‘These are people that had lives’: Families, friends learn of loved ones’ deaths from 3 On Your Side report

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - For years, Christie Burnett worked with the metro area’s homeless community as executive director of the Opportunity Center in downtown Jackson.

During that time, she made friends with several of the center’s clientele, and would often wonder what happened when someone suddenly stopped showing up.

Recently, some of Burnett’s worst fears were confirmed, finding out that at least a dozen of the Opportunity Center’s former clients are buried at the Hinds County Paupers’ Cemetery.

In December, WLBT posted a list of some 330 individuals interred at the Raymond site.

[READ: Approximately 330 people have been buried at the Hinds Co. Paupers’ Cemetery since 2008. Here are their names.]

Burnett was one of several people who reached out to us after reading our report and told us she knew several names right off the bat.

“David Green... I have a picture of him in my phone,” she said. “His family lives in Colorado, California, and Oregon.”

“Robert Earl Johnson... Eric Echols... We had a love-hate relationship, but that one surprises me because he was riding around Jackson on his bike all the time.”

[GALLERY: Faces of the Hinds County Paupers’ Cemetery]

Kieara and Jaylon Bell also spoke to WLBT after learning their brother Carlos Bell was among those listed.

“His ex-wife contacted my mother and saw that his name was on the list,” she said. “We had been looking for him for a year before we found out.”

Carlos was last seen by his sisters in April 2022. After not hearing from her brother for about two weeks, Kieara Bell says she went to the Jackson Police Department to file a missing persons’ report.

“The man at the desk wouldn’t take it, because he said we had to go to the place where we [last] saw him. But like we [were] telling him, we didn’t know where we last [saw] him,” he said. “How were we going to go where he last was to make a report?”

Bell’s final words to Carlos were on April 24. A text message, and then nothing. His body was found on May 3 at an abandoned house at 303 Baker St.

According to police reports, Bell had been stabbed multiple times. The Hinds County Coroner was called to the scene and was able to identify him by May 11, 2022. County documents show that Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart asked for permission to bury Bell at the paupers’ cemetery on July 13, 2022. He was buried that August.

“She said they got his fingerprint like three days after or something, and they didn’t try to do anything,” Bell said. “So, she was like, she didn’t know where the family was. But I’m saying, ‘How do you get his fingerprints or at least some kind of record.’ If had been in jail, or the hospital, or whatever, there are records.”

Jaylon Bell blames the coroner for not reaching out. She also blames the Jackson Police Department because officers knew her brother was missing.

We filed an open record request seeking a copy of any missing persons’ reports for Carlos Bell. The only document provided was from the death investigation at Baker Street.

Police Chief Joseph Wade said he was limited in what he could say due to potential litigation, but released a statement, saying his “heart’s prayers, empathy, and condolences” go out to the family.

Wade said the department revised its general order regarding missing persons and implemented a new policy last fall to ensure “death notifications are delivered respectfully to the next of kin in all cases handled by JPD.”

Additionally, all officers received mandatory training on that new policy back in November and are now working closer with the Hinds County Coroner’s Office to ensure next-of-kin is promptly notified.

“We will continue to evaluate our policy and procedure to improve our police service to those who work, live, and do business in the city of Jackson,” Wade said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice is stepping in to provide technical assistance to JPD and the Hinds County Coroner’s Office “concerning their policies and procedures related to next-of-kin death notifications.”

“Families want and deserve transparency and the opportunity to make decisions about their loved ones’ burials,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clark, of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “Through technical assistance, we aim to ensure that officials are able to deliver death notifications and make decisions regarding burials in a timely and trauma-informed way that complies with federal civil rights law.”

Attorneys Ben Crump and Dennis Sweet praised the DOJ’s announcement, saying they hope the effort will “re-establish trust within the Jackson community and their local agencies.”

Crump and Sweet represent multiple families who say their loved ones should have never been buried at the paupers’ field, including Bettersten Wade, who found out her son Dexter was there last August, months after she reported him missing to JPD.

Wade claims the department didn’t tell her about her son in retaliation to the wrongful death suit she filed on behalf of her late brother, George Robinson.

Three officers were accused in the case and charged criminally. Charges were dropped for two of those officers. A third officer, Anthony Fox, was convicted but the conviction was overturned this year by the Mississippi Court of Appeals.

Sarah Bushnell Harrell also was pleased to find out the Justice Department was getting involved but was skeptical that any changes made under the DOJ would last.

