Six sheriff’s deputies responding to a report of drug activity at a Mississippi home in January deactivated their body cameras before forcibly entering the house — despite not having a search warrant, a lawsuit alleges.
Mississippi
Mississippi deputies tortured Black men, shot one in mouth, lawsuit says
![Mississippi deputies tortured Black men, shot one in mouth, lawsuit says Mississippi deputies tortured Black men, shot one in mouth, lawsuit says](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NT3CH3CMBXD5SSXJQKWDYOUXLE.jpg&w=1440)
The deputies, who are White, also waterboarded Jenkins and Parker, pelted them with eggs and attempted to sexually assault them with a sex toy, according to the lawsuit.
The encounter ended nearly two hours later when a deputy placed a gun in Jenkins’s mouth and shot him, permanently injuring his face, the lawsuit alleges.
Jenkins and Parker are suing Rankin County; Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey; deputies Hunter Elward, Brett Mc’Alpin and Christian Dedmon; and three other unnamed deputies in the Southern District of Mississippi for carrying out and overseeing what their lawsuit describes as a sadistic torture session. The court complaint details new allegations in an incident that has already led to outcry in the community and prompted state and federal investigations into the sheriff’s office.
“I’ve never heard of such a conglomeration of violations and crimes and torts committed in one ordeal,” Malik Shabazz, Jenkins’s attorney, told The Washington Post. “It was hard for me to believe.”
Bailey, the three named deputies and the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for Rankin County declined to comment.
In a February statement, Bailey said his office was cooperating with the state investigation and pledged to hold “any deputy or suspect involved” accountable if they were found to have broken the law, WLBT reported.
Jenkins was visiting Parker, a close friend, in Rankin County on Jan. 24, Jenkins’s mother, Mary, told The Post.
A redacted incident report from the sheriff’s office says that deputies were responding to a report of drug activity when they arrived at the home and that a deputy found two bags “containing what appeared to be methamphetamine.” While at the house, a deputy shot a person who “displayed a gun” toward them, according to a statement the Mississippi Department of Public Safety released a day after the incident.
The reports do not describe the incident further.
But the lawsuit alleges they obscured a harrowing encounter during which the deputies subjected Jenkins and Parker to degrading abuse for nearly two hours. The deputies did not possess a search warrant when they forcibly entered Parker’s home, according to the court complaint, which claims the officers intentionally deactivated their body cameras before entering.
First, the deputies handcuffed Jenkins and Parker, who complied and did not resist, the lawsuit states. Neither Jenkins nor Parker possessed or displayed a weapon during the encounter, it asserts. The deputies then allegedly punched, slapped and kicked the two men and drew Tasers on them. The deputies engaged in a “sadistic contest” to see which Taser would be most effective on Jenkins and Parker and fired the weapons 20 to 30 times, court documents state.
The deputies then forced the two men on their backs and waterboarded them with liquids found in Parker’s home, including milk, Shabazz said.
The deputies also allegedly attempted to insert a sex toy into Jenkins’s and Parker’s mouths and Jenkins’s rear.
Afterward, the deputies threw eggs at the two men, covering them and the walls of the home in eggshells and residue, according to the lawsuit. They then forced the two men to strip naked and shower together to conceal evidence of their abuse, the complaint alleges.
Throughout the encounter, deputies allegedly placed guns to the heads of Jenkins and Parker and threatened to kill them. They also allegedly called Jenkins and Parker racial slurs, including “monkey,” and accused them of “racial violations,” like dating White women.
Around 11:40 p.m., roughly two hours after the deputies entered Parker’s home, Elward placed his gun inside Jenkins’s mouth and shot him, shattering his jaw and cutting his tongue, the lawsuit states.
Jenkins stumbled out of the door and fell, and about 20 minutes passed, according to the lawsuit, which alleges the deputies “would not assist him in any way” during that time. The redacted incident report says the officers notified EMS at some point.
Jenkins was transported by medics to the University of Mississippi Medical Center and received several surgeries, according to the lawsuit. Parker was arrested and transported to the Rankin County Jail on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia, according to the incident report. Jenkins faced a charge of aggravated assault. Prosecutors did not move forward with charges, Shabazz said.
Jenkins suffered permanent nerve damage and numbness on one side of his face, court documents state. When Mary Jenkins first saw her son in the hospital after his surgeries, he was breathing through a respirator and his swollen hands were handcuffed, she said.
