Eddie Parker stood in a courtroom facing the former Mississippi law enforcement officers who were convicted of torturing him and one of his friends. Some of the ex-officers wore red-striped outfits that identified them as the most dangerous inmates behind bars.

Parker, a 33-year-old Black man, had survived the abuse of these white officers, most of whom were part of a self-styled group called the “Goon Squad.” 

On the fateful night of Jan. 24, 2023, he heard officers kick in the door.

“I saw the devil come to me,” he told the judge in the sentencing hearing, “in my home, where I was supposed to have been safe.”

They had handcuffed him and his friend, Michael Jenkins, before they shocked them with Tasers, shoved a dildo into their mouths and poured liquids over their nostrils. 

Parker feared he would suffer the fate of his father, whose lung disease caused him to die gasping for air, he said. “I felt like I was dying and drowning at the same time.”

Not long after, a deputy jammed his gun inside Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet missed Jenkins’ spine and shattered his jaw.

In the courtroom, Parker stared at another deputy, the one he called a “devil” because he said he had overseen the violence that night. Parker told the judge, “He shouldn’t be let loose.”

That 29-year-old former deputy sat there, numb, wondering what the judge’s words would be.

In a series of exclusive interviews through phone calls and hundreds of emails with Mississippi Today over the past year, Christian Dedmon talked about the fraternity he found in law enforcement and his descent into cruelty. “I see Michael Jenkins bleeding in my sleep sometimes,” he said. “It is a nightmare I will spend the rest of my life paying for.”

‘Mindless murderers and sadistic torturers’

As early as he can remember, Dedmon hated drugs.

He hated what they did to his parents. He hated what they did to his friends. He even refused to take pain medication after being injured.

Born in 1994, he grew up as an only child in the shadow of Mississippi’s capital in the suburban city of Pearl. He was 2 when his parents divorced, and he bounced between them, from rental home to apartment to trailer.

One night when he was 12, he helped his father repossess a car. When they began to hook the car to the tow truck, people rushed out, screaming. During the tumult, his father closed the hydraulic arm too fast, cutting off two fingers from Dedmon’s left hand.

Doctors managed to reattach his index finger but could only save half his thumb. Four other surgeries followed, and Dedmon missed most of sixth grade. A few years later, he moved out, dropped out of high school and drove tow trucks, just like his dad.

He was 16 when he heard of a horrific murder in Jackson, Mississippi. A Black man, James C. Anderson, had been beaten and run over with a truck.

Then he heard that his first cousin, Deryl Dedmon, was involved in the attack with other Rankin County residents, most of them in their early 20s.

He felt sick. How could anyone do such a thing?

To support his cousin, Christian Dedmon attended the sentencing hearing, where U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves talked about the lynchings of more than 4,700 Black Americans between 1882 and 1968.

The judge detailed how this white mob of teenagers, like marauders of the past, invaded the city of Jackson, which they called “Jafrica.” They beat Black homeless men. They beat a Black man at a service station. They beat a Black man at a golf course who begged for his life.

“Like a lynching, for these young folk going out to ‘Jafrica’ was like a carnival outing,” the judge said. “It was funny to them — an excursion which culminated in the death of innocent, African-American James Craig Anderson. On June 26, 2011, the fun ended.”

Reeves posed a question that could have been asked later of the Goon Squad officers: “How could hate, fear or whatever it was transform genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers?”

Deryl Dedmon, who ran over Anderson with his truck, received 50 years in prison.

Pam Lantrip, said her grandson, Christian Dedmon, was “really upset about his cousin going to prison for what was essentially a life sentence.”

She never dreamed this grandson, the one who never got into trouble, would be next.

Law enforcement became the ‘brotherhood’

While Dedmon was still a teen, a police officer he knew from deer camp invited him to ride along. Dedmon grew up cheering Chuck Norris as he beat up the bad guys on television, and now these rides lit “a fire within me,” he recalled.

At age 19, he became a 911 dispatcher for the Pearl Police Department, finished high school and got married. Months later, he learned his wife was pregnant. They listened to the baby’s heartbeat, and the obstetrician said everything looked fine.

Days later, she began to bleed, and he rushed her to the emergency room. A sonogram revealed there was no heartbeat. They wept at the awful news, the first of three miscarriages.

On the 15th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack, Dedmon enrolled at the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers Training Academy. He graduated weeks before Christmas in 2016. 

Two months later, he and his wife had a daughter, their miracle baby, and Dedmon vowed to be “the daddy that I did not have.”

