It must be a grisly Friday, because look at the story that just popped up in my newsfeed.
The gruesome discovery of 215 bodies buried in unmarked graves behind a jail outside of Jackson, Mississippi, has left a community in disbelief.
The families are angry their loved ones were buried in so-called pauper’s graves marked by just a metal rod and a number and families were never notified of their deaths. The startling revelation came months after the mother of 37-year-old Dexter Wade filed a missing persons report last March. It wasn’t until August when Bettersten Wade learned her son had been hit by a police car and killed, then buried in that same cemetery.
This takes ACAB to a whole new level. The Jackson, Mississippi police committed vehicular homicide, and then buried the body in a field behind the jail and didn’t bother to tell anyone? They’ve dug up the body since, and he had a wallet with full identification in his pocket, but no one was notified? And there are 215 bodies hidden in that field?
No, that last bit is wrong.
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.
Furthermore, Mr. Wade was number 672. That means there are 671 other people buried behind that jail marked with only a number.
Hey. Hey! Remember? Remember when some of us were talking about disbanding police departments, and all the conservatives and centrists were talking down at us all for being so unrealistic, and others were flying “thin blue line” flags and getting indignant and insisting that civilization would crumble without the cops to protect us, and nothing happened?
Remember?
Fuck those people.
“ police committed vehicular Homicide”
How do we know it was homicide?
Wait, where’s the flag? How disrespectful to not have the flag properly flying over the graveyard!
Someone needs to place a proper flagpole there, with a thin blue line flag flying proudly.
chesapeake, why did you capitalise Homicide in your purported quotation?
Obs, there isn’t enough info to determine whether it was deliberate vehicular homicide or unintentional vehicular manslaughter; but that they hid the event and ignored the missing person report is suggestive either way. Fucking shitty either way, no?
Sad to say, there’s a Wikipedia page for such killings — broken down by month!
Kinda revealing, that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States,_March_2023
“Wade was struck and killed by a Jackson police car as he crossed the interstate. Following his death police claimed they sent a voicemail to his mother, though she denied receiving one. Wade’s mother reported him missing, and she was not informed of her son’s death until months later, after the county had buried Wade alongside unclaimed bodies in a pauper’s field. Wade was the nephew of George Robinson, who was also killed by Jackson Police.”
I would have expected as a first impression that they discovered bodies long ago buried during the distant Jim Crow years. This practice is quite recent. I suppose to point out such horrific things are happening to this day is woke and verboten to discuss in a college or high school classroom in the south. Sweep it under the rug as racism and police malevolence are illusory.
Ambrose Beirce, in his “Devil’s Dictionary”, says that there are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. He added that it makes no great difference to the slain which way they died; the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers.
One wonders what the racial profile of those six hundred odd victims of police murder looks like.
Admittedly, with this being Mississippi, one does not need to wonder too hard.
I’m surprised they didn’t cremate the bodies or dissolve them in a barrel of carbonated water. Did the police think no one would find this later?
Judging by how our military and its proxies inflict this carnage on populations overseas without a second thought, I’m guessing they assumed no one would care.
@19 They weren’t concerned about later – all the evidence is pretty well gone, now, since the justice system doesn’t consider just the fact having bodies buried in you back yard a sign of criminal intent – as long as you’re a policeman.
err @7
@ 1 Chesapeake. We know it was homicide because homicide is the killing of one person by another regardless of whether it was accidental or planned, manslaughter or murder. Definition
Wish I could say I’m surprised, but it is Jackson, Mississippi. I wonder how many similar places are located behind jails across the Southeast. And I’m willing to wager that most of those bodies are the remains of black and brown people.
Fucking hell.. Just fucking hell.
Tell me there’s going to be an investigation, arrests and consequenes for this please?
StevoR, there’s going to be an investigation, arrests and consequenes for this.
(Well, you did ask)
My experience is that all of you “liberals” (a.k.a. “not real leftists”) rode along and gave everything up for us. All of us locally that cared . . .
So, dude, nobody was saying “disbanding police,” they said “defund them.” Whether that is your overfunded city police or your (oh, my gawd, surely) overfunded MN Sherriff’s office or your MN state U ego . . .
You are a Professor, so not likely one of “the accused.” You’re, quite frankly more likely an accusor (as in the piece I respond to).
If ya wanna be a radical, then fuck all that shit, PZ. (But if you do, you probably side with your “enemies,” the “free-thinkers . . .”
Hope to see you over here, PZ!
I concede this sentence got me:
(So, no, there shan’t be significant repercussions, when that’s the reportage.
Finger-wagging and token hearings, maybe.
In case my bitter joke was not evident)
Heh. I am about as “liberal” (so, you didn’t mean actual liberals) as you are Martian.
You are truly a puffed-up blowhard. Dude. And very silly with it.
Here, for ya:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/07/19/whatever-shall-we-do-without-a-few-cops-around/
“The city of Morris, my little town, has disbanded its police force. Yay!”, is the lede.
So yeah, it was being said, O ignoramus.
Too late. Only relics like you instantiate the slymepit, now. Dessicated old farts.
(Remember all that crowing about PZ losing his O-so-many followers and how you would prevail?
I do)
What do you think that word means?
Oy. Vehicular homicide and vehicular manslaughter are the same thing, and are criminal. It’s possible to commit non-criminal homicide with a vehicle, but that’s not called vehicular manslaughter or vehicular homicide. Isn’t natural language fun? It ain’t set theory, that’s for sure.
drew, you’re an imbecile.
For more context, the state of Mississippi is currently trying to take over control of local courts because they don’t like the people who local citizens elect to be judges. Guess why?
@#3 Morales. “ why did you capitalise Homicide in your purported quotation?”
Didn’t know I did. I cut and pasted the words and somehow the word became capitalized.
I see I didn’t know the definition of homicide. I’m very surprised at that. Of course it was a homicide. I see that now.
You can’t harvest strange fruit unless you plant the seeds for it.
chesapeake, ta.
Don’t just blame the police; also blame the Mississippi state lege, who have been consistently voting to defund and disinvest in their own capital city since desegregation began. If the cops are acting like corrupt incompetent Third-World buffoons, that’s partly because the state lege turned their city into a badly-run underfunded Third-World shithole.
I had thought homicide.meant the same as murder, which is intentional. Homicide may be.
There used to be a macabre joke in California that if you want to kill someone, do it with a car and make it look like an accident. The reason? The sentence for vehicular manslaughter was 90 days.
Not just cops and not just Mississippi. The great James Lee Burke in his Dave Robichaux novels often refers to prisoners at Angola Penitentiary having been killed and buried in the nearby levee. Novels therefore fiction, yes, but i’m betting that, like many elements used in these books, there is more than a grain of truth there.
People tend to forget all of the bodies of Black murder victims that were found during the search for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. It seems things haven’t changed as much as we would like to believe.
Her son and her brother. Mississippi Goddamn! It’s horrible that Nina Simone’s old song still applies