Some Hinds County voters may be focusing on a legislative or school board race. But all the county’s voters have one choice to make Tuesday: who will be the next coroner.

The race hasn’t been competitive in over two decades. But this year, six candidates from different sectors of the emergency services and death care fields are vying to be the county’s next chief death investigator. The pay is $900 per month with an additional $185 per case, according to the current office holder.

Coroners are called to car wrecks and murder scenes, and wherever else a death has occurred that may be natural, sudden, unexpected or unnatural. They determine the cause and manner of death. They are also responsible for keeping records of death investigations for the last five years and coordinating with the state medical examiner’s office during investigations.

Coroners must make “reasonable efforts” to notify next-of-kin. At least seven Hinds County residents were buried without adequately notifying relatives from 2022 to 2023. Most families believed their loved ones were missing until they learned of their burial in a pauper field behind Raymond Detention Center. Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart later admitted she struggled to find relatives of missing people. She retired soon after in December 2024. 

Jeramiah Howard, her chief deputy for five years, is interim/acting coroner and, along with five other candidates, is running to finish the last two years of  her four-year term.

Candidates must be at least 21, have a high school diploma or its equivalent and be eligible to vote. Only a handful of states have fewer prerequisites to become a coroner. Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio and North Dakota alone require that a coroner in most of their parishes or counties have a medical degree. 

Coroners must attend the Mississippi Forensics Laboratory and State Medical Examiner Death Investigation Training School upon election. Mississippi law mandates ongoing training by the state medical examiner’s office on specimen collection and locating next-of-kin every four years along with 24 hours of continuing education each year.

Most candidates in this election have worked crime scenes in some capacity. The candidate pool includes those who have done work in the private and public sector. All are Hinds County natives, though they’ve lived in other states and counties. 

Crystal Houson has worked in law enforcement the last 22 years, including stints at the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department and Jackson State University. She got her start in community policing, getting to know repeat offenders and the neighborhood families. She spent four years as captain in the Warrants Division.

She said her work as both a patrol captain and a public information officer taught her the importance of record management and how to preserve and organize evidence. She also took an advanced course in death investigation to aid her on visits to crime scenes.

“Throughout my career, I have investigated numerous deaths, crime scenes, and traumatic incidents — developing the skills necessary to determine facts accurately and without bias,” she wrote in a statement to Mississippi Today.

She said she wants to restore trust and integrity to the office and would strive to be accountable to the public if elected. Her goal would be to speed up the process of identifying next of kin and to provide more regular updates to grieving families on the status of autopsies. Finding families spread across the county was once part of her job.

She plans to lobby the Hinds County Board of Supervisors to approve the burial of more unclaimed bodies to address a backlog. She would allow families without an initial preference for a funeral home to keep loved ones stored at the morgue while they research options.

She has canvassed the community as a patrol officer.

“I believe that this role is not simply a position of duty; it is a profound commitment to assisting families during some of the most challenging times in their lives,” she said.

Jeramiah Howard joined the Pocahontas Volunteer Fire Department after a tree took out his electricity and the volunteer fire chief arrived to help and proceeded to recruit him.

“If you get my power on, I promise I’ll be at the next meeting,” Howard told him.

He’s been with the department 17 years, including 10 as fire chief. He lives in a home in Pocahontas.

“I don’t want to be the president or the governor or anything at all,” Howard told Mississippi Today. “I want people to genuinely remember me as a good dude. If I could do good, I stop and help. That’s always been my MO.”

TV shows such as “ER” got him interested in becoming a paramedic when he enrolled at Holmes Community College. He enjoyed learning about how even obscure illnesses can alter the human body.

The job had him entering homes engulfed in flames in search of pets and family heirlooms, and prying victims from wrecked cars. It was a departure from his day job as a project manager for a government contractor. He enjoyed helping his regulars like a woman who was prone to falls and often required help getting up.

