After more than 7 months, specifically 172 days, Bettersten did not hear one update about the whereabouts of her son. As any loving mother would be, she figured that she would never learn about her son’s fate. She would call the Jackson Police Department often asking for updates, but the lead investigator would tell her there were no leads, according to NBC News.

This would be acceptable if the Jackson Police Department truly did not know where her son was. But the problem is that they did. In fact, they’ve known since the night Dexter went “missing.”

NBC News reported, through the help of a coroner’s investigator, court records, public documents, and interviews with Dexter’s family, it’s been discovered on the night Dexter left his mom, he was struck by an off-duty Jackson police officer driving an SUV on the interstate.

Despite knowing Dexter’s name, and who his next of kin was, police failed to contact Bettersten, and let his body go unclaimed in the county morgue for months. Since his body went unclaimed, the county buried Dexter’s remains at a penal farm, with other unclaimed bodies, without telling his mother.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The corporal, who alerted police to the collision, was not injured. He was not suspected of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and was not given field sobriety tests.

    Why does this make me think the corporal that hit the victim was drunk driving?

    • SARGEx117@lemmy.world
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      Unprompted denial.

      “by the way, I didn’t shit myself at a party while wearing white pants so if anyone tells you that it’s a lie” -Someone who definitely shat themselves at a party in white pants

    • ZMonster@lemmy.world
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      Where’s the confusion? They protested the notion of drunk driving several times – many more than necessary. Protesting is like eating pasta. You can’t do too much of it.

  • eric@lemmy.world
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    I don’t believe for a second this was accidental. If it were, there would be no reason to hide it.

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      I suspect they delayed as long as they did to make sure that any evidence aged beyond legal use, such as any security camera footage was wiped and rewritten, etc. I have no idea, but I assume this isn’t just manslaughter, it’s destroying evidence as well.

      • trash80@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        I suspect they delayed as long as they did to make sure that any evidence aged beyond legal use

        I strongly doubt that. They may have waited until it was all destroyed though.

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      Seriously, the last line of the article, which is buried beneath the collage of ads, stated that the mom actually had to pay $250 to get her rights to her own son’s body back…

      Holy fuck, indeed.

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    I assumed a mental health crisis gone won’t when reading the headline. Nope. An off-duty officer hit him with his cruise with no repercussions. Even worse, they are making her pay to get the body back.

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    Conveniently they forgot, so nobody could investigate his murder at the hands of an off duty cop who is likely in the wind now

  • Lexam@lemmy.ca
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    You can’t blame the police, because they will target you and your family.

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    Is it really not possible to do anything about this? Isn’t the police government-funded, doesn’t the president/ruling party have any say in how it operates?

    Genuinely asking, I’m not American so I routinely get confused by how the government there works.

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      The police department is run by the local government. Generally the city or county, but some police officers are employees of the state. I’m not sure if there’s anything the elected city officials could do anyways, but in Jackson, Mississippi I can guarantee they wouldn’t do anything either way for a black man.

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    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-promise-tracker/promise/1527/expand-justice-department-power-address-police-mis/

    “Expand and use the power of the U.S. Justice Department to address systemic misconduct in police departments and prosecutors’ offices. … Under the Biden Administration, the Justice Department will again use its authority to root out unconstitutional or unlawful policing.”

    Promise Kept

  • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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    same as everywhere else on the planet

    warm bodies are needed to keep things moving such as factories, food production, you name it

    militarized police force helps keep the lower dregs corralled and helps keep the capitalists’ property safe by enforcing rules set down by the capitalists elite and wrote into law by politicians

    if this was upset by climate change laws being put in place, police swapped for peace officers, wages were fair, good healthcare, worker’s rights, etcetera this system would break and capitalists’ would stop writing checks to the politicians writing the laws and keeping the status quo the militarized police force uses and more resources would get distributed across the board and the warm bodies would not be putting in so much effort and existence to a toxic, circular system

    example in literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth https://www.tor.com/2021/11/11/book-reviews-cixin-liu-the-wandering-earth/ "The character of the Last Capitalist, an obvious stand-in for real billionaires in the age of Amazon, adds bleak humor to a very real speculative nightmare where the aforementioned capitalist owns the entire planet and leaves the rest of us to rot in tiny pods. “We had to swallow pill-sized air meters before we went out, which measured exactly how much air we breathed,” a visiting alien tells the protagonist, Smoothbore. “Every time we inhaled, a fee was deducted from our bank account. This was a luxury for most of the poor…we never dared to exert ourselves while outdoors. We mostly just sat and controlled our breathing. Before we returned home, we had to carefully scrape the soles of our shoes, because the soil outside was not ours to keep.”

    example in film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop Since its release, RoboCop has been critically reevaluated and it has been hailed as one of the best films of the 1980s, and one of the greatest science fiction and action films ever made. The film has been lauded for its depiction of a robot affected by the loss of humanity, in contrast to the stoic and emotionless robotic characters of that era. RoboCop has continued to be analyzed for themes such as the nature of humanity, personal identity, corporate greed and corruption, and is seen as a rebuke of the Reaganomics policies of its era.

    example in recent history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute Writing for Jacobin, Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, said the message sent to the rail workers by the president and Congress was “shut up and get back to work.” this was a very tame example in our personal opinion

    https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_republic