He worked as a patrol officer for Pearl police, and law enforcement became the “brotherhood” he had never experienced.

Not long after he joined the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in 2017, his mother was arrested for selling meth. Inside her home, officers said they also found heroin, marijuana, fentanyl and a firearm.

“I spent his entire life trying to protect him from the world and from anyone who could hurt him,” recalled his mother, Jennifer Williams, “but at the end of the day I was the one who hurt him the worst.”

Dedmon said Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey asked him if he was going to have a problem with his mother being jailed there. Dedmon replied no, but the truth was, he was devastated. He said her arrest made him even more determined to get drugs off the street.

He spent extra time stopping cars and searching them. Through that work, he met narcotics investigator Brett McAlpin. All the meth users seemed to know McAlpin’s name.

Dedmon idolized McAlpin like a big brother. He said McAlpin convinced him they had to do more than arrest those using or selling drugs. They had to make these drug abusers pay. 

McAlpin taught him how to hit people so their injuries wouldn’t show up in their jail mugshots, and he didn’t use a Taser because it recorded every time it was used, Dedmon said. Instead, McAlpin “carried a huge piece of wire on his vest that would hurt if you were hit with it,” he said.

To get people to talk, McAlpin fired his gun in the air — a tactic that often worked, Dedmon said.

The pair didn’t stop there. Together, they destroyed the property of those they believed were using or selling drugs. They smashed food into people’s faces, berated them and told them to leave Rankin County. 

To get confessions, officers sometimes shoved guns into people’s mouths, and behind office doors, investigators would hit people “with phone books and whatever,” Dedmon said. “It’s daily operations up there.”

He came to believe this approach made their community safer for children, he said. “We made people scared to sell drugs, to use drugs or to steal.”

He realizes now how wrong that was. “My job was to clean up the streets while following the Constitution,” he said, “not to be the judge and jury in place of a failed justice system.”

Those who embraced McAlpin’s ways could go on “missions” with him, Dedmon recalled. Over the years, he said, more than a dozen different deputies joined in those missions.

Some deputies, however, steered clear of McAlpin and Dedmon. Two deputies from that time said they didn’t trust the pair because they had heard stories about those missions.

Some of them warned Dedmon about hanging out with McAlpin, who had a reputation for excessive force. “He wouldn’t listen,” recalled one former deputy, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. 

In January, Sheriff Bailey testified in a lawsuit that he knew nothing about the violence carried out by Dedmon, McAlpin and the others. 

Dedmon responded that “people being mistreated was no secret to anyone.” As long as he filled out a use-of-force report, the sheriff “didn’t give a shit what I did,” Dedmon said. “That took care of it.”

Mississippi Today and The New York Times corroborated at least 17 incidents involving 22 victims, based on witness interviews, medical records, photographs of injuries and other documents. Allegations in these incidents include everything from melting metal onto a bare leg to using a Taser to shock people in their genitals.

Dedmon estimates he arrested hundreds of people a year. Those included many cases where he said officers raided homes without warrants, beat people to get information and illegally seized evidence that helped convict people of drug crimes.

Despite this evidence of possible wrongful convictions, the state of Mississippi has yet to conduct a review of all the cases involving Dedmon and other officers now in prison.

Sheriff became the father he never had

In 2019, Dedmon was involved in three deadly shootings, firing the fatal shot in one of them. Each time, he saw a therapist, who signed the paper for him to return to work. Each time, he was back on the street in a few days.

Afterward, Sheriff Bailey bragged about his young deputy, who became Rankin County’s “Top Cop” for the year. “When we would go to political functions, he would say I was the ‘deadliest motherf—er in Rankin County’ to his friends and people around, being funny,” Dedmon recalled. “I never found it very funny.”

In fall 2019, McAlpin became the department’s top investigator. Former deputies said he became the sheriff’s right-hand man.

When the question arose about who would replace the veteran investigator, few doubted it would be Dedmon. Former deputies said they admired Dedmon’s hard work but bristled at his arrogance.

The new job was a dream come true for the 25-year-old Dedmon. He began to arrest as many people as he could, including his own father for meth possession.

Bailey became the father he never had. And like a son, Dedmon wanted to please his father. He said he did everything the sheriff asked him to do, including working with jail inmates to muck out the chicken houses of the sheriff’s mother.

