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A group of business leaders from northeast Mississippi, one of the most conservative areas of the state, recently wrote a letter to House Speaker Jason White encouraging lawmakers to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor. 

The letter, signed by influential Itawamba County business owner and Republican donor Luke Mongtomery, thanked White for pressing forward with Medicaid expansion legislation and called it “the most important legislative issue for the 2024 session.” 

“As this bill now goes to our legislators appointed to the conference committee for consideration, I have faith that a workable solution will be developed that is agreeable among House and Senate leaders,” Montgomery wrote. “Legislation that is good for our future and for all Mississippians.”

Montgomery wrote the letter on behalf of Mississippi Hills Leadership PAC, a committee of north Mississippi business leaders who regularly donate to statewide politicians and dozens of conservative legislative candidates.

Montgomery is the current chairman of the PAC, while Dan Rollins, CEO of Tupelo-based Cadence Bank, serves as the vice vice chairman and David Rumbarger, CEO of Lee County’s Community Development Foundation, serves as its treasurer.

The PAC last year donated $50,000 to White’s campaign, $50,000 to a PAC White controls, $50,000 to Hosemann and thousands of dollars to lawmakers, according to campaign finance reports with the secretary of state’s office. 

Business and civic leaders in northeast Mississippi such as Jack Reed Sr., George McLean, Hassell Franklin and Bobby Martin, all of whom have since passed away, had a longstanding history of advocating for political causes in the region. 

But in modern times, business leaders from the area are careful to wade into political issues beyond the typical scope of local business interests.

Montgomery told Mississippi Today in a statement that the PAC’s leaders support White, a Republican from West, and Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, for realizing the importance of passing expansion legislation. 

“The Mississippi Hills Leadership PAC fully supports our House and Senate leaders as they work together to develop a responsible healthcare expansion plan that takes full advantage of available federal support for the benefit of our hospitals, our people, and our future,” Montgomery said.

The letter comes in the middle of House and Senate leaders attempting to hammer out a compromise in a conference committee to resolve the different expansion plans the chambers have proposed.  

The House’s expansion plan aims to expand health care coverage to upwards of 200,000 Mississippians, and accept $1 billion a year in federal money to cover it, as most other states have done.

The Senate, on the other hand, wants a more restrictive program, to expand Medicaid to cover around 40,000 people, turn down the federal money, and require proof that recipients are working at least 30 hours a week. 

Montgomery’s letter did not endorse a specific plan, but it did call the House’s plan, which expanded coverage to the full 138% of the federal poverty level under the Affordable Care Act, “a reasonable and responsible proposal.” 

A potential compromise is for the two chambers to agree on a  “MarketPlus Hybrid Plan,” which health policy experts with the Center for Mississippi Health Policy and the Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County estimate could save the state money in the long-term. 

Speaker White previously told Mississippi Today in an interview that he believes he can hold a bipartisan group of more than 90 House members, a veto-proof majority, together in support of a compromise expansion package. 

But the coalition of support in the 52-member Senate is more fragile. The Capitol’s upper chamber only passed its austere expansion plan by 36 votes, with only one vote to spare for the two-thirds threshold needed to override a governor’s veto. 

In addition to Hosemann, the PAC has donated money to the following senators: Kathy Chism, R-New Albany; Rita Potts Parks, R-Corinth; Daniel Sparks, R-Belmont; Chad McMahan, R-Guntown; Hob Bryan, D-Amory; Ben Suber, R-Bruce; Dean Kirby, R-Pearl; Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg and Josh Harkins, R-Flowood. 

Jack Reed Jr., the former Republican mayor of Tupelo and the CEO of Reed’s Department Store, an economic anchor of downtown Tupelo, is also expected to be at the Capitol on Tuesday morning to advocate for expansion. 

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Archie “The Gunslinger” Cooley, the most unconventional of football coaches, has died at the age of 84, and, frankly, I don’t even know how to begin to describe him. 

So let’s begin like this: There will never be another one. Cooley, which is how he referred to himself so often in the third person, was an original. In the mid-1980s, in Mississippi, he wrestled the college football spotlight away from Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Southern Miss and Jackson State, his alma mater, and shined it ever so brightly on Mississippi Valley State.

