Though it’s common practice for police (or at least someone) to notify family when someone dies, Jackson, Miss. Police Department officers failed to do so promptly after the death and burial of Dexter Wade.
Now, the city announced a policy to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Bettersten Wade said she didn’t find out her son was fatally struck by a police car in March and buried in a pauper’s grave by the county until five months later. Police Chief Joseph Wade (unrelated to Bettersten) announced a new next-of-kin policy to prevent situations like this from happening again.
The policy states that “every effort” should be made to locate and notify the next of kin as soon as possible. Officers are also expected to gather information such as the individual’s nature of death and location of their remains, as well as pay the family the respect of notifying them in person.
Upon the chief’s announcement, NBC reports the police chief didn’t reference Dexter Wade’s case but instead noted the department had been “out of step” with the standard procedure. This “standard procedure” could have saved Bettersten months of hounding the police department and searching for her son, who was already deceased. Authorities confirmed that after Wade died, the Hinds County coroner’s office identified him and gave his information to the police to notify the family.
That never happened...and the Wades aren’t the first family to go through this.
Read more from NBC News:
In another case, authorities failed to tell the family of Marrio Moore, 40, that he’d been killed in February. His relatives eventually found out about the death after reading an Oct. 9 local news article that revealed Jackson police had failed to notify the public about dozens of homicides this year. By then, Moore had also been buried in a pauper’s grave.
In both Dexter Wade and Marrio Moore’s deaths, the coroner’s office and the Jackson Police Department said they made efforts to contact next of kin, including via phone, but they didn’t reach anyone. In Wade’s case, Lumumba, Jackson’s mayor, has blamed a miscommunication.
What throws an even bigger wrench in the Jackson Police Department’s “we made a mistake” response to Wade’s death is the fact he was struck by an off-duty police officer’s vehicle and had identification on him at the time, according to family attorney Benjamin Crump.
Wouldn’t the cops have been able to notify his mother the very day he died? Chile...