In return, Dedmon and his wife said Bailey bought them an elegant dinner on Valentine’s Day. Other gifts followed. Dedmon said the sheriff made him executor for his will, promising him $50,000, a half-dozen guns and a flatbed Dodge truck. Family members and friends recalled Dedmon telling them this.

Dedmon said the sheriff had him handle cases involving personal or political connections. For instance, although he worked as a narcotics investigator, he said Bailey assigned him to investigate a near-fatal attack in 2019, carried out by the brother of Bailey’s girlfriend.

Clint Pennington slashed his wife so badly that doctors had to put more than 80 stitches in her back. “I am in constant fear — fear that he will somehow try to hurt me again,” his then-wife, Amanda, wrote. “I never feel safe.”

After Pennington pleaded guilty to aggravated domestic violence, the judge sentenced him to five years in prison. Pennington served his time instead at the Simpson County Jail, where he became a trusty. He walked free on Sept. 6, 2024, after spending three years and four months behind bars.

Dedmon said by doing such favors for the sheriff, he received “the power to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but it came with a price.”

His wife filed for divorce in 2020. “He was married to his job,” she said, asking not to be named for fear of retribution. “If he heard on the radio that somebody’s house was burning, he was out the door. If a child was missing, he was out the door. If a storm left a road blocked, he was out the door with a chainsaw.”

After a heated argument with Dedmon, she said she complained to McAlpin, who chastised her, “We are alpha males, and you can’t treat us like this.”

That moment made her realize she would receive no sympathy from this brotherhood, she said. “That was Christian’s family.”

The fateful ‘mission’

On the evening of Jan. 24, 2023, thunder rumbled as Dedmon prepared to fry venison for him and Josh Hartfield, a narcotics investigator for Richland Police Department, who had come by to chat. 

Dedmon’s cellphone rang. It was McAlpin. The chief investigator fumed about the home near where he lived in Braxton. A neighbor had seen “suspicious” Black men at the house owned by a white woman.

Dedmon knew the home well. In recent years, several narcotics arrests had taken place there, and two years earlier, he had worked a drug homicide inside the home.

He said McAlpin told him to look out for cameras, lock up everyone there and make sure there were no bad mugshots.

The deputy asked Hartfield if he wanted to go. He did.

Dedmon texted fellow deputies and asked if they could go on a mission. Lt. Jeffrey Middleton, whose shift was called the “Goon Squad,” replied yes. So did patrol deputies Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke.

After they arrived, Dedmon and others kicked in the carport door. Harfield kicked open the back door.

For the two Black men inside, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins, the nightmare had just begun.

For an hour and a half, officers tortured the two men. After Jenkins continued to deny he knew anything about drugs, Elward jammed his pistol inside Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger. 

Click.

The gun didn’t fire because the deputy had unloaded the chamber.

He racked the slide again, and when Jenkins repeated that he knew nothing, Elward pulled the trigger again. This time, a bullet smashed through Jenkins’ tongue and shattered his jaw.

As Jenkins lay bleeding, the officers dashed outside. Dedmon recalled McAlpin yelling, “Let me think, let me think.”

The officers planted drugs, disposed of evidence of their crimes and created a cover story. McAlpin and Middleton warned officers that if they failed to stick to this story, “they could find us all dead together,” Dedmon recalled.

When the two supervisors later saw Dedmon texting on his cellphone, they demanded to know who he was talking to, he recalled. He said they glared at him when he told them he was letting his girlfriend know he would be late.

Dedmon called for an ambulance, and when the sheriff arrived, the officers shared their concocted story of seizing the two men’s drugs and shooting Jenkins in self-defense. Bailey seemed satisfied.

When the sheriff saw that two deputies had turned off their body cameras, he became upset. He expected them to be turned on, but, as he later testified, he didn’t realize there was an exception for narcotics operations.

This wasn’t the only thing Bailey was upset about, according to two deputies present. They said Bailey mentioned the deadline to file for running for sheriff was Feb. 1, eight days from then.

Dedmon said Bailey called it “a bad time for him to have drama that close to an election qualification” because “someone else could put their name in the hat to run for election.”

Opdyke, another deputy there, said Bailey “was upset because it would bring bad publicity — as if we would’ve waited until after he was elected again, he would’ve swept it under the rug and we would’ve all been fine.”

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which investigates every officer-involved shooting, issued a press release: “Rankin County Sheriff’s Department deputies were conducting a narcotics investigation when they encountered a subject that displayed a gun towards the deputies. The subject was transported to a nearby hospital.”

