Mississippi Today
Grand jury opts not to indict football star Jerrell Powe and partners after ‘tunnel vision’ investigation
Ridgeland police arrived at a local bank on a mild, sunny day last January to intercept what they observed as an active abduction.
They took a look at the alleged kidnappers — a 330-pound retired NFL player and a longhaired pot grower from California — and “they just went haywire and thought they had something that they just didn’t have,” said Texas resident Angie McClelland, who would later be tied to the case.
A Madison County grand jury finally agreed with McClelland last November, choosing not to indict any of the five people arrested for the crime.
The assumed victim, a young businessman from Waynesboro named Bryce Mathis, had alerted a bank teller at the Chase Bank in Ridgeland to call the police. By this point, Mathis had made enemies all over the country for allegedly scamming investors and hopeful entrepreneurs. That includes the two men accompanying him at the bank that day: former Kansas City Chiefs nose tackle Jerrell Powe and the cannabis farmer Gavin Bates.
The group was planning to launch a medical marijuana business together and had pooled some $300,000 in investments in a bank account Mathis controlled. Concerned that he might be mishandling the funds, they’d gone to the bank that day to get the money out. The defendants said Mathis went willingly; Mathis told police he’d been forced against his will. Ultimately, the bank account was empty save for forty cents, investigators found.
Police arrested Powe and Bates, generating dramatic national headlines – primarily because of Powe’s celebrity – that ran while the two sat in jail for five days. Bates said he was held in an isolation cell for three days. The cell was so cold, he said, he had to sleep on the floor with his face by a window, a faint source of warm air.
“I still don’t understand why they did that,” Bates told Mississippi Today recently. “… It felt like those police could do what they wanted and they were all backing each other up.”
After going through the suspects’ phones in the following days and finding what they considered damning text messages, the local authorities directed U.S. Marshals to arrest three more people, including Wayne County Board of Supervisors attorney Cooper Leggett.
Leggett was only connected to the marijuana startup because Mathis had previously worked with the county to build a facility there — a project that was abandoned after Leggett said Mathis never paid contractors conducting the initial dirt work (an allegation Mathis denies). Powe and his business partners had reached out to Leggett for intel on Mathis, and they all texted the day of the alleged kidnapping about how best to approach the alleged con artist.
One night, about a week after the incident, Leggett woke up to what sounded like people beating on his front door.
“The front of my house looks like a 4th of July sky of police lights,” Leggett said.
Throughout the night and early morning, officers transported Leggett to the Madison County Detention Center, where he was booked, and then to Ridgeland to speak with investigators. “I’m like, ‘Guys, we could have saved a lot of pomp and circumstance from how y’all arrested me. I would have came if y’all would have called me,’” Leggett told Mississippi Today.
Despite never being indicted, Leggett was on unpaid leave from his county attorney position for nearly a year while he waited for officials to resolve the case. Agents similarly arrested Angie McClelland and her husband Colburn McClelland — partners on the marijuana startup — in their hometown of Katy, Texas.
“They were giddy, like a kid in a carnival, to make a big splash and get a big arrest,” Colburn McClelland said.
The alleged kidnapping began on Jan. 11, 2023, after Bates and Angie McClelland picked Mathis up at his home in Waynesboro. The investor group said Mathis had been evading them for weeks, prompting the in-person visit. Here, the story diverges: The defendants said everyone was on board to go to the bank to retrieve the investor funds, which an audio recording Angie McClelland took at the time appears to corroborate. But Mathis told investigators he thought they were going to lunch.
From 500 miles away in Texas, Colburn McClelland advised Powe not to arrive at the bank until they got inside, lest Mathis see the large athlete, get spooked and leave. “Ya’ll need to get him trapped inside the bank,” Colburn McClelland texted, according to a document he prepared.
Instead, they stopped in a pharmacy parking lot in Laurel, Mississippi, where Powe replaced McClelland in the back passenger seat.
Laurel Police Chief Tommy Cox told Mississippi Today that his department determined Mathis left Laurel with Powe and Bates willingly, and that if a kidnapping occurred, it must’ve been because Mathis changed his mind during the ride. “Everybody were buddies when they left here,” Cox said.
