Nearly a year after he disappeared after going on a walk in Jackson and his body was discovered counties away in the Pearl River, Dau Mabil has been laid to rest, but questions about his death remain. 

The 34-year-old Belhaven resident was buried Sunday and a celebration of life ceremony was held and attended by family and friends from the area, said Spencer Bowley, the brother of Dau’s wife, Karissa.

However, several key members of Dau’s family, including his older brother and birth mother who traveled from a Kenyan refugee camp last year, were not present or informed beforehand. Bul Mabil said he learned about his brother’s burial through someone else – not a member of the Bowley family – and he hasn’t received a response from them since he reached out Sunday. 

“Why wouldn’t they reach out to us?” Bul Mabil asked during a Tuesday interview. 

Spencer Bowley defended his sister and family’s decision not to inform Bul Mabil ahead of time because they believed he would potentially make the funeral service difficult. Mabil has accused members of the Bowley family of murdering his brother a number of times publicly on Facebook, which the family has continued to deny.  

“We frankly didn’t feel safe informing him of what we were doing,” he said Wednesday. 

Pa,ela Griffin, the mother of Dau’s son, was told about the funeral beforehand and they were invited, but she and the boy were not able to attend, Spencer Bowley said. Pamela Griffin could not be reached for comment. 

Dau was buried months after two autopsies and a Capitol Police investigation were completed. 

Bul Mabil has raised concerns about whether his brother would be cremated, saying as early as last year that their culture does not permit it. Bowley said Wednesday that cremation was not part of the plan to put Dau to rest because his wife knew it was against his wishes. 

Dau and his brother came to Jackson in 2000 as “Lost Boys” of Sudan who fled war. They were among 50 boys who came to Missisisppi through the help of local churches.

Karissa Bowley reported her husband missing March 25, 2024, after he left their Belhaven home to walk around an area in town where the couple was known to go. 

On April 13,2024, fishermen spotted a body in the Pearl River in Lawrence County – over 50 miles downstream from Jackson. A preliminary autopsy by local officials identified the body as that of Dau and the sheriff said there was no evidence of foul play.

Since the discovery of Dau’s body, Bul Mabil has questioned whether his brother was the victim of a homicide. That suspicion led him to file a lawsuit against Karissa Bowley to prevent the release of Dau’s body to her until an independent autopsy could be conducted. 

In court, insinuations were directed at Bowley and members of her family, and at one point Karissa Bowley’s attorney asked if she had anything to do with her husband’s death, to which Bowley responded no. The hearing in Hinds County Chancery Court was for a civil case rather than a criminal one.

Chancery Judge Dewayne Thomas later dismissed Bul’s lawsuit and affirmed that Karissa Bowley, as Dau’s widow, was his next of kin who has legal authority over how to handle his remains.  

Thomas did, however, allow an independent autopsy to be conducted at the “direction and expense” of Bul Mabil. 

A second autopsy was completed in August in Florida by Dr. Daniel Schultz – a pathologist approved by Karissa Bowley over one proposed by Bul Mabil, according to court records. 

In a recent email, Bul disagreed with previous reporting that he agreed with Karissa Bowley to use Schultz. Instead, he said the court forced him to use that pathologist “or else the second autopsy would not have been conducted.” 

The second autopsy shared with Mississippi Today is longer and more thorough than the first completed by the state, but it arrived at the same conclusion: Dau died from drowning and his manner of death was undetermined. 

It addresses allegations of a video showing what is believed to be Dau’s abduction and harm. Schultz wrote he watched the video repeatedly and didn’t find evidence to support the claims, noting that the video showed a blurred image from a distance likely moving but not a specific activity. 

“And it is extremely important to also consider the context of the two independent autopsies (one by the state and one by a pathologist [myself] effectively hired by those who think that this might be a homicide and want to clarify),” Schultz wrote.

“My role is to be honest and neutral. And in that vein, there is no evidence of foul play.”

The report provides more context about how Dau ended up in the Pearl River. The place where he entered the water is unknown, but the report states a reasonable location could be the dam near the water treatment plant, which is an area where Dau walked. 

Google Earth pictures included in the report show a 1.4-mile distance between where Dau was last seen in video surveillance and the dam. 

The pathologist wrote Dau’s manner of death as undetermined because available information make it difficult to distinguish whether his death was an accident or by suicide. 

To support that conclusion was a new finding of a bite mark on Dau’s tongue, which the pathologist said likely happened from a seizure from drowning after entering the river or before due to a seizure related to consumption of alcohol.

The report noted Dau had a “history of chronic alcohol abuse” supported by several pieces of information, including how his wife reported him drinking more than a dozen alcoholic beverages in a week and how he experienced shakes that could be a sign of withdrawal.

It also notes how a person who saw Dau in the early morning before he disappeared smelled alcohol on him, and how former coworkers at times saw him drunk at work. 

Toxicology reports can’t pinpoint whether Dau had alcohol in his system at the time of his death because alcohol is a common byproduct of decomposition, the report noted. 

Spencer Bowley said the family had some reason to believe alcohol may have been a contributing factor in Dau’s death, and the autopsy report supports that. Overall, he said they are glad to have more information that wasn’t available earlier on and in the previous autopsy report. 

Bul Mabil disagreed with the report’s emphasis on Dau’s alcohol consumption and a years-old DUI charge, which he said made it seem like Dau caused his own death.

He also wanted to learn more about the bite mark in the report, which was called a deep muscular hemorrhage, and found a scientific journal article that suggested such injuries on the tongue could be evidence of strangulation from homicide.  

Bul Mabil said he shared the journal article with the pathologist and asked if it could be incorporated into his findings, but the pathologist did not, and he said it felt the information was dismissed.