The next day, Dedmon said the sheriff texted him, saying his Taser use would have the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department on the national news. His Taser had been fired four times and Elward’s, eight times.

Hartfield had denied using his Taser, but an internal investigation at the Richland Police Department determined he had fired it five times. The department demoted him, suspended him for two weeks without pay and placed him on administrative leave with pay.

At the Sheriff’s Department, McAlpin and Middleton continued to supervise their divisions. Dedmon, however, was assigned desk duty. “I felt sad, scared and miserable,” he said. “No one would speak to me, so I just started staying home.”

He saw the situation as a lose-lose proposition: Say nothing and risk prison time. Or tell the truth and risk being killed.

‘I knew my life was over’

Dedmon headed for the woods dressed in camouflage. He had his .270 Remington rifle. It was still deer season, his favorite time of year. Today, he had another prey in mind: himself.

He arrived before dawn and sat in the deer stand, watching the dark sky brighten into blue. Soon, streaks of yellow appeared. Then orange and red.

When a buck wandered up, Dedmon said he stared through the scope at the antlers stretching in all directions. He took aim but couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

After the deer disappeared, he fired the rifle. The sound spooked him, and he left.

Each morning that followed, he had a different excuse for why he shouldn’t kill himself. One day, he worried about his daughter. On another, he thought suicide seemed scarier than what he would face behind bars. On yet another, he trembled at the thought of facing God for what he had done.

“I was caught between wanting to drink myself to death, tell the truth or just end it all,” he said. “I knew my life was over.”

Middleton and McAlpin kept reaching out to make sure he stuck to the cover story, Dedmon said. McAlpin had cheered on the torture of the two men, but now he wanted “to make it look like he was never on the scene. He used me to do it and threatened to kill me if I changed my mind.”

But when MBI agents began to question that story, McAlpin grew paranoid, Dedmon said. “He started acting insane.”

Dedmon continued to spiral downward. No longer receiving overtime pay for his narcotics work, he struggled financially. He said he texted the sheriff and asked if he could work on the chicken farm for extra money.

The sheriff never texted back, but a deputy showed up with a sealed envelope, Dedmon said. After the deputy left, he tore it open and counted the cash: $1,000.

‘Policemen can’t go to jail’

On July 13, 2023, Deputy Daniel Opdyke met with FBI agents, federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials. This time, he shared the whole story of what happened that night.

McAlpin confronted Dedmon outside a gas station. “He told me he was going to talk to the feds the following day and wanted to be sure I was going to continue to lie about him not being there,” Dedmon recalled. “He said, ‘Our lives are on the line. Don’t f— it up.’”

Dedmon was the last deputy to talk with the feds, and he volunteered little. Not long after, his attorney, Michael Cory, called and told him the feds were estimating he would receive a 24-year prison sentence. If he didn’t plead guilty, he was told, the feds planned to also indict him for kidnapping.

Cory said he let Dedmon know that he wasn’t so sure about the 24-year figure, given what he estimated the range would be under the federal sentencing guidelines.

Dedmon thought about his life. The joy he felt in becoming a law enforcement officer. The joy he felt in becoming a father. And now the despair he felt about serving more than two decades in prison. 

That meant he would miss his daughter’s high school graduation. He would miss her leaving home. He might even miss walking her down the aisle at her wedding.

The night before pleading guilty, he handed his law enforcement certificate and awards over to Nick McLendon, chief of the Richland Police Department, and asked him to use these items to warn cadets at the training academy about compromising their integrity.

The next day, Dedmon pleaded guilty to federal charges in the torture of Jenkins and Parker and spent his first night in jail. When his 7-year-old daughter learned that he wouldn’t be coming home, Dedmon’s mother quoted her as saying, “What do you mean he’s in jail? Policemen can’t go to jail.”

‘If the gun had not gone off that night…’

Hours after five of his deputies pleaded guilty to federal charges on Aug. 3, 2023, Bailey held a press conference, where he apologized to the victims but never mentioned them by name. 

He placed his hand on his chest. “My moral boundary is set by my Christian faith,” Bailey said. “Do I cross that boundary? Sometimes I do. These guys were so far past that boundary, it’s unbelievable.”

Asked how he didn’t know what these deputies were doing, he replied, “That’s what I have supervisors for.” What he didn’t mention was that two of his supervisors had been among those pleading guilty.

When a reporter said some residents were calling for his resignation, the sheriff laughed. “The only thing I’m guilty of in this incident is trusting grown men that swore an oath to do their job correctly.”

