Mississippi authorities reportedly exhumed the body of Dexter Wade without allowing his family to be present months after he was killed by an off-duty cop and secretly buried, leaving his mother to search for him for months.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump told WJTV 12 News that Wade’s body was supposed to be exhumed at noon on Monday, Nov. 13. Wade’s body was actually disinterred at 8 a.m., hours before the family arrived.
“A low-down, dirty shame,” Crump said at a news conference on Monday. “Like a thief in the night, they came and took the body out of the ground. This is further evidence of the cover-up, and that exacerbates the reason why we have to have the Department of Justice conduct the investigation from beginning to end. Because what happened to Dexter Wade in March and what happened to Dexter Wade today reeks to the high heavens,” Crump added.
“They put him in the ground without my permission. They dug him up without my permission — I want that to be known,” Wade’s mother, Bettersen Wade, told reporters.
Crump called for the DOJ to investigate Wade’s death and undercover his burial in a pauper’s grave last month.
The 37-year-old mysteriously disappeared in March, leaving his mother, Bettersen Wade, to search for him for more than seven months.
It turned out that just an hour after Wade left home on March 5, he was struck by an off-duty corporal — whose name has not been released — in a Jackson police car as he was crossing an interstate highway. Authorities took Wade’s body to a morgue, where it went unclaimed for months, even after Wade’s mother filed a missing person report on March 14.
Police also knew the names of Wade and his mother but told her no one had been able to find him. Instead, they buried him behind a penal farm in a grave marked only by a number. His mother didn’t find out until August.
The Hinds County Board of Supervisors voted last week to authorize the exhumation of Wade’s body after receiving a petition for it to take place.
Crump said funeral plans are underway and will be announced shortly. Campaign Zero, an American police reform organization, is covering funeral costs.
A GoFundMe fundraiser was created to help Wade’s family pay for the costs of an autopsy but has only reached $14,000 of its $100,000 goal.
Crump said that Wade will be given “a proper funeral where his family and loved ones and his two little children and all the community can come out and give him a respectable homegoing service — one that apparently Jackson Police Department didn’t intend for him to have.”
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