by Anna Wolfe, Mississippi Today
February 21, 2025

Neighbors could hear yelps from inside a 10-by-10-foot shed behind a house on Grand Avenue in west Jackson on an October afternoon in 1982.

The location was a known unlicensed personal care home — facilities meant to care for adults, often with mental illness, who cannot live on their own, but which have never been regulated by any state agency.

Local police said they couldn’t enter without a warrant and called Mendal Kemp, then-chief of licensing for the Mississippi State Care Commission, the precursor to the Mississippi State Department of Health.

Kemp arrived and, finding the property locked, borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and scaled an eight-foot wooden fence.

He made it past two vicious guard dogs, opened the storage room door and found eight severely emaciated individuals sitting on a cot and on the floor around the dark, unlit room. There was no running water or electricity, and the owner had given the residents a bucket to use as a bathroom. One had sores all over his back, another was completely blind. 

Kemp, his colleague from the Mississippi Department of Mental Health named Janne Patterson Swearengen and others spent four hours at the scene rescuing the individuals, who were transported to licensed facilities.

But the health officials were no strangers to these conditions. A few years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court found state mental health hospitals could no longer hold nondangerous patients against their will, and thousands of patients from the nearby Mississippi State Hospital wound up in Jackson.

To answer, unlicensed personal care homes started cropping up, especially along West Capitol Street in large multi-story houses that had otherwise been abandoned, absent safety assurances like fire extinguishers or appropriate staffing.

“We couldn’t license them. So what do you do?” Kemp told Mississippi Today in a recent interview. “They couldn’t comply with any kind of standards. And these people were so helpless. They had been treated like dogs — ‘go lay down, stay in your room, don’t do this’ — and they’d been institutionalized for all this time, so they obeyed.”

Kemp’s office often received anonymous complaints about these facilities. His workers would go door to door and issue letters: get a license or close down.

“We’d go back, it’d be an empty house. She’d just moved down the street,” Kemp said.

The Grand Avenue discovery by Kemp and his colleagues made national news, resulted in the creation of the Coalition of Boarding Homes, and led to the passage of the Vulnerable Persons Act in 1986, which strengthened laws around protecting abused or neglected vulnerable adults.

READ MORE: In a city without a plan, anti-public sleeping bills pop up at Jackson City Hall and state Capitol

Forty years later, an underground network of unlicensed personal care homes in Jackson — and the horrors perpetuated against vulnerable residents living in some of them — persists.

In 2010, a woman living in an unlicensed personal care home in west Jackson died of hypothermia after being kept in a room with no heat and a broken window. In 2017, the health department raided three illegally-operating homes, finding that residents were living with no heat, toilets or bed linens, according to news reports. That home operator still has an active home health care business license. In 2021, three residents died after a man set fire to another unlicensed personal care home in north Jackson.

In January, Disability Rights Mississippi, a nonprofit and the state’s designated legal advocacy agency for people with disabilities, released a report detailing widespread misconduct in the industry of unlicensed personal care homes across Mississippi, where, unlike in other states, these facilities “have the ability to comfortably engage in illegal practices without the threat of licensing agencies penalizing them.”

State law requires that any home caring for more than four individuals not related to the homeowner be licensed by the Mississippi State Department of Health, adhering to a set of often costly safety requirements and inspections. Residents of these homes typically don’t need the level of care offered by a nursing home, but still need assistance to stay fed and bathed, take medicine, or get to and from appointments.

The health department licenses 11 of these homes in Jackson, according to an agency directory — down from 17 in 2017, according to the Clarion Ledger. The health department said in that time, smaller homes have been replaced with larger ones, so the reduction only accounts for a net loss of 15 beds.

Then there are unlicensed homes operating legally with fewer than four residents and those operating illegally with more than four residents – same as forty years ago. Disability Rights found that some owners try to skirt this rule, such as by placing residents in tents on their property, “to claim that only three people are ‘actually inside the house.’”

The Legislature saw a bill this session to get rid of this distinction, requiring homes with any patients to be licensed, but it quickly died. 

There’s no way of knowing for sure how many of these homes are operating under the radar, but Disability Rights estimates there could be two to three times as many unlicensed homes as licensed.

Individuals living in these facilities often have nowhere else to go. They sometimes sign over their monthly SSI checks, $900 of federal assistance for people with disabilities and often their only income, to the homeowner in exchange for paltry services and little to no allowance. Disability Rights found a home caring for six individuals pulling $4,800 per month in rent, far above the market value for the property, and it did not have a smoke detector or sprinkler system.