He was a sports writer’s dream. Need a column? Call Cooley. He always delivered. He wore a cowboy hat, usually with a feather in it, and that hat covered a brain that was years and years ahead of all others when it came to offensive football.

Back when most college football teams were running “three-yards-and-cloud-of-dust” offenses, Cooley’s MVSU Delta Devils were spreading the field, never huddling, and throwing the ball on every down and then throwing it some more. The stuff you see big-time college and NFL offenses doing now, he was doing then.

The only thing the Valley Delta Devils had more of than passing plays were nicknames. Cooley was The Gunslinger. Jerry Rice was World, short for All World. Willie Totten, the quarterback, was Satellite. The offense was The Satellite Express. The offensive line was known as Tons of Fun. Vincent Brown, the great linebacker, was The Undertaker. Together, they were a blast.

The first time I saw then in person was Sept. 24, 1984, when they came to Jackson to play one of W.C. Gorden’s terrific Jackson State teams. Valley had scored 86 points in its opener and 77 points in its second game. Rice was catching about 20 passes and four touchdowns a game. Totten’s passing stats were so gaudy that the NCAA chief statistician accused Valley sports information director Chuck Prophet of making them up. Prophet sent the NCAA the game films and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong.” He wasn’t.

So Valley came to Jackson, drawing a crowd of more than 50,000, and on the first offensive play, the Devils flanked four wide receivers in single file to the left side and one wide receiver, the one wearing jersey number 88, to the far right. No. 88 was Jerry Rice and Jackson State had only one defensive back to cover him. 

Well, you know what happened next. Rice ran right past the defender, Totten lofted a pass down the field, which Rice caught and gracefully ran to the end zone a good 10 yards ahead of the defender.

Valley won 49-32. During the game’s final minutes, Cooley paraded up and down the Valley sideline, waving a green and white Valley banner. Valley had not defeated JSU in 30 years. Afterwards, he led the Valley players in a victory lap around the Memorial Stadium. “We’ve done the impossible!” Cooley, a former Jackson State All American center and linebacker, shouted.

“Now I know how they’ve been feeling for the last 30 years,” Cooley said, and he said a lot more.

“Jackson State said they had to score 30 points to win,” he said. “Ha! They would have had to score 50 because we scored 49. I’m gonna talk now because they have to live with it for a year.”

Cooley could ever more talk. He could brag and he could back it up. He was from the old Dizzy Dean school of boasters: “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” 

Cooley could do it and did.

He was a Laurel native, a graduate of tradition-rich Oak Park High School, also the alma mater of such famous Mississippians as Olympic long jumping champion Ralph Boston and world renowned opera soprano Leontyne Price. Cooley grew up with next to nothing. “A lot of times, growing up, I’d open the refrigerator for something to eat, and the only thing in there was water,” Cooley told me. “So, I’d drink a glass of water and go out and play football.”

He played center and linebacker at Jackson State. He was a defensive coordinator for years at Tennessee State before taking the job at Valley. He said all those years as a defensive coach, he kept a notebook of plays other teams used that he knew he wanted to use when he became a head coach. Clearly, most were passing plays.

And, yes, it helped to have a receiver like Rice and a quarterback like Totten, both now in the College Football Hall of Fame. But Cooley called the shots and he brought the cameras and microphones to Itta Bena, which is Choctaw for “Home in the Woods.” I remember trying to give driving directions from Jackson to Itta Bena to a reporter from The New York Times. He said I lost him at “turn right at the cotton gin.”

That 1984 Valley team was undefeated at the same time SWAC rival Alcorn State was undefeated through mid-October. They were scheduled to play in November in Itta Bena. A young Jackson sports columnist – this one – wrote a column that the game should be moved to Jackson where 50,000 more people could see it. So, they moved it to Jackson and played it on a Sunday. More than 64,000 people attended, which made it the biggest pay day in the history of either school. Marino Casem’s Alcorn State Braves won 42-28 in a game never to be forgotten by anyone who was there.

