Hundreds of individuals are buried in numbered graves in a pauper’s graveyard close to the Hinds County Detention Center and Hinds County Penal Farm. Families say their family members have been buried there with out discover.

Google Maps/Screenshot by NPR

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Google Maps/Screenshot by NPR

Hundreds of individuals are buried in numbered graves in a pauper’s graveyard close to the Hinds County Detention Center and Hinds County Penal Farm. Families say their family members have been buried there with out discover.

Google Maps/Screenshot by NPR

Families of people that have been buried in a pauper’s area subsequent to the Hinds County Penal Farm close to Jackson, Miss., are calling for a federal investigation into the burials, which occurred with out households being notified. With their legal professional now saying the sector holds a whole bunch extra graves, the households desire a full accounting of the our bodies buried there.

The concern became national news final fall, when a number of households stated they’d waited months to listen to a few lacking cherished one — solely to be taught their relative had died months earlier, and have been buried in a grassy area, their graves marked solely by a metallic tag bearing a quantity. Their legal professional, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, says he believes many extra folks have been buried below related circumstances.

“We know, based on the records from the coroner’s office, that, since 2016, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that were buried behind that jail, and their families have not been notified,” Crump told PBS NewsHour this week.

When NPR contacted officers in Jackson to ask about Crump’s allegation, Melissa Faith Payne, town’s director of communications, stated the our bodies have been buried in a pauper’s graveyard managed by Hinds County.

“It is not a secret burial ground,” she stated. “In those graves are the bodies of those who went unclaimed by family when they died. These persons are either homeless people, inmates from local jails who died but relatives never claimed their bodies, unidentified persons who officials were never able to connect with family, or even persons who died” whose households could not afford a funeral.

A mom’s grief drew extensive consideration final fall

Last October, Bettersten Wade told NBC News the anguishing story of how, months after she filed a lacking individuals report about her son, Dexter Wade, she was lastly informed that her son was useless at age 37. The police additionally informed her that county officers had buried him within the native pauper’s area, she stated.

Police investigators stated Dexter Wade had been struck and killed by an SUV pushed by an off-duty Jackson Police Department officer on Interstate 55, simply hours after his mom final noticed him. The police report stated Wade was on foot on the time.

“The accident was investigated and it was determined that it was in fact an accident and that there was no malicious intent,” Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said last October.

But, Lumumba added, officers had failed to tell the Wade household. “There was a lack of communication with the missing persons division, the coroner’s office, and [the police department’s] accident investigation” unit, he stated.

By the time Bettersten Wade realized her son’s destiny, she had spent months searching for him, contacting police in Jackson, giving them potential leads and asking for any updates about the place her son may be. She additionally requested for assistance on social media to seek out him.

“I just couldn’t believe that he had disappeared off the face of Earth and nobody knows where” he was, she informed NewsHour.

It turned out that Dexter Wade had a prescription drugs bottle together with his identify on it in his pocket when he died. Within days of his dying, the Hinds County Coroner’s workplace was in a position to verify his identification and share that info with police. But someway, Jackson police have been unable to tell Wade’s mom till final August.

Questions persist over burials

When Wade’s household lastly recovered his physique, their legal professional stated that an unbiased examination discovered that the denims he was buried in held a pockets, which contained his state ID, a bank card and different figuring out info.

“The fact that Dexter had a state identification card and several other identifying items shows us that there was a concerted effort to keep the truth and manner of his death from his family,” Crump stated, in response to member station Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “There is no excuse, not even incompetence, for not notifying a next of kin of an identified man’s death.”

Since the Wade household struggled to seek out Dexter, Payne stated, the Jackson Police Department has modified its coverage to enhance the way it informs a deceased particular person’s next-of-kin.

At least two different households are recognized to have been knowledgeable they’ve kin buried within the area. In the case of a person named Marrio Moore, 40, the lag in communication was compounded by one other concern: the Jackson Police Department’s preliminary failure to disclose more than 20 homicides that occurred over the course of 2023. In October, when the company lastly launched the names of people that had been killed, Moore’s household was shocked to see his name on the list — and to be taught he had been killed on Feb. 2, and buried in the identical area as Dexter Wade.

“It is tragic to suffer the consequences of having to bury your child before you perish,” Lumumba stated final fall. “But to add insult to that trauma, it is even more difficult to not have the ability to have a proper burial for your child.”

The mayor stated his administration regrets what the Wade household endured. At the identical time, he emphasised that an investigation didn’t reveal police misconduct or malicious intent.

But weeks after that assertion, the Wade household was confronted with one other hardship, when Dexter Wade’s stays have been lastly exhumed from the pauper’s grave.

Hinds County officers had knowledgeable Bettersten Wade that her son’s physique can be exhumed and transferred to a funeral dwelling on Nov. 13, in a course of that will start at 11:30 a.m. After months of uncertainty, the occasion promised a second of closure. But as Mississippi Public Broadcasting reported, when Wade arrived on the area, she realized her son’s physique had been dug up hours earlier, at 8 a.m.

“As Dexter’s body was transferred from the coroner’s SUV to the funeral home’s van, Bettersten stared blankly into the black bag holding her son’s remains and asked why they couldn’t have at least buried him in a box,” MPB reported.