There is perhaps no more solemn duty for the government than identifying the dead and notifying those they leave behind. Yet in Hinds County, Mississippi, NBC News reporters found that people who were missing and being actively searched for by loved ones had been unceremoniously disposed of by authorities in a pauper’s graveyard.
The investigation started last summer with a call from Bettersten Wade, who told NBC News reporter Jon Schuppe that her adult son, Dexter Wade, had been struck and killed by a police cruiser in Jackson, Mississippi, in March. But rather than notify her of what had happened, county officials buried Dexter in a pauper’s grave at a jail work farm. She had searched for him for months, not knowing that he was already dead.
As Schuppe reported Wade’s story — which drew more than 3 million readers on NBCNews.com and sparked national outrage when it was published in October — he wondered who else might be buried in the indigent cemetery managed by Hinds County.
Schuppe’s determination to find out, and his willingness to listen closely to families from marginalized communities, exposed a broken system in Jackson that sent at least seven men to pauper’s burials without their families’ knowledge. At least three of the men had IDs in their pocket with an address when their bodies were found, yet their families did not learn the details of what happened to them until NBC News told them.
Those findings lit the fuse of an NBC News investigation that revealed far more significant failures in America’s death notification system than had previously been reported. In a monthslong project, reporters found that the problems spread far beyond that one unkempt field to coroner’s offices across the country. The vast majority of them, NBC News learned through a data analysis, don’t post information about unclaimed bodies on a free government website. Many don’t have written policies for notifying family members of the dead.
The result: bodies buried in pauper’s graves, cremated or stacked on shelves and decomposing in morgues — all without their relatives’ knowledge. It is the final indignity.
In Hinds County, Schuppe became the sole reliable source of information for families wondering if relatives were also buried at the gravesite, fulfilling a sacred responsibility when the local government wouldn’t. In one case, he informed a man that his brother, whom he’d spent months searching for, was in the pauper’s field. “You are the one that gave us closure,” the man texted.
Officials working to solve missing person cases in Jackson and neighboring Rankin County also contacted Schuppe, seeking information that he uncovered.
To help correct the injustices, NBC News published the names of 215 people buried at the Hinds County penal farm since 2016. Within days, another family member wrote to say her brother was on the list. “He got treated like a piece of trash,” she said. “They shouldn’t be able to get away with this.”