“Operating these homes does cost money, but the inconsistency and lack of oversight for ensuring residents are receiving adequate care and provisions, after handing over most or the entirety of their limited funds, creates a breeding ground for financial exploitation,” the Disability Rights report reads.

Aurora Baugh, who spent most of her career at the Department of Mental Health, retiring several years ago as the Coordinator of the Division of Recovery and Resiliency, said her agency long quit discharging folks from the mental hospitals to unlicensed personal care homes — but low housing stock is one of the sector’s largest challenges. The agencies that transition people from institutions to the community, like the Department of Mental Health, but also the Department of Corrections, have a stake in the conditions of these facilities.

“They’re the ones who make the difference if people go to licensed or unlicensed, but if you only have (11 in Jackson), what are you going to do? Put them in a hotel?” Baugh said.

And to make matters more complicated, some residents may prefer the lax rules offered in the unlicensed homes, such as the ability to come and go as they please or smoke cigarettes, as opposed to strict conditions in place at some licensed facilities or nursing homes.

“They wanted the freedom, you know, after being housed (in hospitals) for so many years,” Swearengen said.

In exchange, the Disability Rights report identified what residents inside some of these homes are enduring: plastic coverings or boarded up windows, deadbolted doors, no electricity, exposed wiring, bathrooms ill-equipped for disabled residents, no washer, dryer or stoves, locked food pantries and improper cooling and heating to the point where one resident’s body temperature decreased to 78 degrees. Disability Rights found residents that had not been bathed, wearing the same clothes for days, and residents receiving only one meal a day.

Typically, the conditions inside these facilities aren’t brought to light until an incident involving law enforcement occurs or someone makes a complaint, like in the case of Grand Avenue in 1982. 

But licensing officials aren’t exactly scaling fences today. 

Frances Fair, director of health facility licensure and certification at the Mississippi State Department of Health, said the department’s surveyors – “current day superheroes” – hit the streets every week in tough circumstances to examine conditions and investigate complaints inside the homes licensed by the department.

“But we do need to do it legally, within the framework of our authority,” Fair said, which does not include the same treatment for unlicensed homes.

When the health department receives word of a home operating illegally, Fair said it turns the information over to the Office of the Attorney General, whose responsibility she said it is to investigate.

Michelle Williams, chief of staff for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, said the office has received at least 10 of these complaints from the health department since January of 2024, and that the office does investigate in these instances to determine if abuse, neglect of exploitation is occurring. But Williams also said a home simply operating without a license isn’t a crime, that the attorney general’s office doesn’t pursue licensure, and the health department should seek administrative relief in those cases.

The AG’s office investigates thousands of cases of alleged adult abuse, neglect or exploitation each year — most of which do not rise to the level of criminal prosecution — but Williams said the office does not capture data to show how many of those incidents occurred inside personal care homes, licensed or unlicensed.

In the gap, Disability Rights has taken the steps it can, filing civil court complaints to force illegal homes in Jackson to become licensed or close down: four in 2022 and one in 2024.

“Even when these homes are closed, there are no safeguards in place to prevent operators from reopening a new UPCH (unlicensed personal care home) in a different location, leaving residents vulnerable to continued exploitation and neglect,” reads the Disability Rights report.

Fair said solving the issue of predatory unlicensed personal care home owners will require stakeholders to “follow the money.” In the case of residents signing over their SSI checks to the personal care homes, the business owners become the official “representative payee” in the federal government’s records.

“As long as people can make money off of vulnerable adults and say they’re going to take care of somebody, but then they take their checks and commingle those funds with their own personal funds and there’s not a lot of oversight on that, then that can be a problem,” Fair said.

Fair said several agencies have a role to play, such as the U.S. Social Security Administration, which administers the funds ultimately going to these business owners and should be auditing to ensure residents are treated fairly.

The descriptions of the unlicensed homes found today in Mississippi — “inhumane living conditions”, “neglect by other residents and staff”, “unsafe, unsanitary, and uncaring” — mirror language from Kemp’s old papers.

“They were in deplorable conditions and in great need of attention,” Kemp wrote after the incident on Grand Avenue, according to an Oct. 20, 1982, Mississippi Health Care Commission memo obtained by Mississippi Today.

