By Rene Childress

Let us imagine for the moment that we are the mother of a 37 year old son who lives near you and  who visits you almost everyday. He visits you as usual on March 5,2024. He kids you and makes you laugh as is his normal way with you. You go about your day as usual. You go to bed this day believing that it is just another ordinary day. 

You wake up the next day believing you would see your child again. He doesn’t come by or call. You think he will eventually come by as usual. 

You wait and wait for a couple of days. Nothing happens. You start to worry. You contact all his friends and family members to see if anyone has seen or heard from him. 

Finally in desperation you contact the authorities on March 13, 2024. They take your report. They tell you they have not had contact with him. 

Unbeknownst  to you they had been notified that your son was involved in an accident involving an off duty police officer driving an official police vehicle. Your son was hit walking down Interstate 55 when he was struck by a police vehicle. Five days before you reported your beloved son was missing a “Jackson Coroner's” investigator identified your son's body  by using his fingerprints. They notified the police to contact you and your family. This did not happen.

What actually happened to you and your son is the continuing story of  how America continues to refuse to accept African-Americans as human beings that are worthy of value. Your son’s body was held in the county morgue for months before finally being interned in an unmarked grave in a paupers field. 

No one ever called you, Your grief was almost unbearable. Your family was devastated. Your child was missing. The authorities kept turning you away with excuses about maybe he was just on a journey away from Mississippi without notifying his family. They never tell you that your son is dead. They never tell you how your son is killed. 

Only after a national news agency picks up this story does the truth begin to emerge about the death of your son. After the national media begins to shine a light on this case you begin to hear the horrendous story about the last days of your child’s life. You find out that he was struck by a police car on Interstate 55 by an off duty police officer. 

Once you know that your child is dead the police begin a coverup to explain their obvious attempt to provide cover for the off duty officer responsible for your son’s untimely death at age 37. They fill the airways with how they were unable to identify your son and therefore they couldn’t contact his next of kin. They don’t tell the media or you that the Jackson Coroner had notified them on March 9th that the coroner’s office had identified him through his fingerprints. 

They continue to claim he had no ID on his broken body. We now know that their story was full of lies and misrepresentations. After much wrangling and court orders you were able to claim your son’s remains. You demand an autopsy. 

The first  thing we find out from the exhumed remains is that in your son’s back pocket is a wallet that contains a Mississippi official state ID card, a credit card with his name on it and a medical ID card. How hard would it have been to identify him from these documents? The autopsy also finds that he has a missing amputated leg. Why was his leg amputated? What were they trying to hide by separating his leg from the rest of his body? These are all the answers I know you wanted answered.

This is a true story of heartbreak and depravity that continues in this country.  The man who lost his life that fatal day Dexter Wade late of Mississippi. His family, the Dexter family, are one more family in a long unending story about the tortuous path that the sons and daughters of  slavery have traversed in this “ Land of the free and the home of the Brave”.