Mathis told Mississippi Today that while in the car, Powe terrorized him. “He said that I was going to start getting my mail from the groundhog,” Mathis said.
Powe denies making any threats. The investor group also points to a video recording, reviewed by Mississippi Today, in which Mathis stated to the camera that he had misspent his investors’ money while “stringing them along” and that he planned to “make it right.”
In an interview with Mississippi Today, Mathis stood by his story that he was forced to travel with Powe and Bates against his will and any recorded statements were coerced.
When they got to Ridgeland on Jan. 11, the bank had closed for the day, so they spent the night in a hotel, where Mathis claimed Powe slept on top of his legs to prevent him from escaping. “He took a pillow, laid it on my legs, and he laid up on top of it with his arms crossed,” Mathis said. “I mean, it wasn’t like it hurt. He was just there to make sure I didn’t move.”
“That sounds so damn stupid,” Powe said of Mathis’ claim.
The next morning, Colburn McClelland texted Powe, “If Bryce has asked to leave we gotta let him go…so long that he is staying by his own choice, there is no issue,” to which Powe responded, “He ain’t ain’t asked to leave at all.”
In an interview with Mississippi Today, Powe also questioned why, if Mathis had been kidnapped, he didn’t attempt to alert anyone during the several stops they made during their drive to central Mississippi.
“It’s a reason why he lured us to the bank, because that’s where he wanted to do that, to make a big scene and play with people’s lives,” Powe said.
After his arrest, Leggett requested a preliminary hearing, where the lead investigator, Ridgeland detective Austin Baney, testified that the kidnapping case was his first investigation.
“In my opinion, he (Baney) got tunnel vision and never could let go of that story that he saw in the tunnel,” Leggett said. “He just did not want to let go of the sensational story that he thought he had when everything was basically crumbling underneath him.”
Ridgeland Municipal Court prosecutor Boty McDonald said that the text messages taken from the suspects’ phones would prove the five defendants conspired to capture Mathis against his will.
“We’re not going to try the case out here in public, but you can rest assured that in Ridgeland, we would not have arrested them and charged them with kidnapping if it wasn’t kidnapping,” McDonald told TV news reporters after the arrests.
The grand jury wasn’t convinced. While the investigation originated with Ridgeland police, McDonald turned the felony kidnapping case over to the Madison County District Attorney’s Office. Nearly a year after the arrests, county prosecutors took the case to a grand jury and it returned a “no bill,” meaning the jurors did not find probable cause to believe the defendants had committed the crime.
“I stand behind the work that the police officers and detectives did here and I also stand behind any discretion exercised by the DA’s office,” McDonald told Mississippi Today.
Cox, the Laurel police chief, said he wasn’t surprised by the decision. “It just sounded hinky to me from the beginning,” the police chief said.
The three out-of-staters say the experience has tainted their opinion of the Hospitality State. Bates said the next time he’s traveling east, he plans to avoid flying over Mississippi. Angie McClelland said she knows it’s home to some fine people, “but I’ve unfortunately seen the crooked letter crooked letter.”
Powe, who still calls Mississippi home, praised the Madison County court system for reaching the correct result. He said when he got the news about the no bill, “it felt like a ton of bricks had been lifted off me.”
“This has definitely been a nightmare for me and my family,” Powe said. “So just to be able to move on in my life and not toss and turn anymore with this on my mind, it’s just been a big relief.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1961
Nov. 22, 1961
Five Black students, made up of NAACP Youth Council members and two SNCC volunteers from Albany State College, were arrested after entering the white waiting room of the Trailways station in Albany, Georgia.
The council members bonded out of jail, but the SNCC volunteers, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall declined bail and “chose to remain in jail over the holidays to dramatize their demand for justice,” according to SNCC Digital Gateway. The president of Albany State College expelled them.
Gober became one of SNCC’s Freedom Singers and wrote the song, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” after the 1961 killing of Herbert Lee in Mississippi. The tune became SNCC’s anthem.
After her release from jail, Gober joined other students, and police arrested her and other demonstrators. Back in the same jail, she sang to the police chief and mayor to open the cells, “I hear God’s children praying in jail, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom.’”
