MS - Hinds County Penal Farm, 200+ bodies buried behind jail, 400+ unidentified

[pokerowan]

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/12/1224449631/mississippi-jail-graves-investigation

"It is not a secret burial ground," [Melissa Faith Payne] said. "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 families couldn't afford a funeral.

215 bodies buried behind a Jackson, MS jail have been indentified so far, dating back to 2016. Despite the above quote, many of these people were not unclaimed, and some families did not even know that their relative had died:

Last October, Bettersten Wade told NBC News 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.

Dexter Wade was struck and killed by a police officer (!) then buried as one of these 'unidentified persons', despite having identification on his body. The County Coroner found medication, a state ID, and his wallet on him when the body was exhumed.


I'm really surprised I couldn't find a thread on this, as it's been going on since fall last year. Hopefully I've just missed it. There are some other articles I want to share on this - and over 400 bodies which remain unidentified. (I was going to put this in the UID forum, but the articles mostly relate to those who have been IDed.)

 

[dalsglen]

Jeez.

 

[pokerowan]

Coroner's office that buried men without telling families releases a policy that leaves questions unanswered

It's unclear when the Hinds County, Mississippi, next-of-kin notification policy went into effect, but it appears not to have been followed in the deaths of Dexter Wade and others.

www.nbcnews.com

A Mississippi coroner’s office under fire for burying people in pauper’s graves without their families’ knowledge has released a policy on death notifications that is unsigned and undated, making it impossible to know whether the guidance was in effect while the office was handling the botched cases.

The policy includes provisions that, if they were in effect over the past two years, appear to have been disregarded by Hinds County coroner’s office investigators.

 

[worm]

I was expecting this to be a story from the 1930s-40s.

 

[pokerowan]

I was expecting this to be a story from the 1930s-40s.

I couldn't believe it when I saw it! It's not even the existence of the pauper's field that is the issue here - obviously these are all over the place, and still commonly used to bury folk in. It's the fact that this entire area of land now needs to be searched, because an off-duty police officer struck and killed a man with his vehicle, and the police force then buried that man with multiple IDs on his person without notifying the next of kin. Are the public supposed to assume this is a one-off? MOO.

 

[pokerowan]

Jan 10th:

Families in disbelief after hundreds of bodies found buried behind Mississippi jail

They claimed that they tried to reach out to Ms. Bettersten. And you should know that Ms. Bettersten is the named plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Jackson Police Department, because they killed her brother three years earlier. [...] So when they called her house, if they did call her house, like they claim, they knew where she lived. They knew how to get in contact with her if they really wanted to notify her that her son Dex had been hit by a police car. So it is very suspicious that they would just bury him in a pauper's grave because they said they could not identify his next of kin.

Ms. Bettersten does not accept it. And because of her tenacity, it has exposed all of these loved ones being dropped in a hole in a bag behind a Mississippi jail.

 

[renaebri]

A full account of the 215 will probably take a while, but I hope that's being worked on?.. Would they list them on Namus? I checked and there's nothing from there in the Unidentified or Unclaimed.

looks like these three spots might be the graves, original on the left, newer ones on the right.
2011

2022