Roaming Charges

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

+ Bettersten Wade searched for her missing son for seven months, before finding out that Dexter Wade had been run over and killed by a police SUV driven by an off-duty cop as he tried to cross a highway in Jackson, Mississippi. Police knew Wade’s name and address, but never contacted Bettersten, even after she had reported him missing. Instead, they let his unclaimed body sit in the morgue for months, then buried him in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the Hinds County penal farm. His mother had been reluctant to report him missing to the same police department, which employed a cop who had killed her 62-year-old brother Robinson by slamming his head into the ground in 2019. There’s speculation in Jackson that the Department decided not to notify Bettersten about her son’s death because her family had filed a wrongful death suit over Robinson’s killing. Dexter Wade was the father of two young daughters.

+ Casey McWhorter is scheduled to be executed by the State of Alabama on November 16. Casey McWhorter was sentenced to death by an Alabama trial judge in 1993 even though two of his jurors voted for a life sentence. Only Alabama and Florida permit judges to impose the death penalty based on nonunanimous votes by the sentencing jury.

+ As he was shopping for food with his kids, Silvester Hayes was violently arrested by Dallas cops who mistook him for someone with a similar name. The police officers pushed Hayes to the ground and knelt on him as he yelled for help. After noticing their error, the cops can be heard on a body cam recording making up bogus charges against him: resisting arrest and unlawful carrying of a weapon. Hayes was jailed for days and lost his job as a security guard. He couldn’t pay his car bill, or his mortgage or support his four kids, who moved in with their mother. It took a year for the trumped-up charges against him to be dropped.

+ At least 27 current and former Chicago police officials’ names appeared in leaked rosters for the Oath Keepers. Nine of those cops remain on the police force.

+ Colin Eaton, a Vallejo, California cop who was caught on video punching a woman after a car chase last week, is the same police officer who shot and killed 20-year-old Willie McCoy in 2018, while he was sleeping in his car at a Taco Bell drive-thru. Two months later, Eaton was one of two cops who tasered McCoy’s niece during a traffic stop. In 2020, Eaton was cited for stepping on a man’s head during a search. He was suspended from duty for 80 hours.

+ NYPD officer Willie Thompson started an affair with a witness in one of his cases. When the witness broke it off, Thompson threatened her to keep quiet and lied to the DA about the affair. After the DA learned the truth, Thompson threatened the woman again. Ultimately, Thompson was found guilty of misconduct and was recommended for termination. But NYPD commissioner Edward Caban intervened, overturned the decision and put Thompson back out on the streets.

+ Justin Lee, a cop in Montgomery County, Maryland, who fatally shot a suspect in a stabbing in July, was arrested by the FBI last week on charges that he assaulted a police officer during the January 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol. Lee had been hired by the department a year after the riots. The Police Department claims it thoroughly investigates the background of all job applicants.

+ Gregory Rodriquez, a guard at the Central  California Women’s Prison, has been charged with 96 counts of sexual abuse over a fifteen-year period, after 22 women accused him of sexual harassment, assault and rape. Several of the women were punished with longer sentences for reporting Rodriquez’s abuse.

+ In an attempt to undermine a reform-minded District Attorney, St. Louis detective Roger Murphey sabotaged several murder cases in which he had served as lead investigator. His department did nothing to stop him

+ Scott Jenkins, a self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriff” in Virginia, asked people for cash or campaign donations in exchange for making them ‘auxiliary’ sheriff deputies, with the right to carry sheriff-issued firearms. He collected tens of thousands of dollars.

+ Briana Erickson, a reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, obtained an email in which the Henderson (NV) Police Department’s public information officer, Sgt. Daniel Medrano, brags that his office “vets each news reporter” to see which ones “make the department look good.” When Erickson called the PIO to ask about this, Medrano refused to return her calls. The police sergeant made more than $227,000 in pay and benefits last year.

+ The estranged son of Nashville’s police chief is the suspect in the shooting of two police officers outside a Dollar General store.

+ Eight years after pointing a loaded gun at a black man in his courtroom, Robert Putort, a white judge in upstate New York, has been removed from office. Putort’s lack of contrition for the incident was cited as one of the reasons for his removal.

+ In 2002, Sedrick Moore was sentenced to 50 years in prison for a rape and armed robbery in Moultrie, #Georgia. After more than two decades in prison, Moore was exonerated in August 2023 by evidence showing that a co-defendant had falsely accused him and that the forensic DNA analysis presented at trial was flawed.

+ Patrick Heron, a now-retired Philadelphia police officer, pled guilty to sexually assaulting 48 women and girls over 17 years. Heron filmed himself doing it, while he was in uniform, in the back of his police car.

+ City officials in Newton, Iowa ordered the police to arrest city resident Noah Peterson for calling the mayor a “fascist” thus proving his point.

+ Last year, the new Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry pushed a bill to make public the criminal records of children as young as 13, but only in the three parishes that have large Black populations, and nowhere else in the state.