“People can take advice all day. You can take recommendations all day, but unless somebody is holding you accountable to that... that you’re following through... I don’t believe that they would put it into place,” she said.

Like Kieara and Jaylon Bell, Harrell learned that her father Mark Nelson Bushnell had died after seeing our report. The last time she had spoken to the 57-year-old was back in September 2019.

“He was homeless, and he struggled with addiction, but typically... I kept contact with him,” she said. “Despite his lifestyle, that was strange to me.”

Harrell, who lives in South Carolina with her husband, said she looked for her father every time she came to Jackson, but never expected to find him in the paupers’ cemetery.

“We kind of knew the places that he tended to be or hang around, so we would drive through looking for him,” she said. “We called police stations, hospitals, homeless shelters... For almost four years, no trace of him, which now makes sense.”

Hinds County records indicate Bushnell died on January 6, 2020, after being struck and killed by an 18-wheeler.

“After reading your article, that’s when we started making phone calls. For almost a solid month, I called several times a week to the coroner’s office, because all the roads pointed back to the coroner’s office,” she said.

Harrell said an investigator told her authorities were able to identify Bushnell by taking his fingerprints. They also pulled medical records, which listed her as a contact.

She doesn’t understand why she was never notified, despite being listed in her father’s medical records.

“My dad himself, in his medical records, mentioned that he had two daughters and that one of them lived in South Carolina,” she said. “Typically, any time he would be admitted to the hospital I was his emergency contact.”

The families of other individuals also have come forward, including the loved ones of Marrio Moore, who learned he was murdered last fall as part of our Hidden Homicides investigation. Relatives of Philip Kincaid, 59, also learned of Kincaid’s death by reading our reports.

Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart denied repeated requests for an interview for this story. Mississippi code section says it’s up to the county coroner to “make reasonable efforts” to notify family members or other known interested parties if a body is not claimed within 48 hours.

We asked for evidence of those “reasonable efforts” in the case of Bell and Kincaid. The county sent 21 pages of documents, but none that detailed any efforts to contact those families.

The cemetery is near the Raymond Detention Center along a dirt access road. As of December, 674 people were buried there.

Burial records are maintained by the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office. Documents reviewed by WLBT showed the county had names on file dating back to November 2008. The names of the 340 people buried there before that are unknown.

Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones told 3 On Your Side he didn’t know what happened to the records before 2008, saying he had never seen them.

Jones was elected to his first term in a 2021 special election. He was elected to his first four years in 2023.

“I don’t know what happened prior to my administration and prior to the other administrations before it,” he said. “I can tell you I’ve tried to locate that information [and] I have not been able to locate it.”

A 2010 article from the Clarion-Ledger shown below confirms the existence of paupers’ cemetery burial records before 2008.

Jones says his office has been harassed by people who believe the county’s trying to hide something. Some of that has come about to inaccurate reporting in national reports and on social media.

A January 10, 2024, article from PBS Newshour mentions “215 bodies buried in unmarked graves behind a jail outside of Jackson” and that the families of those 215 individuals had not been notified.

Both statements are incorrect. All graves there are marked with a number, and there is no evidence the coroner’s office did not attempt to reach out to those individuals’ families.

Even so, some of those concerns forced the county to adopt a new policy limiting access to the paupers’ cemetery earlier this year.

“We have to have more heightened security concerns. It’s not necessarily... to make anything difficult for someone, but to make sure that, first of all, the people that go there that day are protected.”

In the meantime, Harrell says she’s working with the coroner’s office to have her dad’s body exhumed. She’ll have to pay $300 to claim her father’s remains and another $50 for a copy of the death certificate. She hopes to have him cremated and have his ashes spread at a family cemetery in Louisiana.

“There’s a French saying, joie de vivre, and it means ‘the joy of life,’” she said. “He lived that out. I know it can be hard to believe when people look at someone who’s homeless or someone who’s addicted to substances... It’s easy for people to judge, but I know with my dad and with all the rest of these families, there’s more... than what they’re being judged by.”

As for Burnett, she plans to remember her friends at their best. “David Shane Kelly... He came to us a lot. Christopher Rogers came to us a lot. He could build anything,” she said. “He was an amazing carpenter. Willie Simmons... He always had a frown on his face, but he was a softy.”

Those memories are preserved on a wall inside the Opportunity Center, painted to resemble a large tree. And on many of those branches are former clients who died.

“These are people that had lives, that had gifts and talents and made my life better,” she said. “My life is so much better because of the people I met at the Opportunity Center... the clients that we’re supposed to be helping but helped us so much more.”

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