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
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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