A mother spent months looking for her missing son before she learned he was fatally struck by an off-duty police officer’s vehicle and his body was buried in a pauper’s grave without her permission.
She thinks it could be a vendetta.
The sad tale involves Bettersten Wade of Jackson, Mississippi, and her 37-year-old son, Dexter Wade, whom she last saw on March 5.
NBC News, scouring court records, documents, interviews, and more, pieced together what happened to Dexter Wade, who his mother said had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Jackson police did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment. TheGrio sent two emails to Jackson officials but did not receive a response.
On March 5, Dexter left home with a friend, and that was the last time his mother saw him alive. According to the NBC investigation, an off-duty Jackson police corporal driving an SUV hit and killed Dexter Wade as he crossed a six-lane highway, Interstate 55, that evening.
Officials ruled the incident an accident and the officer involved wasn’t cited, NBC reported.
Bettersten Wade said she reluctantly called the police to report her son missing. She has a difficult relationship with the Jackson police. An officer was convicted of manslaughter after he slammed her 62-year-old brother into the ground, killing him, in 2019.
“My mama told me, ‘They’re not going to do anything,’” Bettersten told NBC. “But I had to do something to find Dexter, and I thought that was the best way.”
Over the next several months, Bettersten Wade called Jackson police, who said they had no information.
But, according to NBC, the police knew what happened.
“They had me looking for him all that time, and they knew who he was,” Bettersten Wade told NBC.
The Hinds County coroner’s office told NBC that it had confirmed Dexter Wade’s identity on March 8 and had left a phone message with his mother, who said she doesn’t recall receiving it.
The coroner’s investigator, LaGrand Elliott, said he passed the information to Jackson police so they could notify Bettersten Wade.
“Once we get that information, I turn it over to police because it is their jurisdiction so that they can do the proper death notification,” Elliott said.
But word never got to Bettersten Wade. She continued looking for her son until, on Aug. 24, a new Jackson investigator told her they found Dexter and an officer would come to see her.
Police directed her to the coroner’s office, which confirmed the pauper’s burial.
Bettersten Wade wondered if her brother’s death and the family’s history with cops led to the police response.
“Maybe it was a vendetta. Maybe they buried my son to get back at me,” she said.
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