When Incompetence Becomes Obscene
By 
I don’t recollect if we’ve blogged about the Dexter Wade case here, but a tragic story has taken a turn for the obscene:
An independent pathologist examining the newly exhumed body of Dexter Wade — the Mississippi man killed by police and buried in a pauper’s grave without his mother’s knowledge — found a wallet with a state identification card that included the address of a home he shared with his mother, the family’s lawyer said Thursday.
The pathologist, Frank Peretti, reported that he found the wallet in the front pocket of Wade’s jeans and that it contained his state identification card with his home address, along with a credit card and a health insurance card, attorney Ben Crump said in a statement.
So to be clear, our sequence of events:
- Cop hits and kills Dexter Wade. Circumstances are worthy of investigation but not necessarily suspicious, as Wade was apparently crossing an interstate on foot.
- Cops decide that they can’t determine Wade’s identity, so leave body in morgue.
- Mother, understandably concerned about missing son, inquires with police as to his whereabouts.
- Nothing.
- Nothing.
- Nothing.
- Police give up on trying to discover identity of 30-something Black man, apparently ignoring mom’s repeated requests for info about her missing 37 year old Black son.
- Somebody puts 1 and 1 together and mom is finally led to son’s grave, resulting in a great many questions.
- Body is exhumed, revealing that son had his wallet in his front pocket with several forms of ID.
Worth pointing out that even a crack, professional organization such as the Jackson, Mississippi Police Department can miss an obscure detail such as the corpse carrying his ID in his front pocket rather than his back pocket. I mean, why would anyone ever do that? Probably a criminal of some sort.
I’m probably the most cop-tolerant of LGM frontpagers (they are, after all, civil servants performing a set of jobs that are mostly necessary for the health of the community) but this is an abjectly insane sequence of events that a) reveals the civic rot of Jackson, and b) ought to result in the termination of everyone in the police hierarchy.