“Things must be a lot better,” Kemp mused during his interview with Mississippi Today.

“I don’t know that they’re better,” Swearengen, his former colleague, responded.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Malcolm X, an African-American nationalist and Muslim leader, was assassinated as he began to address his newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City’s Washington Heights. 

He was 39 — the same age as Martin Luther King Jr. when he was killed. A week before his assassination, Malcolm X’s home was firebombed while he and his family slept. They managed to escape, standing outside in the 20-degree weather. 

“Had that fire gone through that window, it would have fallen on a 6-year-old girl, a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old girl,” he told reporters. 

Asked if he was worried about his life, he replied, “I don’t worry, I’ll tell you. I’m a man who believed that I died 20 years ago, and I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.” 

As he walked to the podium the day he ws killed, he declared, “Peace be unto you” in Arabic. 

When a commotion arose in the audience, Malcolm urged them to “be cool, be calm.” The disturbance distracted the bodyguards, and three men opened fire on Malcolm X, one of them with a sawed-off shotgun, hitting him with at least 16 bullets. 

His wife, Betty Shabazz, already pregnant with their twins, threw her body on her children. After the shooting stopped, she rushed the stage, screaming as she sank to her knees, “They killed him.” 

His legacy has continued to grow since his death. 

“Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression,” he once said, “because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Former Mississippi sheriff’s deputy describes rampant violence by ‘Goon Squad’

by Jerry Mitchell, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield, Mississippi Today
February 21, 2025

In a series of interviews from prison, a former Mississippi sheriff’s deputy described for the first time how he and others in his department regularly entered homes without warrants, beat people to get information and illegally seized evidence that helped convict people of drug crimes.

His statements corroborate many aspects of an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today that uncovered a two-decade reign of terror by Rankin County sheriff’s deputies, including those who called themselves the “Goon Squad.” They also shed new light on the deputies’ tactics and the scope of their violent and illegal behavior.

The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who once led the department’s narcotics division, told Mississippi Today in emails and phone calls that drug raids occurred in suburban Rankin County, outside Jackson, almost every week for years.

He said deputies regularly brutalized and humiliated suspects to get them to share information during the raids. And he said they often seized evidence without a legally required warrant, raising questions about possible wrongful convictions in hundreds of narcotics cases stemming from the raids.

For some raids, he said, the deputies would falsely describe emergency circumstances that gave them cover for searching without a warrant; for others, they would falsely claim that evidence was in plain sight.

He said deputies were entering homes without warrants so often that in 2022 a senior detective warned him that prosecutors in the district attorney’s office had noticed and had demanded they stop.

The violent raids continued until at least 2023, when Dedmon and five other officers barged into a home without a warrant and then beat and tortured two Black men, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins. One of the deputies shoved a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and shot him, shattering his jaw and leading to a federal investigation. Dedmon and the other officers pleaded guilty last year and were sentenced to prison.

“I lived a lie for long enough,” said Dedmon, who is serving a 40-year sentence. “I owe the truth to my daughter, to every person in Rankin County and to law enforcement as a whole.”

District Attorney Bubba Bramlett has declined to share details on how his office has approached a review of drug cases for possible wrongful convictions.

But reporters found dozens of pending drug indictments that were dismissed, some of them citing the fact that deputies associated with the Goon Squad were unavailable as witnesses.

According to local defense lawyers, the district attorney’s office is not reviewing cases where defendants pleaded guilty, ruling out a vast majority of drug cases involving the deputies. Dedmon estimated that there were hundreds of home search break-ins without warrants in recent years.

In their guilty pleas, six law enforcement officers, five of them deputies, admitted they had broken into a house without a warrant and brutalized Parker and Jenkins. Prosecutors described how the officers tried to conceal their actions by placing a gun at the crime scene, destroying surveillance footage and using drugs from another bust to falsely incriminate the men they attacked.

Dedmon said the actions officers took that night were extreme. He said that a majority of drug raids involved suspects who were buying or selling drugs, but that violence and a willingness to bend the rules to enter homes were common.

The most frequent approach was a “knock and talk,” where deputies would tell those inside that they would not be arrested or that it would be easier for them if they cooperated, he said.

That might be a lie because they might be arrested or charged, he wrote. “It’s not illegal and is often used as a tactic to lie to violators to get them to cooperate and make your job easier.”

Dedmon said the deputies would also carry out a “buy bust,” where an informant would enter a home, buy drugs and “then we would kick the door in upon them leaving.”