For many years in the coroner’s office, he operated with only the White Pages and Google to identify family members of the deceased. It was challenging when the deceased had lost touch with family or come from a fractured one. He also had to remove the bodies of those abandoned at funeral homes by financially struggling families.

Howard’s latest initiative is to secure similar databases used by law enforcement to aid in body identification and next-of-kin notification. He depends on technology afforded the Capitol Police to provide fingerprint identification to bodies. Otherwise, if a death occurred on a Friday evening, he would have to wait until Monday for results from an ink fingerprint scan. 

Howard has knocked on hundreds of doors to notify families of dead relatives. He has been on hours-long group calls with grieving relatives.

“You never think you can find the right words to say,” he said. “Everyone takes death differently. I am always happy to tell the relatives everything I know.”

His job involves difficult decisions made on little sleep. He says he once got a call from hospital staff that needed help identifying a grandmother’s relatives. They were close to “pulling the plug,” he said. He visited every address listed for the woman’s relatives in central Mississippi, and eventually found next of kin. The grandmother spent her last three hours with her grandchildren. 

He also dissuaded a mother from visiting the morgue where her daughter was transported after a car wreck on the interstate.

Howard said he aims to improve transparency surrounding pending investigations and departmental shortcomings. If elected, he hopes to procure a backgrounding database and a contractor to renovate the county morgue. His goal is to be the “gold standard” for death investigation in the state, and rebuild trust with Hinds County residents.

“The ones for whom this race means something are those who have felt loss.”

Stephanie Meachum was office manager for the Hinds County Coroner’s Office from 2005 until 2016. The job taught her how to organize agency records and log bodies. She sometimes had to fill in as a deputy coroner and collect information from a crime scene as part of investigations. She also set the office budget.

She has run the death division at the state Department of Health’s vital statistics office since 2016. In this role, she coordinates with coroners across the state and ensures death certificates are issued on time and filled out properly. She regularly phones funeral home directors, nursing homes and other stakeholders that may not understand the paperwork required for death registration. She also regularly speaks with the state Crime Lab, ensuring that deaths resulting from domestic violence and drug abuse are correctly labeled. 

“The job is basically understanding what you’re seeing and reading, and answering the questions to the best that you can,” Meachum said.

In her current job, she has observed that Hinds County, even considering its larger intake of bodies in relation to other counties, lags in processing  death certificates. 

As coroner, she said she would strive to make people more aware of crime victim services. She also envisions the role as more of a presence in the community, traveling to ensure that families have a plan during hurricane season.

“I feel like I’m much more qualified because I have done every aspect of the coroner’s office,” Meachum said. “I’m not learning what to do. I’m coming in with over 20 years of death investigation experience. I’ve been on the on-the-street investigation side. I’ve done hospital calls. I’ve been through mass fatalities and mass disasters.”

She would like more candidates to speak about what occurred in 2021 when the coroner’s office caught heat for its next-of-kin notification policy. She believes the office should be more transparent about its shortcomings, providing regular updates on social media and at forums.

When she worked as office manager for the Hinds County coroner, deputy coroners sometimes had an uneven distribution of work, which Meachum said contributed to a case backlog. She also grew frustrated with deputy coroners who relied on email and fax to ensure important records were shared, when the people could’ve just dropped the paperwork in-person. 

“I’m not just a person who’s going to come out and declare someone deceased without doing the investigative work,” she said.

Schwanna Roberts has worked in funeral homes since she was 17. She was so young that her mother had to sign a release form before she could start. She was initially an embalmer but for the past decade has worked as a funeral home director in Jackson and Chicago.

She remembers when she first got interested in the death care industry. She was attending the wake of her grandmother’s husband and was put off by the embalming work. His skin was discolored, and his body was poorly positioned in the casket. She vowed to her grandmother that she could do a better job. 

Her grandmother continued to take her to funerals for inspiration. Her favorite part of a funeral is the two-minute remarks given by family at the end to “lighten the mood.” 