Albany State suspended another student, Bernice Reagon, after she joined SNCC. She poured herself into the civil rights movement and later formed the Grammy-nominated a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock to educate and empower the audience and community.
“When I opened my mouth and began to sing, there was a force and power within myself I had never heard before,” a power she said she did not know she had.
Other members of the Freedom Singers included Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson, Dorothy Vallis, Rutha Harris, Bernard Lafayette and Charles Neblett. On the third anniversary of the sit-in movement in 1963, they performed at Carnegie Hall.
“This is a singing movement,” SNCC leader James Forman told a reporter. “The songs help. Without them, it would be ugly.”
Today, the Albany Civil Rights Institute houses exhibits on these protesters, Martin Luther King Jr. and others who joined the Albany Movement.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
IHL deletes the word ‘diversity’ from its policies
The governing board of Mississippi’s public universities voted Thursday to delete the word “diversity” from several policies, including a requirement that the board evaluate university presidents on campus diversity outcomes.
Though the Legislature has not passed a bill targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved the changes “in order to ensure continued compliance with state and federal law,” according to the board book.
The move comes on the heels of the re-election of former President Donald Trump and after several universities in Mississippi have renamed their diversity offices. Earlier this year, the IHL board approved changes to the University of Southern Mississippi’s mission and vision statements that removed the words “diverse” and “inclusiveness.”
In an email, John Sewell, IHL’s communications director, did not respond to several questions about the policy changes but wrote that the board’s goal was to “reinforce our commitment to ensuring students have access to the best education possible, supported by world-class faculty and staff.”
“The end goal is to support all students, and to make sure they graduate fully prepared to enter the workforce, hopefully in Mississippi,” Sewell added.
On Thursday, trustees approved the changes without discussion after a first reading by Harold Pizzetta, the associate commissioner for legal affairs and risk management. But Sewell wrote in an email that the board discussed the policy amendments in open session two months ago during its retreat in Meridian, more than an hour away from the board’s normal meeting location in Jackson.
IHL often uses these retreats, which unlike its regular board meetings aren’t livestreamed and are rarely attended by members of the public outside of the occasional reporter, to discuss potentially controversial policy changes.
Last year, the board had a spirited discussion about a policy change that would have increased its oversight of off-campus programs during its retreat at the White House Hotel in Biloxi. In 2022, during a retreat that also took place in Meridian, trustees discussed changing the board’s tenure policies. At both retreats, a Mississippi Today reporter was the only member of the public to witness the discussions.
The changes to IHL’s diversity policy echo a shift, particularly at colleges and universities in conservative states, from concepts like diversity in favor of “access” and “opportunity.” In higher education, the term “diversity, equity and inclusion” has traditionally referred to a range of efforts to comply with civil rights laws and foster a sense of on-campus belonging among minority populations.
But in recent years, conservative politicians have contended that DEI programs are wasteful spending and racist. A bill to ban state funding for DEI in Mississippi died earlier this year, but at least 10 other states have passed laws seeking to end or restrict such initiatives at state agencies, including publicly funded universities, according to ABC News.
In Mississippi, the word “diversity” first appeared in IHL’s policies in 1998. The diversity statement was adopted in 2005 and amended in 2013.
The board’s vote on Thursday turned the diversity statement, which was deleted in its entirety, into a “statement on higher education access and success” according to the board book.
“One of the strengths of Mississippi is the diversity of its people,” the diversity statement read. “This diversity enriches higher education and contributes to the capacity that our students develop for living in a multicultural and interdependent world.”
Significantly, the diversity statement required the IHL board to evaluate the university presidents and the higher learning commissioner on diversity outcomes.
The statement also included system-wide goals — some of which it is unclear if the board has achieved — to increase the enrollment and graduation rates of minority students, employ more underrepresented faculty, staff and administrators, and increase the use of minority-owned contractors and vendors.
Sewell did not respond to questions about if IHL has met those goals or if the board will continue to evaluate presidents on diversity outcomes.
In the new policy, those requirements were replaced with two paragraphs about the importance of respectful dialogue on campus and access to higher education for all Mississippians.
“We encourage all members of the academic community to engage in respectful, meaningful discourse with the aim of promoting critical thinking in the pursuit of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the human condition, and the development of character,” the new policy reads. “All students should be supported in their educational journey through programming and services designed to have a positive effect on their individual academic performance, retention, and graduation.”
