37, nerd, mom friend. blm. i like horror, deer everything, acnh, splatoon2&3, pokemon, drawing, ghibli and cryptids. sorry im like this in advance. she/her.
On March 5, 2023, Dexter Wade left home and was struck by an off duty Jackson Police Department corporal driving a department SUV on Interstate 55. He died at the scene.
Although authorities later claimed they could not locate his family, Dexter had a prescription pill bottle in his pocket with his name on it. By March 9, the coroner had already confirmed his identity through those records and fingerprints.
Dexter’s mother, Bettersten Wade, reported him missing on March 14. For the next six months she searched tirelessly. She called the police again and again, looked through abandoned houses, and posted appeals on Facebook hoping someone had seen her son. Throughout that time, the police, who already knew his identity, repeatedly told her they had no information about him.
Months later, after keeping Dexter’s body in the morgue, the county buried him in July in a pauper’s field at a penal farm cemetery reserved for the unclaimed. His grave carried no name, only the number 672.
It was not until late August 2023 that a police officer finally came to Bettersten Wade’s home and told her what had happened.
Bettersten Wade believes the circumstances surrounding her son’s death and the way authorities handled it were not simply an accident. In 2019 her brother, George Robinson, died after being body slammed by Jackson police. Since then, she had been outspoken in the legal fight against the department over her brother’s death.
Because of that history, she believes the police knew exactly who Dexter was but chose to withhold the information from her as retaliation.
When the family finally received permission to exhume Dexter’s body in November 2023 so they could give him a proper burial, they arrived at the cemetery expecting to witness the process. Instead, they discovered that authorities had already exhumed his body hours earlier, denying his mother the chance to see her son brought out of the ground.