Dexter Wade, who was run over by a police car and buried in a pauper’s grave in Mississippi, will also be given a “proper funeral,” said Crump, the family’s lawyer.
The lawyer representing a Mississippi mother whose adult son was run over by an off-duty police officer and was later buried in a pauper’s grave without her knowing will ask the Department of Justice to investigate why she wasn’t told what happened.
The lawyer, Ben Crump, also said in a news conference Monday that he will help arrange for Dexter Wade’s body to be exhumed from where he was buried on the grounds of the Hinds County penal farm, marked only by a number. Crump said he will then arrange for an independent autopsy before Wade is reburied in a cemetery with a headstone bearing his name.
Wade will be given “a proper funeral where his family and loved ones and his two little children and all the community can come out and give him a respectable homegoing service — one that apparently Jackson Police Department didn’t intend for him to have,” Crump said.
Wade’s mother, Bettersten Wade, said it was devastating to search for her missing son for months and beg the Jackson police for answers, only to learn that the department knew all along that he’d been killed the night she last saw him. The experience has made her question the police department’s ability to work for its residents.
“The system is supposed to work for me if I call you and say I need help,” Bettersten Wade, 65, said at Monday’s news conference. “I am a citizen here in Jackson. So I asked for help.”
NBC News first reported on what happened to Dexter Wade last week, sparking widespread public outrage.
“It just doesn’t pass the smell test,” Crump said. “That’s why people all over America are talking about what happened to Dexter Wade in Jackson, Mississippi.”
Source : NBC News
