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5th member of Mississippi “Goon Squad” sentenced to over 27 years in prison
The fifth member of the Mississippi “Goon Squad” that admitted to the racially motivated torture of two Black men has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.
Former Rankin County deputy Brett McAlpin was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Tom Lee.
Lee has also sentenced four other former law enforcement officers who were involved in the attack. Christian Dedmon was sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in that attack and another incident in December 2022. Hunter Elward was sentenced to over 20 years in prison. Two other officers, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, were sentenced to 17.5 years in prison each.
The sixth and final officer, former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield, is expected to be sentenced by Lee on Thursday afternoon.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP
For each of the deputies sentenced so far, Lee has handed down prison terms near the top of the sentencing guidelines. Lee has previously called the officers’ actions “egregious and despicable.”The attack involved beatings, repeated uses of stun guns and assaults with a sex toy before one of the victims was shot in the mouth in a mock execution gone awry.
The terror began Jan. 24, 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence when a white person in Rankin County complained to McAlpin that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a house in Braxton. McAlpin told Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies asking if they were “available for a mission.”
“No bad mugshots,” Dedmon texted — a green light, according to prosecutors, to use excessive force on parts of the body that wouldn’t appear in a booking photo.
Dedmon also brought Hartfield, who was instructed to cover the back door of the property during their illegal entry.
Once inside, the officers mocked the victims with racial slurs and shocked them with stun guns. They handcuffed them and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces. Dedmon and Opdyke assaulted them with a sex toy. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess, and Hartfield guarded the bathroom door to make sure the men didn’t escape.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP
After Elward shot Jenkins in the mouth, lacerating his tongue and breaking his jaw, they devised a coverup. McAlpin pressured Parker to go along with it, asking him to keep quiet in exchange for his freedom. The deputies agreed to plant drugs, and false charges stood against Jenkins and Parker for months.
McAlpin and Middleton, the oldest men of the group, threatened to kill the other officers if they spoke up.
The majority-white Rankin County is just east of Jackson, home to one of the highest percentages of Black residents of any major U.S. city. The officers shouted at Jenkins and Parker to “stay out of Rankin County and go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River,” court documents say.
Opdyke was the first to admit what they did, his attorney Jeff Reynolds said Wednesday. On April 12, Opdyke showed investigators a WhatsApp text thread where the officers discussed their plan and what happened. Had he thrown his phone in a river, as some of the other officers did, investigators might not have discovered the encrypted messages.
Attorneys for several of the deputies said their clients became ensnared in a culture of corruption that was not only permitted, but encouraged by leaders within the sheriff’s office.
Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey, who took office in 2012, revealed no details about his deputies’ actions when he announced they had been fired last June. After they pleaded guilty in August, Bailey said the officers had gone rogue and promised changes. Jenkins and Parker called for his resignation and filed a $400 million civil lawsuit against the department. Last November, Bailey was reelected without opposition, to another four-year term.
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NEW YORK – The man accused of killing three people when drove drunk into a crowd on the Lower East Side on July 4th was arraigned on a host of charges Saturday.
Daniel Hyden of Monmouth Junction, N.J. is charged with aggravated vehicular homicide, aggravated vehicular assault, manslaughter, assault and operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated charges. Hyden was driving with a suspended license, prosecutors said.
According to prosecutors, Hyden, 44, drove a Ford F-150 pickup truck into the crowd at Corlears Hook Park just before 9 p.m. local time. He allegedly ran through a stop sign at the intersection of Water and Cherry Streets, drove up onto the sidewalk, slammed through the chain link fence, and into the crowd.
Eleven people were killed or injured, prosecutors said. The three people killed have been identified as Lucille Pinkney, 59, and her son Herman Pinkney, 38, and Ana Morel, 43. Another person was critically injured, and seven others hospitalized. The youngest victim was 11, according to prosecutors.
Responding police officers say they found Hyden on the ground next to the driver’s-side door, wearing pants but no shirt or shoes. He had bloodshot eyes, was stumbling and there was “a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath.”
“I hope we get justice”
Photos provided
On Friday, Family members of the victims returned to the scene, some breaking down in tears.
“I hope we get justice for my brother and my mother,” Diamond Pinkney said. “Herman, I love you. I’m going to do you proud.”
“We’re all devastated with this. It breaks my heart, and I’m so sad about it,” neighbor Nereida Garcia said.
The world’s oldest mummies have been around longer than the mummified pharaohs of Egypt and their ornate tombs — but the ravages of time, human development and climate change are putting these relics at risk.
Chile’s Atacama Desert was once home to the Chincorro people, an ancient population that began mummifying their dead 5,000 years ago, two millennia before the Egyptians did, according to Bernando Arriaza, a professor at the University of Tarapaca.
The arid desert has preserved mummified remains and other clues in the environment that give archaeologists information about how the Chincorro people once lived.
The idea to mummify bodies likely came from watching other remains naturally undergo the process amid the desert’s dry conditions. The mummified bodies were also decorated with reed blankets, clay masks, human hair and more, according to archaeologists.
While UNESCO has designated the region as a World Heritage Site, the declaration may not save all of the relics. Multiple museums, including the Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum in the ancient city of Arica, put the Chincorro culture on display. Some mummies and other relics are safely ensconced in those climate-controlled exhibits, but the remains still hidden in the arid desert remain at risk.
“If we have an increase in sea surface temperatures, for example, across the coast of northern Chile, that would increase atmospheric humidity,” said Claudio LaTorre, a paleo-ecologist with the Catholic University of Chile. “And that in turn would generate decomposition, (in) places where you don’t have decomposition today, and you would lose the mummies themselves.”
Other clues that archaeologists can find in the environment may also be lost.
“Human-induced climate change is one aspect that we’re really worried about, because it’ll change a number of different aspects that are forming the desert today,” said LaTorre.
Arriaza is working to raise awareness about the mummies, hoping that that will lead to even more preservation.
“It’s a big, big challenge because you need to have resources,” Arriaza said. “It’s everybody’s effort to a common goal, to preserve the site, to preserve the mummies.”