When he was released from the hospital around a month later, his demeanor transformed, Mary added. Once outgoing and talkative, he is now skittish and subdued and frequently relives the night he was shot, she said.
“He’s still having nightmares at night,” Mary said. “He sleeps with the light on.”
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation began investigating the incident, first reported as an officer-involved shooting, the next day. The FBI Jackson Field Office, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office opened a federal civil rights investigation into the incident in February, the FBI announced.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and FBI Jackson Field Office did not respond to inquiries on the statuses of their investigations.
Rankin County and Bailey are also facing a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the family of a man shot and killed by officers overseen by Bailey in 2019. And in March, a county judge ruled that the sheriff’s office had violated the Mississippi Public Records Act by withholding incident reports about three men who were killed by sheriff’s deputies or died in their custody.
Shabazz said the six deputies were not punished for their actions in January and remain with the sheriff’s office. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to an inquiry about the deputies’ employment.
Shabazz called for the prosecution of the deputies involved.
“This is pure, cold, raw, hateful intimidation and a form of torture and terror that I hope no other American citizen will ever experience,” he said.
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Mississippi
As Climate Threats to Agriculture Mount, Could the Mississippi River Delta Be the Next California? – Inside Climate News
![As Climate Threats to Agriculture Mount, Could the Mississippi River Delta Be the Next California? – Inside Climate News As Climate Threats to Agriculture Mount, Could the Mississippi River Delta Be the Next California? – Inside Climate News](https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/PRODUCE015-1024x683.jpg)
This story was originally published by The Tennessee Lookout.
A smorgasbord of bright red tomatoes and vibrant vegetables line the walls of Michael Katrutsa’s produce shop in rural Camden, Tennessee. What began a decade ago as a roadside farm stand is now an air-conditioned outbuilding packed with crates of watermelon, cantaloupe and his locally renowned sweet corn — all picked fresh by a handful of local employees each morning.
The roughly 20-acre farm west of the Tennessee River sells about half of its produce through his shop, with the rest going to the wholesale market.
Farms like Katrutsa’s make up just a sliver of roughly 10.7 million acres of Tennessee farmland largely dominated by hay, soybeans, corn and cotton. Specialized machines help farmers harvest vast quantities of these commodity “row crops,” but Katrutsa said the startup cost was too steep for him. While specialty crops like produce are more labor-intensive, requiring near-constant attention from early July up until the first frost in October, Katrutsa said he takes pride in feeding his neighbors.
The World Wildlife Fund sees farms in the mid-Mississippi delta as ripe with opportunity to become a new mecca for commercial-scale American produce. California currently grows nearly three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of its vegetables.
Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season.
But as climate change compounds the threats of water scarcity, extreme weather and wildfires on California’s resources, WWF’s Markets Institute is exploring what it would take for farmers in West Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas to embrace — and equitably profit from — specialty crop production like strawberries, lettuce or walnuts.
Specialty crops make up only 0.19% of the region’s farm acreage, but their higher sale value allows them to generate 1.08% of the region’s agriculture revenue, according to WWF’s May report, called The Next California, spearheaded by Markets Institute Senior Director Julia Kurnik. She argues that there’s an opportunity to proactively create more inclusive, higher-yield business models on existing farms, preventing natural ecosystems from being unnecessarily transformed into farmland.
But shifting produce growth to the Mid-Delta comes with hurdles: it requires buyers willing to try new markets, understanding of new crops’ diseases and needs, specialized equipment like cold storage and lots of expensive hands-on labor.
“It is not as simple as a farmer simply putting new crops in the ground,” Kurnik said.
Early Adopters Put Idea to the Test
Sixth-generation Arkansas farmer Hallie Shoffner is putting WWF’s models to the test through a nonprofit called the Delta Harvest Food Hub. The hub works with Black and women farmers to pilot the scalability of growing specialty crops in the Delta region, starting with specialty rice.
Shoffner grows basmati, jasmine, sushi rice, sake rice seeds and more on her 2,000-acre, century-old farm located in an unincorporated town outside Newport, Arkansas. She’s skeptical about a full switch to produce, but sees specialty rice products as “low-hanging fruit” easily adopted in the mid-Delta, where commodity rice is already widely grown.
