Republican Gov. Tate Reeves on Wednesday announced that state agencies are disbursing over $110 million toward economic development, infrastructure upgrades and workforce development around the state. 

The funding for the projects is coming from the state Legislature, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Delta Regional Authority, the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission and the federal government. 

“We’ve secured billions in new private-sector investment and created thousands of jobs across the state,” Reeves said. “The funding we announced today will go a long way toward continuing Mississippi’s economic momentum and will help create more high-paying job opportunities for Mississippians across the state.” 

The bulk of the spending will go toward developing and improving industrial sites, which are often used to entice manufacturing companies to locate or expand operations in the state. If these sites have adequate infrastructure near them, companies are more likely to locate there.

Despite new investment in the state, Mississippi continues to grapple with one of the lowest rates in the nation of people who are actively seeking work or employed, at 53.9%. 

State Economist Corey Miller said at a legislative hearing last week that one of the reasons Mississippi is also experiencing a relatively low unemployment rate of 2.8% is because people have stopped looking for jobs. 

Reeves said on Wednesday that Mississippi may have a low percentage of people looking for jobs because the state has a relatively low cost of living and some families can afford to have only one income. 

“If an individual doesn’t want a job, the government ain’t going to force them to get a job,” Reeves said. “And that’s just a reality.” 

Still, the governor believes Mississippi can improve its labor force participation rate by improving education and providing people with better work skills. 

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

There’s been quite the controversy next door in Louisiana where, at Gov. Jeff Landry’s insistence, a live tiger was on display in Tiger Stadium last Saturday night at an LSU football game for the first time in eight years.

Tiger or not, Alabama pummeled LSU 42-13. Since then, Landry has defended the renting a tiger named Omar Bradley from a Florida exotic zoo to put on display at the game.

Mike the Tiger — actually, this was was Mike VI — died in 2016, and LSU decided to end the practice of having a live tiger present at football game. It was part of the lore of Tiger Stadium and it could be intimidating for opposing players: a huge, growling Tiger parked right outside the visitor’s locker room. Usually, there was a microphone in the cage.

Take the case of the late, great Thomas “Shorty” McWilliams, Mississippi State superstar of the mid-1940s, who played as an 18-year-old freshman for the first time at Tiger Stadium on Oct. 21, 1944. Old as I am, I am too young to have ever seen McWilliams play, but I wish I had. My daddy told me he was the best player he ever saw, and he saw thousands in a life of following football. I know this: The man they called “Shorty Mac” was the only four-time All-SEC player in league history, and it’s difficult to imagine in today’s college football landscape there’ll ever be another one.

What follows is the story, told firsthand by Shorty Mac, when he was interviewed in 1995 by the good folks at Communications Arts who were putting together exhibits for the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Museum. To set the stage, McWilliams was punting out of the end zone, near the visitor’s locker room at Tiger Stadium, in pregame warm-ups.

We’ll let Shorty Mac take it from there: “Unbeknownst to me, they rolled up Mike the Tiger in that cage right behind me. I didn’t know he was there and that 500-pound tiger roared. Oh, he roared at the top of his lungs. It scared me so bad. It scared the (bleep) out of me. I ruined myself. I had to play the whole game in those pants.”

You can watch and listen to McWilliams tell that and other stories on the football kiosk at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Museum. Now then, here’s the rest of the story from that night in Baton Rouge. Shorty Mac apparently recovered nicely from that pregame scare. He scored both touchdowns in a 13-6 Mississippi State victory over Coach Bernie Moore’s Tigers, who included a young quarterback named Y.A. Tittle, later one of the great NFL stars of the 20th century. Afterward, Moore told reporters the only way to stop McWilliams “is to not schedule Mississippi State. He killed our defense.”

McWilliams was the game’s leading rusher and passer. Indeed, he led the SEC in scoring with 84 points as a freshman. McWilliams played the 1945 season at Army, then returned to State to play his final three seasons of college football. 

Back to the present: Gov. Landry, speaking Monday night, said he regretted that the live tiger was the only tiger who showed up for the Alabama game, which was every bit as one-sided as the final score indicates. As reported in The Athletic, Landry said, “I had more people come up to me saying they remembered Mike the Tiger more than some of the great plays in Tiger Stadium… It’s about tradition. At the end of the day, the woke people have tried to take tradition out of this country. It’s tradition that built this country.”

I won’t take a side in that controversy, but I sure would love to here what Shorty Mac would say.