Roberts became the grief counselor soon after she started working at the funeral home. She said supervisors and colleagues have praised her clear and calming presence.

She hopes to establish a family liaison role within the office to provide “a single, compassionate point of contact during difficult times.” Another priority is establishing protocols to ensure families receive timely updates with empathy and respect.

“The coroner needs to be someone who is for the people,” Roberts said. “You need someone who can tell the truth. You need someone that has great character.” 

When her brother died seven years ago, she couldn’t speak his name without crying. The experience, more than over a decade of funeral home work, made her realize how critical clear communication and a dedicated staff can be for mourners. She started Doves of Peace Ministry to cater the meal after the funeral for two grieving families each month. During difficult times, the 38-year old mother of one daughter said she leans on her family and her faith.

“The main thing is to have someone with a heart in that position,” Roberts said. “Trust has been broken. When there isn’t a communication breakdown or outdated procedures, families aren’t frustrated.”

Her campaign flyer reads: “for the families no one’s checking on, for the families still waiting for answers.” She said she regularly calls random Hinds County numbers in the White Pages as part of campaigning and knocks on dozens of doors.

“There will be no growth if the wrong person is elected,” she said. “I don’t have big plans of wanting a state-of-the-art facility. We should be focused on the basics like identifying and contacting families”

Davista Tillman has wanted to be coroner since she was in fourth grade. Grisham-Stewart spoke to her classroom for career day at Wells Power APAC. She was only 10 years old, but was inspired to see a woman in a county position.

“I told myself I was going to put in some work until that time comes,” Tillman told Mississippi Today.

After graduating from Lanier High School in Jackson, she attended mortuary school where she obtained certificates in mortuary science and funeral services. She later obtained her license as both an embalmer and funeral director. She received her associate degree in criminal justice from Holmes Community College. 

Tillman began her career as an orderly in the adult emergency department at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the only Level 1 trauma center in the state. She later became an autopsy technician, assisting the pathologist in thorough examinations.

She worked as a funeral director in Jackson and around the state. She currently works as a funeral home director/coroner liaison and post-mortem anatomical donation technician for the Mississippi Organ Recovery Agency. Once a body comes in, she removes, preserves and transports tissue to be used in some cases for what she calls “life-improving surgery.”

“When doing this for so long, you as a person can become numb to death,” Tillman said. “It has also taught me to be more delicate with people’s feelings. Most people’s emotions are all over the place. You learn not to take it to heart when families lash out at you. You become their support in their hardest days.”

She is always on call as a technician for MORA and for the funeral home. She sometimes comes in to work at 10 p.m. or 2 a.m. Her schedule is already similar to that of the coroner and coroner’s deputies, she said. 

“My life experience has given me the knowledge to succeed in this role,” she said. “When I worked as an autopsy technician, you would see the difference between a heart attack and other ailments on the body. Seeing homicides as an embalmer, you see entrance and exit wounds and learn to look for the ligature marks.”

She would make renovating the county morgue a priority. She also envisions an opportunity for mortuary students to embalm bodies that spend excess time at the morgue. If she is going to be the face that parents see on the worst day of their lives, she wants to be more active in the community to offset that shock.

Bryan White joined the candidate forum hosted by the Hinds County Democratic Party Executive Committee on Thursday. Dressed in an emergency services uniform, White wanted attendees to know that he was not a “career politician.”

He reminded candidates that he had a law enforcement background, which he deemed important given Hinds County’s high crime rate.

He envisioned an app that would track the progress of death certificates for loved ones. He expressed a desire to work closer with the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department. If elected, he said he would track homeless people through a database.

The pauper burial controversy was a reminder of how many homeless people live in Jackson, he said.

While on a wellness check, he said he solved a difficult case by determining a deceased person died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He identified a nearby lawn mower as the problem. The mower had recently run out of gas.

“You have to look for the smoking gun,” he said.

White is no longer in law enforcement. He works with emergency services in the county.