The United States is the fifth-largest rice exporter in the world, and Arkansas is the country’s top producer, with other Mississippi River valley states not far behind. But the majority of specialty rice is grown in California or imported from East Asian countries.
“We are forward-thinking farmers who want to change, who want to do something different,” Shoffner said. “We want to make more money, because we know we cannot make as much money as small farms in the current agricultural economy.”
The commodity farming that dominates Delta agriculture makes the economic success of farmers largely dependent on the market prices of rice, corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops, Shoffner said. This incentivizes farms to grow larger to ensure they turn a profit even when prices are low, like they are now. But smaller farms struggle to stay afloat.
Shoffner said her vision for developing specialty crop markets in Arkansas will be through more collaboration between many smaller farms to diversify crop production and produce for large contracts together. She’s also exploring possibilities for expanding chickpea, sunflower, sesame and pea production in Arkansas.
And while she’s at it, Shoffner is working to make agriculture more equitable.
“As a white farmer who is a sixth generation farmer, I realize that I have inherited a large amount of land that systematically disenfranchised Black farmers,” Shoffner said. “And it is my responsibility to acknowledge that, and leverage what I’ve been given to help others.”
Her project, Delta Harvest, has a contract to grow specialty rice with a large company and she’s working with several Black farmers. She was too small to do it by herself, so they are doing it cooperatively.
Finding the Right Markets
In Mississippi, efforts to shift some of California’s sprawling specialty crop industry to the Mid-Delta drew skepticism from some farmers—even those with established specialty crop operations.
For the past 20 years, Don van de Werken has co-owned a 120-acre blueberry and tea farm in Poplarville, Mississippi, distributing much of its crops to buyers in his county and nearby cities.
Van de Werken questioned whether there would be enough regional demand to sustain a scaled-up specialty crop industry in Mississippi, noting that the success of his own enterprise hinges on targeting hyper-local markets like New Orleans. Shipping vegetables, fruits and other produce to buyers outside the Delta region would quickly become cost prohibitive for local farmers, van de Werken said.
“The problem we have, not just in Mississippi but the mid South in general, is we just don’t have the population base,” said van de Werken, who is also president of the Gulf South Blueberry Growers Association. “We don’t want our blueberries to go to Maine or Seattle. We want to focus our produce in a regional market.”
To make growing specialty crops worthwhile, Mississippi farmers would need to identify nearby buyers willing to purchase the new products on a consistent basis, van de Werken said. While selling goods directly to retail grocery chains like Kroger is often difficult, farmers could reduce financial risks by signing purchasing agreements with regional brokers like Louisiana-based Capitol City Produce.
“Anybody that puts anything in the ground is already taking a risk, but you want to minimize that risk,” he explained. “If you can prove to the brokers and the buyers that they can make money doing this, then the farming will come.”
The WWF report investigates ways to distribute risk across the supply chain to make selling to new markets easier on farmers, and works to connect buyers with Mid-Delta farmers.
AgLaunch, a Memphis-based nonprofit that guides farmers in innovation, estimates that adding specialty crops to the Mid-Delta region could spur $4.6 billion in added revenue and 33,000 jobs. But while commodity crop prices are readily available on the Chicago Board of Trade, the specialty crop market is generally not so transparent. Large, vertically integrated companies usually dictate contract terms, AgLaunch President and farmer Pete Nelson said.
AgLaunch helps build “smart contracts” that allow multiple farmers to produce on a contract, helping them secure higher quantity deals with proper compensation as a collective.
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Purdue College of Agriculture professor Fred Whitford said the idea of farming cooperatives that help smaller farmers carve out space in a large-quantity market is more than 100 years old. Whitford compared commodity producers to retail giants like Walmart, which make money by selling in bulk. Small producers are more like Ace Hardware, he said.
“Maybe the smaller folks have an ability to make more off their land by going to a specialty crop,” he said.
New Challenges Need New Solutions
Farmers who embrace specialty crops will face hurdles before they make it to the market.
Growing produce can be more profitable but “easier said than done,” Whitford said. “It’s nice on paper … but boy, in reality, you’re going to have to keep an eye on this crop, whatever you’re growing, because one slip up … then you have lost a lot of money.”
