Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.
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Not to excuse those fascists, but a simpler explanation is just lack of communication. Some incompetent somewhere didn’t bother with part of their job, and everyone else assumed it was done
The decision to call the police was difficult for Bettersten. She did not trust them. In 2019, her 62-year-old brother died after a Jackson officer slammed him to the ground. The officer was convicted of manslaughter but is appealing.
Odd coincidence that this happened to a family that’s put a cop behind bars. How often does stuff like this happen anyway?
Our firm took a civil case (wrongful death. the cop ran a stoplight, no lights no sirens, not responding to a call. killed a mom and two kids.) against a police department a few decades ago. Every employee of the firm had to pay about 10 grand in bribes to the cops in the towns where they lived before they stopped getting pulled over for nothing. Yeah, it’s a real honorable profession.
That is so fucked up!
This is America
Don’t catch you slippin’ nowI’m so tired of Enforcers choosing the most expensive option for the taxpayers.
What a shitty investigator. It took the new one less than a week to figure it out. I can’t see how this could have possibly happened for any reason other than malice or gross incompetence. Either way both the original investigator and the rest of the department need to be looked into.
I hope very soon police can face the same amount of suffering they dish out to people and families.
If that were to become a reality, they would be no cops. Is that what you want? No cops? Because that sounds nice.
Every time I hear about (more) police violence, I just get stuck thinking about the number of times I’ve been assaulted by patients as a healthcare worker and how I was still required to put their safety above my own if at all possible…including the one that was twice my weight and tried to strangle me.
There seems to be an inverse correlation between fearing for your life and fearing negative repercussions…
Yeah but she literally didn’t even thank them for their service.
PSSH, the gall
His name was Dexter Wade.
This behavior is cowardly and disgusting. There’s no excuse.
Also, I didn’t realize we still had “pauper’s fields.” The repeated use of the word “pauper” in this article makes me really uncomfortable. I’m not from the south, so maybe it’s a regional thing? But that term strikes me as antiquated and dehumanizing.
Just curious what word would you use? Those without wealth or status have always been dehumanized regardless of the terms used for them.
As for right or wrong, pauper’s fields will always be a thing as long as there are poor and indigent people. Have you ever wondered what happens to the homeless when they die? Many end up unified in death. So there is no way to inform family if they ever have any.
I believe that it is much more common to cremate unclaimed deceased then bury them these days. Even still the ashes are not carefully interred, but just spread out on a common site.
That makes sense, and I totally understand the utility of having municipal graves for unclaimed remains. I guess I would just call them that: unclaimed or unrepresented remains. I’m not saying “pauper” is inherently bigoted or anything, it just took me by surprise and struck me as a dehumanizing label that fits better in Medieval England. I don’t think we would call someone a pauper to their face in 2023, so I’m not sure why we’d use it to refer to their remains.
Yeah I prefer the older term “potter’s field” personally.
I don’t disagree with you but honestly I much more have a problem with the need for a place like this than whatever people feel comfortable calling it. Part of me would much prefer an uncomfortable term. It is an uncomfortable practice, a nicer name will not change that.
I don’t think their issue is with the practice, just the term used. It’s like saying “poor people cemetery”, kinda distasteful sounding. They could just call it something else with less stigma attached than the term “pauper”, like calling it a public graveyard. Or just use the older term “potter’s field”.
I actually disagree with the practice not the name. There is a long history of giving nice names to distasteful practices to hide their true nature. In a way distasteful names are at least honest.
I’m not sure what alternatives you think we should have for burying unidentified people. I could see an argument to be made about how poor people shouldn’t have to be relegated to certain types of cemeteries or graves just because they can’t afford “proper” ones. But generally even if you took away cost people usually choose where they want to be buried based on various factors if possible, or their families do for them if they haven’t, so you need to have a system for people whose choice and affiliations are otherwise unknown. The original intent of potter’s fields was for burying strangers and unknown people, and that’s ideally what the practice should be more about rather than a class thing imo. And in that case, it’s more of a necessary practice than anything else, and the dead deserve to be referred to with dignity. It’s not like they’re the ones who chose to be buried there, yet they bear the brunt of the term “pauper”, giving an “uncomfortable name to an uncomfortable practice” is a nice idea and all but the only people who suffer for it are the people being buried there, not the ones doing the burying. So it just seems rather mean and unnecessary. The term isn’t a commentary on the practice, it’s a commentary on the people it’s being practiced on, who arguably deserve to be treated better than that.
People like doing this, but the stigma remains with the thing, not the word. Until attitudes change, changing the word does nothing.
That’s not really how it works in every case. Take slurs for example, the stigma is very much in the word, and referring to people by the terms they prefer to be referred by instead of a slur definitely does more than nothing. There’s a reason why many groups and companies like to rebrand after a particularly devastating scandal, or why certain communities 9r ideologies use alternative terms for themselves, like fascists calling themselves identitarians, and so on. Words can have more influence on how we perceive something than you think.
The decision to call the police was difficult for Bettersten. She did not trust them. In 2019, her 62-year-old brother died after a Jackson officer slammed him to the ground. The officer was convicted of manslaughter but is appealing.
Two of her family, wow. Now, I don’t know what the environment is like there, but the son was crossing a highway at night on meth. This one could be… I’m not sure of the word… no bad behavior? Accident? But the lack of identification and contact is absolutely absurd.
They did identify him. They just didn’t contact her.
Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.
Disgusting behaviour.
Darnella Frazier is the woman who recorded George Floyd’s murder. Her uncle was also killed by police. Recently a man was released and awarded several hundred thousand dollars after spending over a decade in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. After release, he was shot and killed by police. The police are a street gang, legitimized by capital in exchange for capital’s occasionally being allowed to direct the police’s constant stream of violence.
Yeah, the cover-up is the bad part.
Might as well be considered a hit-and-run.
In 2019, her 62-year-old brother died after a Jackson officer slammed him to the ground.
A family having to deal with this much awfulness… it beggars belief.
Jfc. That’s was heavy.
God Damn Mississippi! What the fuck are you doing?!
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Really shitty article.
Just give us the facts without all the dramatization.
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