Asked if he thought these deputies could have committed similar acts in the past, Bailey replied, “I’d say anything is possible right now.”

Dedmon said for the sheriff “to act as if these five guys are the only people under his nose that used unnecessary force is a lie.”

Asked about Dedmon’s allegations, the department’s attorney, Jason Dare, responded that Dedmon is “a convicted felon – convicted of falsifying evidence.”

An investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times has revealed that a loose-knit group of Rankin County deputies had carried out a campaign of terror for two decades. They barged into homes in the middle of the night and tortured people they suspected of buying or selling drugs until they shared information.

“If the gun had not gone off that night and shot one of the victims through the mouth, there is a good chance the Goon Squad would still be operating,” said Jackson lawyer Jeffrey Reynolds, who represented Opdyke.

‘He hid behind his badge and gun’

The day before his sentencing on March 24, 2024, Dedmon heard on the radio that Elward had received 20 years in prison. He figured his sentence would be close to that. Twenty-two people had written letters of support, and some planned to testify.

An hour before his sentencing, his lawyer told him the judge was going to give him 40 years. “It was like being struck by lightning,” Dedmon recalled. “He told me it would do zero good for any of my character witnesses to speak, that Judge Lee had his mind made up.”

In the courtroom, Michael Jenkins called Dedmon “the worst example of a police officer in the United States.”

In a statement, Jenkins said, “Every time I try to take a bite of food, the pain reminds me of what happened that night. All the things I used to enjoy doing in my life have been affected.”

The gunshot wound to the jaw has affected both his singing and drumming at church, he said. At night, he wakes up covered in sweat because of nightmares of the attack, he said. “I’m broken inside. I don’t ever think I will be the person that I was.”

Dedmon’s attorney told the judge the torture that took place that night was nothing new. “Everybody knew that was the culture of the department,” he said.

McAlpin, who received 27 years, put the whole attack in motion by ordering Dedmon to take care of the problem, the attorney said. “It’s an injustice to sentence Christian Dedmon to significantly more time than his supervisor, who was there, who initiated it, who didn’t stop it.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Chalk said Dedmon faced an additional charge  in an unrelated case for firing his gun to try and scare a confession out of a man he had pulled over to the side of the road. Although he was young, he knew what he was doing, she said. “He hid behind his badge and gun.”

Dedmon apologized to Parker and Jenkins, saying he would never forgive himself for what he did. “If I could take every bit of it back, I promise you I would, or if I could take it myself, I would.”

A year after the sentencings, Parker told Mississippi Today that he forgives his torturers. “I do, because they know not what they did,” he said. “That’s the way God put it on my heart.”

What concerns him is that other officers involved in similar conduct have yet to face charges. “They got nothing, not even a slap on the wrist,” he said. “It’s scary knowing that kind of danger is out there, walking free.”

For more than a year, Parker said he never left the house where he was tortured. After he began to leave, officers sometimes pulled him over and searched his car. He said he welcomed these searches because it gave him an opportunity to share his story.

But after Louisiana officers searched his car on Dec. 17, they arrested him. He now faces charges of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and possession of cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy. He is also charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Parker had a felony in Rankin County for failing to “stop vehicle pursuant to officer’s signal” and was convicted in Alabama in 2019 for drug possession with intent to distribute.

Dedmon said he finds no joy in Parker’s arrest. “Prison is a very traumatic experience, and it would be very hard for me to wish this on anyone,” he said. “I truly wish him the best and pray that he uses this opportunity to turn his life around before he ends up with a sentence as lengthy as mine.”

‘Hell of a brotherhood, isn’t it?’

Dedmon said he entered law enforcement, “not as a devil, but to make a difference in the community.”

He doesn’t blame Jenkins and Parker for seeing him that way. “I can’t change their view of me,” he said. “I can only change the man I am from this point forward.”

He said he thanks God that Jenkins “is alive. Nothing about me matters.”

These days in prison, he sits with others battling suicidal thoughts. “I’m expected to set an example,” he said, “yet on the inside I’m dying.”

His life brightened in June when he married his longtime girlfriend. There was no ceremony. Instead, a Kansas pastor wed the pair by phone.

He is slated to be released from prison in 2057 — three years after his cousin, Deryl. By that time, Dedmon will be celebrating his 63rd birthday and eligible for Social Security.

“I’m sitting here with a life sentence while a number of those who did the same kinds of things I did have gotten promotions,” he said. “Hell of a brotherhood, isn’t it?”