In Tennessee, Katrutsa grew strawberries in addition to his other crops for 10 years, but last April, a hail storm pulverized his entire field, leaving him with nothing. He’s not growing strawberries this year, and he might not plant them again — he’s not sure if he can find enough labor to make it work.
He grows many types of produce so if one fails, it’s less catastrophic. He sources seedlings from a neighboring state (it’s cheaper than growing from seed) and plants five times each season to maximize yield.
He works with a consultant to help identify diseases and how to treat them. Tomatoes are the most challenging, Katrutsa said. Some of his tomato plants withered this year due to bacterial wilt that flourishes in wet soil and high temperatures and has few effective chemical remedies.
Carolyn Preble helps out farmer Michael Katrutsa at the farm shop, which stocks the more than 20 acres of produce Katrutsa grows in rural Camden, Tennessee. Credit: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout
Chemical treatments pose other challenges. In Shaw, Mississippi, Michael Muzzi relies on a range of herbicides to grow soybeans and other feed grains on his 2,000-acre farm. Once sprayed, herbicides like Liberty and Dicamba remain in the ground and can drift in the air, which is hazardous to specialty crops, like tomatoes, that aren’t resistant.
“You’re not going to be able to spray [those herbicides] on specialty crops,” Muzzi said. “You’d have to have something that’s chemically tolerant.”
Growing fruits and vegetables on a farm with previous heavy herbicide use would require insulating those crops from chemical runoff — a feat that could only be reliably achieved by leaving whole acres of land unused for years, he said.
AgLaunch is exploring innovative ways to address these problems. For some farmers, this means helping make their existing row crops more efficient using farmer-incubated technology, adding local value by growing specialty crops or taking on processing, Nelson said.
Then there’s disruption with higher risk: farmers can partner with agriculture automation technology startups, allowing them to field test their products and collect data in exchange for farmer equity in the startup companies. If the startup succeeds, the farmer shares in the benefits.
“It’s not as simple as, ‘Hey, we should grow tomatoes,’” Nelson said. “It’s how you think about the whole value chain and make sure the farmer is protected. Make sure it’s not an opportunity just to grow a crop, but it’s an opportunity to own part of the processing or to build new products.”
Kurnik said WWF isn’t trying to recruit farmers to start growing specialty crops – they just want Mid-Delta farmers to have the information they need to make informed decisions. In terms of acreage, row crops “dwarf” specialty crops in the United States. A small percentage shift would mean a significant change in the level of specialty crops in the Delta.
“We don’t need everyone to want to jump on board tomorrow,” she said. “They would flood the market if they did.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Disclosure: The Next California report was also funded by Walton.
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Mississippi
Mississippi man dies of an apparent overdose in MDOC custody in Rankin County
![Mississippi man dies of an apparent overdose in MDOC custody in Rankin County Mississippi man dies of an apparent overdose in MDOC custody in Rankin County](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/62f03215fa8f49a1bd8baf9d444d47064169505c/c=0-21-533-322/local/-/media/2015/08/01/JacksonMS/JacksonMS/635740391618225482-jail-bars-prison-bars-.jpg?auto=webp&format=pjpg&width=1200)
A 41-year-old man incarcerated at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County died Thursday of an apparent overdose.
Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain confirmed the death in a news release.
The man was identified as Juan Gonzalez. According to prison records, he was serving a four-year sentence on multiple convictions in Hinds County and was tentatively scheduled for release in May 2025.
“Because of the unknown nature of the substance, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency and the Mississippi Department of Health were notified,” MDOC reported.
The investigation into Gonzalez’s death remains ongoing.
This is a developing story and may be updated.
Mississippi
Mississippi high school football scores for 2024 MHSAA Week 2
![Mississippi high school football scores for 2024 MHSAA Week 2 Mississippi high school football scores for 2024 MHSAA Week 2](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/authoring/authoring-images/2024/08/31/PJAM/75024172007-tcl-clinton-vs-warren-central-21.jpg?auto=webp&crop=2099,1181,x0,y0&format=pjpg&width=1200)
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Here is our Mississippi high school football scoreboard, including the second week of the season for MHSAA programs.
THURSDAY
Heidelberg 14, Quitman 8
Independence 20, Byhalia 6
Myrtle 47, Potts Camp 18
North Pontotoc 41, Water Valley 19
Okolona 40, Calhoun City 0
Provine 16, Lanier 6
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