Also excised was a policy that listed common characteristics of universities in Mississippi, including “a commitment to ethnic and gender diversity,” among others. Another policy on institutional scholarships was also edited to remove a clause that required such programs to “promote diversity.”
“IHL is committed to higher education access and success among all populations to assist the state of Mississippi in meeting its enrollment and degree completion goals, as well as building a highly-skilled workforce,” the institutional scholarship policy now reads.
The board also approved a change that requires the universities to review their institutional mission statements on an annual basis.
A policy on “planning principles” will continue to include the word “diverse,” and a policy that states the presidential search advisory committees will “be representative in terms of diversity” was left unchanged.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Closed St. Dominic’s mental health beds to reopen in December under new management
The shuttered St. Dominic’s mental health unit will reopen under the management of a for-profit, Texas-based company next month.
Oceans Behavioral Hospital Jackson, a 77-bed facility, will provide inpatient behavioral health services to adults and seniors and add intensive outpatient treatment services next year.
“Jackson continuously ranks as one of the cities for our company that shows one of the greatest needs in terms of behavioral health,” Oceans Healthcare CEO Stuart Archer told Mississippi Today at a ribbon cutting ceremony at its location on St. Dominic’s campus Thursday. “…There’s been an outcry for high quality care.”
St. Dominic’s 83-bed mental health unit closed suddenly in June 2023, citing “substantial financial challenges.”
Merit Health Central, which operates a 71-bed psychiatric health hospital unit in Jackson, sued Oceans in March, arguing that the new hospital violated the law by using a workaround to avoid a State Health Department requirement that the hospital spend at least 17% of its gross patient revenue on indigent and charity care.
Without a required threshold for this care, Merit Health Central will shoulder the burden of treating more non-paying patients, the hospital in South Jackson argued.
The suit, which also names St. Dominic’s Hospital and the Mississippi Department of Health as defendants, awaits a ruling from Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Tametrice Hodges-Linzey next year.
The complaint does not bar Oceans from moving forward with its plans to reopen, said Archer.
Oceans operates two other mental health facilities in Mississippi and over 30 other locations in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
“Oceans is very important to the Coast, to Tupelo, and it’s important right here in this building. It’s part of the state of Mississippi’s response to making sure people receive adequate mental health care in Mississippi,” said Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann at the Nov. 21 ribbon cutting.
Some community leaders have been critical of the facility.
“Oceans plans to duplicate existing services available to insured patients while ignoring the underserved and indigent population in need,” wrote Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones in an Oct. 1 letter provided to Mississippi Today by Merit Health.
Massachusetts-based Webster Equity Partners, a private-equity firm with a number of investments in health care, bought Oceans in 2022. St. Dominic’s is owned by Louisiana-based Catholic nonprofit Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.
Oceans first filed a “certificate of need” application to reopen the St. Dominic’s mental health unit in October 2023.
Mississippi’s certificate of need law requires medical facilities to receive approval from the state before opening a new health care center to demonstrate there is a need for its services.
The Department of Health approved the application under the condition that the hospital spend at least 17% of its patient revenue on free or low-cost medical care for low-income individuals – far more than the two percent it proposed.
Oceans projected in its application that the hospital’s profit would equal $2.6 million in its third year, and it would spend $341,103 on charity care.
Merit Health contested the conditional approval, arguing that because its mental health unit provides 22% charity care, Oceans providing less would have a “significant adverse effect” on Merit by diverting more patients without insurance or unable to pay for care to its beds.
Oceans and St. Dominic’s also opposed the state’s charity care condition, arguing that 17% was an unreasonable figure.
But before a public hearing could be held on the matter, Oceans and St. Dominic’s filed for a “change of ownership,” bypassing the certificate of need process entirely. The state approved the application 11 days later.
Merit Health Central then sued Oceans, St. Dominic and the State Department of Health, seeking to nullify the change of ownership.
“The (change of ownership) filing and DOH approval … are nothing more than an ‘end run’ around CON law,” wrote Merit Health in the complaint.
Oceans, St. Dominic’s and the Mississippi Department of Health have filed motions to dismiss the case.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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