption.
>> These things happen.
No, they really don’t. That’s why it has made national news.
> These things happen.
215 times, apparently.
unidentified persons
"Inmates from local jails" and "unidentified persons" are separate categories.
This is completely counter to the long established design and custom of cemeteries - which is to be a welcoming place for loved ones.
And counties bury paupers in established cemeteries. Hines county certainly did as well. And did so long before this dumping ground was started. The procedures to inter these people in public cemeteries where already in place. They simply needed to be followed.
There is no need to put grieving families though a restricted entrance process, just so they can visit their loved one's graveside.
Perhaps even more tragic is that these sort of burial arrangements are commonplace at state psychiatric hospitals.
These hospitals are where they send the worst of the worst: uncontrollable, criminally insane, extreme and present danger to self and others. And then, of course, people die in custody and they are sometimes buried on the grounds, behind bars, essentially, in a cemetery where nobody can visit them, except perhaps the staff of that self-same hospital, who aren't likely to care in a month, much less 20 years down the line.
https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings/tree...