The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi told the public what he thought about the killing of a Black man who was run over by an off-duty cop in a police car and whose death was kept a secret from his family.
Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba opted to call Dexter Wade’s death a “tragic” and “unfortunate accident,” but also stated there was “no malicious intent” on the part of city authorities who buried Wade without notifying his mother.
Wade’s mother, Bettersten Wade, recently retained the legal services of civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who called this terrible ordeal “a living nightmare for any mother.”
“The secrecy surrounding [Dexter’s] death, the alleged concealment of vital information, and the callous burial in a pauper’s field are not just oversights — they are a grave miscarriage of justice,” Crump said.
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Wade looked for her 37-year-old son for over five months after he mysteriously disappeared in March.
However, just an hour after Wade left home on March 5, he was struck by an off-duty corporal, whose name has not been released, in a Jackson police car as he was crossing an interstate highway. Authorities took the body to a morgue, where it went unclaimed for months.
What adds insult to injury is that they knew the names of both Dexter and his mother and never contacted Bettersten even after she filed a missing person report. When Wade called police about her missing son, they said no one had been able to find him.
“They had me looking for him all that time, and they knew who he was,” Bettersten Wade told NBC News.
Instead, the county buried Wade’s body in an unmarked grave in a penal farm in late July. They didn’t inform his mother until late August.
No sobriety test was run on the cop who killed Wade. He was also never cited for violating any traffic laws. Authorities did, however, run a toxicology test on Wade’s body which revealed that he had PCP and…
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