He said deputies knew that after securing a home, they should seek a search warrant from a judge and then wait at the property until they were cleared to gather evidence. That rarely happened, he said.

Instead, he said, deputies would immediately start their search and in their subsequent reports cite “exigent” circumstances, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled allow a warrantless search. The court has held that officers do not need a warrant if they believe an informant is in danger, if a suspect is about to destroy evidence or if they face a similar emergency.

Eve Brensike Primus, a University of Michigan Law School professor and the director of the Public Defender Training Institute, said if the evidence seized in a warrantless drug raid is critical to a case, “that would be a serious Fourth Amendment violation that would result in reversal on appeal.”

The Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent arbitrary and harassing police searches through a warrant requirement, she said. “We want police to go to a magistrate or judge to get a warrant before they search a home because homes are so private, and we want a judicial check on the police officer’s determination of probable cause beforehand.”

Previous reporting by The Times and Mississippi Today documented 17 cases where victims and witnesses alleged misconduct by Rankin County deputies, often involving the same men convicted in the Parker and Jenkins case. Some described being beaten or choked or having guns shoved in their mouths until they confessed. One man said deputies shoved a stick down his throat until he vomited. Another said deputies used a blowtorch to melt metal onto his skin.

Dedmon said he and some other deputies learned their techniques from Brett McAlpin, a longtime narcotics investigator in the department whom federal prosecutors described as molding officers “into the goons they became.” He said McAlpin handled writing up many of the raid reports and taught deputies how to use violence and humiliation to get information from drug crime suspects.

“The goal was to create as much chaos as possible to prevent such behavior in Rankin County,” Dedmon said. “That’s how they solved cases and prevented drugs from being sold in the community.”

He said he knew the violence was wrong, but he idolized McAlpin, who is now serving 27 years in the Parker and Jenkins case.

“He was the first person I ever saw destroy people’s property out of his own hatred for the way they lived,” Dedmon wrote in an email. “Sickly enough I grew to believe that it was the right thing to do!”

He said it was McAlpin who passed on a warning from a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office demanding that “the warrantless entries had to stop.” Dedmon said the warning was specifically aimed at him, according to what McAlpin told him. “He said to me that times are changing at the D.A.’s office,” Dedmon recalled.

In a written statement, Jason Dare, the lawyer for the Sheriff’s Department, said Dedmon’s remarks insinuate “that investigators with the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department do not procure search warrants for residential searches. Such a generalized accusation against our investigators is false, defamatory and easily disproven through readily available public records.”

In 2023, while investigating allegations against the Goon Squad, reporters for Mississippi Today and The Times sought copies of warrants related to nine raids by the unit. The department did not provide the warrants and referred reporters to the district attorney’s office, which declined to release any documentation.

Dare said Dedmon’s statements to Mississippi Today show the former narcotics investigator “admits that he knew right from wrong and admits to falsifying reports to the Sheriff’s Department, both of which show that the training and policies of this department taught him how to legally and properly perform his duties. Assuming these statements are accurately reported, they show that Dedmon made the choice to commit criminal acts and is incarcerated as a result.”

Dare said the sheriff “has remained committed to the safety and protection of Rankin County citizens.” Last week, the Rankin County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution praising the sheriff for helping save the life of a man who shot himself.

In a 2023 press conference, the sheriff declared that he knew nothing about the violence that his deputies were carrying out. “The badge worn by so many has been tarnished by the criminal acts of these few individuals,” he said. “I’ve tried to build a reputation here, tried to have a safe county, and they have robbed me of that.”

Dedmon said for the sheriff to get on TV and “act as if we’re just some crazy guys that slipped through the cracks is insane, political and misleading.” He said he’s seen more than a dozen different officers use excessive force, “but I’m the one paying the price for it.”

That criticism should not detract from “some really good law enforcement officers” in Rankin County, he said. “Any community has to have proactive patrolmen and narcotics officers to be safe.”

Krissy Nobile, director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, said Dedmon’s statements make it obvious that Rankin drug cases need to be reviewed for possible wrongful convictions.

“These perpetrators controlled the institution that was supposed to investigate these heinous crimes, leaving the victims no recourse,” she said. “Mercifully, post-conviction allows attorneys to look back when our institutions fail — especially when the failure is of this magnitude.”

