The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi are investigating several state sheriff’s department deputies for their constant use of excessive force toward Black men, specifically the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office.
The investigation has been going on since 2019.
The Associated Press conducted a separate investigation to look into some instances where deputies used excessive force, and they discovered some horrifying experiences some Black men endured.
Two men claimed Rankin County sheriff’s officers shoved guns into their mouths during separate encounters. While one victim didn’t have the trigger pulled, the other victim’s deputy allegedly pulled the trigger, shooting off Michael Corey Jenkins’ tongue.
Hospital records showed that Jenkins had a broken jaw and mangled tongue that doctors had to sew together.
Rankin County deputies attempted to claim that Jenkins, one Black man, pointed a gun at the six white deputies at the scene, who barged into his friend’s home. Yet Jenkins’ lawyer said Jenkins didn’t have a gun.
“They had complete control of him the entire time,” Malik Shabazz, Jenkins’ lawyer, said.
The shooting occurred on Jan. 24. Jenkins and his friend Eddie Terrell said the deputies beat them while they were handcuffed, poured milk over their faces while lying on their backs and tased them three times over 90 minutes.
The first taser fire occurred a little after 10 p.m., according to Jenkins and Terrell’s testimony during an interview with AP. Thankfully, tasers have an automatic memory that records each use—the device’s records aligned with the two men’s story.
Therefore, the deputies had no reason to shoot Jenkins in the mouth, which the deputy did a little over an hour after the first taser went off (11:45 p.m.).
The deputy that shot Jenkins hasn’t been identified, but an officer named Hunter Elward was at the scene and swore up and down that Jenkins pointed a gun at him.
How is that possible when they arrested the two men, poured milk on them as they lied on their backs and were tased? Amid all that, Jenkins pulled a gun on the officer with his hands behind his back? Make it make sense.
Carvis Johnson is the name of the man with a gun in his mouth but wasn’t shot.
Mississippi deputies’ use of excessive force also led to two reported fatal encounters. One fatal accident occurred at a 29-year-old Black man’s mother’s house in 2021; deputy Elward was present.
Elward and officer Luke Stickman arrested Damien Cameron, a Black man with a mental illness history, due to some vandalism report.
Elward wrote in the report that he had to punch and grapple with Cameron to get him in the squad car. He then stunned him to get his legs in the vehicle.
Yet he claimed he had to return inside to get his taser but returned only to find Cameron unresponsive, causing him to remove the 29-year-old from the vehicle and perform CPR.
However, Cameron’s mother, Monica Lee, recalled the incident differently. A moment she would never forget.
She said that Elward held his knee on Cameron’s back, and Stickman kneeled on her son’s neck, similar to what happened with George Floyd. Cameron told the deputies he couldn’t breathe.
“I walked outside to tell him goodbye and that I loved him, and that I would try to see him the next day,” Lee told AP investigators. “That’s when I noticed they were on the driver’s side of the car doing CPR on him. I fell to the ground screaming and hollering.”
Elward was also responsible for the 2019 shooting death of 31-year-old Pierre Woods. Also at the scene was officer Christian Dedmon who was at Johnson’s arrest.
The state’s sheriff’s department has protected its deputies that caused deaths and injuries to Black men by refusing to release documents to the public.
AP requested bodycam footage, yet Mississippi officers aren’t required to wear cameras. The Insider took matters to court, so the county judge could order the department to hand over documents regarding the deaths of a few men in 2021.
The document for Jenkins incident was released to the public but was heavily redacted.
“The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office provided Insider with a heavily redacted incident report from the night of the shooting.
The report, less than a page long, was nearly entirely blacked out.” https://t.co/2p8u2i5DVi pic.twitter.com/PoSES4zFHT
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) February 17, 2023
It’s alarming that many of these deputies are tied to many deaths and situations that end with someone getting hurt in the state. On top of that, departments are refusing to hang over records, knowing investigators will shut them down due to their unlawful tactics. And it’s not only happening when officers respond to calls; it’s happening in the state’s jails and prisons.
A Mississippi corrections officer named Shelley Griffith was sentenced at the start of 2020 due to violating an inmate’s civil rights by exerting excessive force on him. In 2019, former state corrections officer Reginald Laterry Brown was sentenced to five years for inflicting “cruel and unusual punishment on an inmate in his custody.”
The world is still mourning the loss of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Elijah McClain and, most recently, Tyre Nichols. The killings of Black people need to be stopped, and the people causing them, need to be held accountable, not protected.