Two more Shorty Mac vignettes before we close:

• The late Dick Smith, a sports writer and later a newspaper owner, told me about one of Shorty’s games at Meridian High in 1943. “Meridian was playing Tupelo for the Big Eight Conference championship,” Smith said. “The first seven times Shorty touched the ball, he scored. Short runs, long runs, kick returns, didn’t matter. Every time he got the ball he scored. The eighth time he touched it, he ran 70 yards until he pulled his hamstring and went down on the two-yard line. By then, Meridian was so far ahead, they didn’t need him.”
• The late Edward “Cookie” Epperson told me this one at Shorty Mac’s funeral in January 1997. Epperson was Shorty’s roommate at State and one of his best pals. Said Epperson: “Shorty was enjoying a hot shower after practice when a couple of players sneaked an opossum into the shower with him. That possum hissed and Shorty flew out of there. He didn’t bother to get his clothes or even a towel. He ran past the secretary and on outside. He never ran faster.”

Shorty Mac wasn’t afraid of the biggest, baddest linebackers, but he apparently did fear critters whether they roared or hissed.

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

Longtime law enforcement officer Darryl Norwood was trying to help Jackson police catch a man threatening to kill his family when an officer shot Norwood, instead of the man, with a stun gun.

That night would be the last that Norwood would walk without a cane.

Rather than admit what happened, authorities blamed his injuries on a gunshot or physical altercation, according to medical and police records. Norwood has filed a lawsuit against the Jackson Police Department and Cpl. Rebecca Lomax for acting “with gross negligence” when using her stun gun to strike Norwood.

It was after 10 p.m., on Nov. 1, 2022, when the doorbell rang inside the home of Norwood, who was sitting in the living room with his 23-year-old daughter, Jaylen. They checked their security cameras to see who it was, but they saw no one at the front door. 

Because it was the night after Halloween, Jaylen assumed some kids were still out trick-or-treating. But after hearing movement in the backyard, Norwood stepped outside, identified himself as a police officer, and asked whoever it was to show themselves. When they didn’t, he told his daughter to call 911.

After opening the front door and stepping outside, he recognized four children from down the street. He said the children, who were crying, told him that their father, Clifton Sutton, was going to kill them and their mother. 

Norwood said he grabbed his police badge, handcuffs and gun before going to find Sutton.

Norwood said he found Sutton in his front yard, hollering, screaming and flailing about. He said it was clear to him that Sutton was high.

When Sutton spotted his children at Norwood’s house, he started running toward them. As he got closer, Norwood shouted at him multiple times to stop, but he didn’t.

After hearing the commotion, people emerged from their homes. Two of them said Sutton threw himself into a moving car and fell to the ground, only to get right back up, as he tried to make his way to Norwood’s house.

Norwood said Sutton then walked to a neighbor’s house and sat on the ground. A neighbor said he and Norwood tried to keep Sutton calm and away from his family while they waited for the police. Four minutes later, Jackson police arrived, according to police records. 

Video footage obtained by Mississippi Today shows Norwood walking up to an officer’s patrol car and talking to the officer through the window. At the same time, Sutton sat on the hood of another officer’s car, surrounded by the first officer to arrive at the scene and two other men.

Norwood said he was trying to explain to Cpl. Rebecca Lomax that he had things under control when Sutton suddenly walked away.

Norwood began to chase him. Norwood said he worried what Sutton might do to his family and took it upon himself to restrain Sutton since the police weren’t doing that.

Norwood grabbed one of Sutton’s hands and began to pin him up against another police car, aided by a Jackson officer. Norwood said he was hoping to handcuff Sutton — the last thing he remembered before waking up in a hospital.

The video shows what appears to be a female officer shining a light from her stun gun as she moves toward the three men. The crackle of the stun gun can be heard as she fires it.

When a stun gun strikes, it sends 50,000 volts through a person’s body, immobilizing that person and making it impossible for them to brace their fall with their hands or arms, according to experts.

After seeing Norwood strike the asphalt, Jaylen began screaming and rushed to his side.

She said she saw him splayed out on the street, unconscious in a pool of blood. According to Norwood’s ex-wife, Charlotte, Lomax administered chest compressions and shouted, “Lou, Lou, get up, Lou,” while Norwood lay unconscious.

According to police records, an ambulance arrived at 11:38 p.m. to take Norwood to the University of Mississippi Medical Center. One officer told the dispatcher that a “male [was] shot in the head. 