She said her office was willing to carry out this task and would need $400,000 in extra funding from the Mississippi Legislature to hire an additional investigator and part-time lawyers to review the cases.

Matt Steffey, professor of law at Mississippi College, said prosecutors are expected to seek justice, not just convictions, and have a responsibility to examine possible wrongful convictions, “especially where the problems are as acute, profound and well documented as they are in the Goon Squad cases.”

The Mississippi attorney general’s office, which prosecuted the Goon Squad cases with the Justice Department, also has the authority to review the Goon Squad cases.

But MaryAsa Lee, its communications director, said the office wasn’t examining any cases.

Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the nonprofit Innocence Project, said the district attorney “has a constitutional and ethical obligation to notify every defendant in every conviction in which these cops played a role in the arrest or prosecution.”

That has yet to happen, according to lawyers representing some of the defendants.

Neufeld said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland requires prosecutors to disclose any evidence that might clear a defendant, even if the evidence arises after that person’s conviction.

“I’ve been involved in multiple situations where prosecutors notify hundreds of convicted defendants where there is misconduct far less egregious than that attributed to the Goon Squad,” he said.

More than a decade ago, Lane Fikes of Carthage said McAlpin snatched him out of his truck and joined other officers in beating him. “They pretty much beat up anybody,” he said. “That was their M.O. [Method of Operation].”

The next day, “I went to the emergency room,” he said. “I had cracked ribs.”

Hospital officials urged him to report it, but he said he knew if he did, he would get payback from deputies.

“As far back as I remember, you didn’t mess around in Rankin County,” he said. “If you did, something like this was going to happen.”

In 2013, a Rankin County grand jury indicted Fikes on charges of selling meth. Fikes, a Celebrate Recovery leader who has been sober since 2016, said he was addicted to meth at the time but that he wasn’t selling it.

Prosecutors kept pressuring him to plead guilty and said he would face 30 years in prison if he didn’t take the deal, he said. “They get in your head. ‘What did I do? Do they have something on me?’”

He wound up borrowing money to hire his own attorney, Beverly D. Poole, who pushed for prosecutors to share the evidence against her client, including all video and audio recordings.

After prosecutors turned over evidence, Poole told the judge that prosecutors had failed to share everything.

When she finally glimpsed the video of the drug buy, Fikes was nowhere to be seen. The judge dismissed the indictments, and Fikes walked free.

“If I had accepted their charges, I would be in prison,” he said. “How many other people have they done that to?”

Jeremy Travis Paige, who had been convicted in Hinds County of selling marijuana and receiving stolen property, said McAlpin pulled him over on Aug. 1, 2018, and knocked him out with a blow.

When he came to, “I was being dragged into my house by narcotics officers,” he recalled in his complaint to the U.S. District Court. (The incident report mentions the traffic stop but nothing about taking him to his house.)

Goon Squad officers broke into his home without a warrant after a woman sold drugs to a confidential informant and then claimed he put her up to it, he said. “I got beat down and tortured for hours. I was in handcuffs the whole time.”

Officers “tried to force me to do drug deals off my phone,” he said. Instead of setting up deals, he texted family.

At one point, Paige said McAlpin, a longtime Master Mason, saw him wearing his grandfather’s Masonic ring. “He said, ‘You don’t deserve to wear that,’ and he slapped me in the face real hard,” Paige said. “He about knocked me out.”

McAlpin swore in a statement that he never hit Paige, but extensive injuries can be seen on his face in his jail booking photograph.

Paige said it was still daylight when the beating by McAlpin and other officers began, and he wasn’t booked into the jail until 1:30 the next morning. “No human being should be treated the way I was treated that night,” he said. 

An April 2019 grand jury indicted Paige for selling meth. “I don’t see how the grand jurors indicted me when I wasn’t even there [at the drug sale],” he said. “There was no video, no audio, nothing.”

Less than a year later, he sued the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, McAlpin and Sheriff Bailey for the beating. Rankin County officials responded that Paige wasn’t due a dime because “qualified immunity” protected McAlpin’s actions, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

While sitting in jail, Paige rejected each plea deal until he was told if he didn’t accept the final offer, he would be prosecuted as a habitual offender and receive the maximum sentence of 80 years in prison, he said. “They threatened me with my past.”

He pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced him to five years in prison. He is now on parole.

He would like to see his case and others like his investigated for possible wrongful convictions, he said. “I’m doing time for a charge I didn’t commit. We need to see how deep the corruption goes.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.