Mabil said the emphasis on Dau’s drinking, findings about the tongue injury and what he sees as a failure to incorporate other evidence of a crime against Dau leads him to see the recent report as biased. 

He is looking to hire a new attorney and a private investigator to uncover new information and a forensic pathologist to review the recent autopsy report. 

“It’s very difficult for me to accept any report and to give up on my brother’s case,” Mabil said in a video posted on Facebook Sunday evening.

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

Archie Manning remembers Kellen Moore coming to the Manning Passing Academy at Thibodaux, Louisiana, as a counselor during the summer of 2010, just before Moore’s junior season at Boise State.

Moore had just turned 22. But, said Manning, “He looked like he was 12.”

“I remember him as a really nice, polite kid, a left-hander” Manning said. “He was a coach’s son. His daddy was a legendary high school coach in Washington (state). I remember that he didn’t have the arm strength that a lot of the quarterbacks we bring in have. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was really accurate and he knew where to go with the ball. He impressed me as being really, really smart, ahead of the game. As so many coaches’ sons do, he really understood the game.

“I don’t know how much he got from us, but he must have enjoyed the camp and gotten something out of it because he came back the next year.”

Yes, and Moore has enjoyed south Louisiana a lot lately. Sunday, in the Superdome, he called the plays for the Philadelphia Eagles in their Super Bowl trouncing of the two-time defending NFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. He was back in the Crescent City Wednesday to start his new job as head coach of the New Orleans Saints.

Fixing the Saints will be much more difficult than torching the Chiefs, and we will get to that shortly. But first some more background on Moore, who will not turn 37 until July. Most college football fans will remember Moore for his remarkable four-year run as the starting quarterback at Boise. After redshirting as a freshman, he led the Broncos to a ridiculous 50-3 record over the next four seasons 2008-11. Southern Miss fans should recall that in 2008, Moore’s freshman season, Boise State came to Hattiesburg and trounced a good Jeff Bower-coached Southern Miss team 24-7. For his Boise career, he completed 70% of his passes for nearly 15,000 yards. He threw for 142 touchdowns, compared to just 28 interceptions. Clearly, he was really accurate and did know where to go with the football, which was quite often into the end zone.

Despite all those gaudy statistics, Moore was not drafted. He wasn’t quite six feet tall and, again, he lacked elite arm strength. He signed as a free agent with the Detroit Lions and played sparingly over six NFL seasons with the Lions and the Cowboys, retiring in 2017.

The Cowboys, who saw firsthand Moore’s football knowledge, hired him in 2018 as their quarterbacks coach. In 2019, at age 32 he was promoted to offensive coordinator. He has also served, successfully, as offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers (2023) and, of course, the Eagles last season. Perhaps the best way to put into perspective his contributions to the Eagles’ championship run is this: In 2023, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts threw 15 interceptions and had a passer rating of 89.1. Under Moore, Hurts threw just five interceptions and had a passer rating of 103.7. That’s a huge, huge jump.

No doubt, naysayers will point out that calling successful plays with Hurts throwing and running, A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith catching, and Saquon Barkley running should not be confused with inventing the wheel. And those same critics will correctly say Moore won’t have that many highly skilled weapons to work with in New Orleans. (He also will not have the same quality offensive line wearing black and gold as he had wearing green and silver.)

Other critics will question whether a guy who will have just turned 37 when the 2025 Saints begin training camp will have the experience (both football- and management-wise) to command an NFL coaching staff and football team. And, frankly, given the choice I probably would have at least gauged the interest of highly successful Baltimore Ravens’ offensive coordinator Todd Monken before hiring a guy 23 years younger and with far less experience, none as a head coach.

But we all know Sean McVay coached the Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl at age 32 and won it all at age 36. You don’t have to have a gray beard to coach football. That said, Moore is only a year older than Saints defensive stars Demario Davis and Cam Jordan. A bigger problem for Moore is that the league’s youngest head coach will inherit one of the league’s oldest rosters. At the risk of mixing cliches, the Saints are as long in the tooth as their new coach is wet behind the ears.

Manning, who still closely watches his hometown team, put it this way: “Kellen’s got his hands full. The Saints have some issues.”

The biggest of those: The Saints are a league-worst $54 million over the NFL salary cap. Some of those salaries must be slashed or eliminated. The league’s youngest head coach faces huge decisions, beginning with what to do about quarterback. Go with Derek Carr? Or start over and go younger? The Saints do have the ninth pick of the upcoming draft. That’s just for starters. As Manning put it, the Saints have issues, as in plural. It’s hard to get a whole lot better while chopping the payroll so drastically.

This all will be interesting to watch. And we should all remember what happened the last time the Saints hired a young, former Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator as their young head coach. Sean Payton, like Moore, had never been a head coach before he took the Saints job. That worked out pretty well, did it not?

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

Feb. 13, 1960

Students, many of them students from Fisk University, began sit-ins in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. In the months that followed, more than 150 were arrested. 

Rather than pay fines, the students served their time in jail. When a mayor’s committee suggested separate “Black” and “White” sections at the lunch counters, the students balked. 

Two months later, a bomb exploded, nearly destroying the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the defense attorney representing many protesters. Later that day, more than 3,000 marched to city hall. 

Diane Nash asked the mayor if it was wrong for a citizen of Nashville to discriminate on the basis of color. The mayor admitted it was wrong. Confronted about the lunch counters, the mayor acknowledged they should be desegregated. Weeks later, six downtown stores desegregated their lunch counters, serving Black customers for the first time. 

James Lawson, who knew the principles of nonviolent resistance, led the students, many of whom became important leaders in the civil rights movement: Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel, C.T. Vivian, Marion Barry and Bernard Lafayette. David Halberstam captured their story in his book, “The Children.”

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