Hospital records say that a female Jackson police officer, presumably Lomax, told doctors, “there may not have been a gunshot, but there was definitely an altercation … and this patient’s head was being beat up on the ground.”

When Norwood woke up in the hospital, he discovered that doctors had intubated him. He spent the next three months in and out of the hospital.

Before the incident, Norwood said he lived an active life. He spent his free time woodworking, weightlifting and mountain biking. Now he uses a cane to get around and battles constant pain due to nerve damage.

His “cognitive function has been adversely affected, and he is now suffering from memory loss, anxiety attacks, depression, numbness on the left side of his body, and uncontrollable emotions,” according to the lawsuit filed in Hinds County Circuit Court.

Norwood attended physical therapy sessions until Medicaid stopped covering his treatment in January of 2023.

His ex-wife came to live with him and take care of him after the incident. He said he also has two support Yorkiepoos, Prince and Giselle. “When I start crying, both will come in my lap and lick my tears,” he said. “They know when I’m hurting.”

Norwood lived in Jackson all his life. In his youth, he had a few run-ins with the police. One time, officers dragged him out of his car and aimed a shotgun at his head. “I thought I was dead,” he said. Officers then released him after they realized he wasn’t the one they were looking for, he said.

Norwood became an officer because he wanted to make a difference. And he believes he did by teaching his officers how to treat people with respect on the job.

“You had to have accountability for your officers. If you did something wrong, you let me know what it is. I’m gonna get that monkey off your back as best I can,” he said. “I will die for you…, but I will not lie for you.”

According to Norwood, the officers he’s trained have gone on to become sergeants and lieutenants elsewhere and have reached out to him to thank him for his mentorship. Their praise keeps him going, he said.  

The lawsuit accuses Lomax of “reckless disregard” for firing on Norwood, “who was committing no crime.”

The city attorney’s office responded that even if Lomax fired a stun gun during a lawful arrest, the evidence fails to “satisfy the high burden required for reckless disregard” and, therefore, both Lomax and the city are entitled to immunity.

The lawsuit claims that the city failed to properly train officers on the use of stun guns and “created and maintained a culture, pattern and practice of ignoring [a] person’s safety and welfare in the Jackson Police Department and violating [a] person’s constitutional rights.”

After the case was transferred to federal court, U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III dismissed all the constitutional claims, saying Norwood had failed to prove a culture or a pattern of stun gun misuse. “A plaintiff must do more than describe the incident that gave rise to his injury,” he wrote.

Jordan dismissed the claim against Lomax, concluding that Norwood had failed to overcome “Lomax’s qualified-immunity defense.”

Jordan remanded the lawsuit back to Hinds County Circuit Court, where it is still pending.

Norwood said when he contacted the Jackson Police Department to obtain a record of what happened, they told him they didn’t have it. 

Mississippi Today tried to obtain the incident report, use of force report, and body cam and dash cam footage related to the incident. The Jackson Police Department claims the records are part of an open investigation and denied our request for them.  

Norwood served as an officer and lieutenant for the University of Mississippi Medical Center Police for over a decade before taking medical retirement in 2019 after he sustained an injury to his back. He said if the department had followed protocol, there should be an incident report and a separate use of force report on the firing of Lomax’s stun gun. 

Norwood also tried to contact Lomax, whom he trained at UMMC, but was unable to reach her.

This is not the first time Lomax has injured someone on the job. In 2011, two years after becoming an officer with the Columbus Police Department, she was suspended for 30 days without pay for causing a collision that sent her and three elderly women to the hospital. 

Mississippi Today reached out to Lomax. She referred all questions to the city attorney’s office, which wouldn’t comment and pointed to court filings.

The kids Norwood helped that night brought him a fruit basket and a thank you card addressed to “Superman.” Sutton sent Norwood a handwritten apology.  

“I believe God doesn’t make mistakes, only lessons to learn from,” Sutton wrote. “I’m very sorry for the pain I have caused you and your family.” 

In a postscript, he said that he’d recently found God and was trying to be a better husband and father. That night, he asked his wife and kids to pray with him. 

“A spirit came over me and took control,” he wrote. “I don’t remember anything that happened.” 

Sutton said when he woke up in the hospital, a police officer told him he’d assaulted Norwood. Norwood denies that Sutton assaulted him. 
Norwood doesn’t regret his intervention. “I thank God that I went out there and helped the kids and the wife; I do, but sometimes it hurts,” he said. “I’m just hoping that somebody will help me, and this won’t happen to nobody else.”

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