When I first read about the death of Dexter Wade of Jackson, Mississippi, I became confused over the allegations being made. The headline of one article covering the subject certainly sounded damning. “Family calls for justice after man struck and killed by police car, buried without notice.” After reading the full details of the story, I suppose that headline is technically true, but there’s quite a bit more going on here than first meets the eye. The lede might have you thinking some cops ran down a Black man and then tried to hide the body in a hole in the woods or something, but that’s not accurate. But there still might be something very bad or at least problematic going on here. (ABC News)

The family of Dexter Wade is calling for justice after the 37-year-old man was allegedly fatally struck by a Jackson, Mississippi Police Department cruiser in March and later buried in a potter’s field without his family knowing.

“My son — I never thought in a million years that he would leave me,” Wade’s mother, Bettersten Wade Robinson, said in a tearful press conference Monday in Jackson. “He was my oldest son and I wouldn’t have never thought this’d happened to him.”

Wade Robinson reported her son missing on March 14, nine days after she had last heard from him on March 5.

To start with, the incident in question didn’t involve some sort of standoff or a shootout with the police. The police car was being driven by an off-duty officer late at night. Dexter Wade was reportedly walking down the road when the officer accidentally struck and killed him as he was attempting to cross the highway.

Rather than intentionally trying to hide the incident, the police reportedly did make an effort to identify him. He had no ID on him, but he did have a prescription drug bottle with his name on it. He was taken to the morgue where a coroner confirmed his identity using fingerprints. That’s where the details of the story become a bit fuzzy and the story of the police becomes questionable.

The information on the prescription bottle allowed the police to contact Wade’s medical provider. They gave the police what turned out to be a disconnected phone number and no address was listed. Facing what they believed to be a literal “dead end” in the search for his next of kin, Wade’s body remained in the morgue for months until the police finally received permission from the Hinds County Board of Supervisors to bury him in a potter’s field.

Even if every bit of that story as described by the police is accurate, there are still some glaring questions to be answered. Jackson, Mississippi isn’t really that big, having a population of roughly 150,000. Also, Wade isn’t a terribly common surname. How many of them could there be in and around Jackson? If you’re the police and you just killed someone with a patrol car, even if you can’t find a valid address or phone number, wouldn’t you just start calling random Wades from the phone directory and ask if they had a relative named Dexter they hadn’t seen in a while?

Also, Wade’s mother reported him missing within days of those efforts. She called the police repeatedly over the next months asking for updates and no information was forthcoming. The police are blaming this on “a lack of communication with the missing persons division, the coroner’s office and accident investigation.” I suppose that’s possible if the police department is big enough. But if the people answering the phone at the Jackson PD headquarters are getting repeated calls about a missing person, wouldn’t you suppose that they would eventually contact the missing person’s division?

Something about this just doesn’t sound right. It sounds like an attempt at a coverup. But what would the police be trying to cover up? They say the coroner’s office conducted a full investigation and concluded the death was an accident and “not malicious.” Even Wade’s mother doesn’t seem to be suggesting that there was any sort of running beef between her son and the cops. (Though his fingerprints were in the database so  he may have gotten into some trouble at some point.) I honestly can’t even put my finger on a most likely explanation here. But it certainly merits further investigation.