Cooley would leave MVSU after the 1986 season and go on to coach at Arkansas Pine Bluff, Norfolk State and Paul Quinn College in Dallas. His teams never again rose to the prominence of those Valley teams when CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated all found their way to Itta Bena, where they told the story of the highest scoring college football team in history and their leader, the self-proclaimed Gunslinger.

The post Remembering ‘The Gunslinger’ of college football, Archie Cooley appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The two legislative committee leaders responsible for criminal justice measures say they will move bills forward to restore suffrage for individuals, raising the prospect that some Mississippians will have their voting rights restored. 

House and Senate Judiciary B Chairmen Kevin Horan and Joey Fillingane announced Friday that they will have hearings on Monday to consider the suffrage bills. 

The House earlier in the session passed a substantial restoration bill that would have automatically restored suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent felony offenses, but Senate Constitution Chairwoman Angela Burks Hill killed it without bringing it up for debate.

Lawmakers, however, can still consider individual bills to restore suffrage to people who have been convicted of disenfranchising felony offenses, though only a small number of those bills typically survive the legislation process.

Horan, a Republican from Grenada, said the House will not restore suffrage to people convicted of violent offenses or those previously convicted of embezzling public money. Additionally, Horan said people must have completed the terms of their sentence and not have been convicted of another felony offense for at least five years to be considered. 

Fillingane, a Republican from Sumrall, said the Senate also will likely only restore voting rights to people previously convicted of nonviolent felony offenses – not violent crimes such as murder or rape. 

The Lamar County lawmaker also said the amount of time after someone has completed their sentencing terms is not a major factor in his decision to advance a suffrage bill out of committee or not. 

“The further out the better, but the time since completing the sentence doesn’t really matter,” Fillingane said. 

Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of any of 10 felonies — including perjury, arson and bigamy — lose their voting rights for life. Opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office have since expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 23.

READ MORE: ‘If you can’t vote, you’re nobody:’ Lawmakers hear from rehabilitated felons who still can’t exercise right

About 55,000 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of March 19. The list, provided to Mississippi Today through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court. 

The state constitution gives lawmakers the power to restore suffrage to citizens, but the process is burdensome. It requires two-thirds of lawmakers in both legislative chambers to vote in favor of restoring suffrage in individual cases. 

“We have a process in the Legislature that helps to restore individuals’ voting rights, but it is a terrible process,” Democratic Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson said on Wednesday. “And it’s a cumbersome process. And there really is no easy way to navigate it.” 

The Legislature last year did not pass any suffrage restoration bills, but a willingness from both of the relevant committee chairs to push some of the bills forward could mean lawmakers will approve some bills this year.

Lawmakers have until the final days of the session to vote on suffrage bills, and legislators are coming to the end of their regular session, but it’s unclear when they will adjourn. 

Legislators still have major items they can consider, Medicaid expansion legislation, addressing the public retirement system and rewriting the public K-12 funding formula. 

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“Bought sense is better than borrowed sense” lives in my memory, rent-free. I’ve always cringed at it because, at every stage of life, some lessons have been costly to learn.

At the Alluvial Collective, we show up to the office, on the screen, or in a community with one overarching challenge: to create or deepen the connections that will support collective thriving.  That is our “For what.”  We get to show up with wisdom purchased over our organization’s last 25 years of work and with wisdom borrowed from many generations and traditions.  In most traditions, self-reflection and stories reveal the path to where we should go and how we should travel.

As you engage in the National Week of Conversation, here are a couple of stories and a few thoughts to help you show up for each other, our communities, and our country.

What Do You Need

The first story emerges from a book called “Getting To Yes,” about negotiating.

Two people were arguing over an orange, and after some time, they decided to split it in half, feeling that equal parts were fair, like in elementary school. Before splitting the orange, they never asked each other the reason the other wanted it. As it turns out, one wanted the orange peel to flavor a cake, and the other wanted the orange’s “meat” to eat.

In another story, an arriving house guest is deeply offended by their host’s demand that they remove their shoes upon entering their family home. The visit goes off the rails and probably off the porch, too.

Each of these stories reminds you of tensions and dilemmas that are all too familiar in our families, towns, and – for me – our leadership discourse.  We have notions about what the other person, or people, want, but at critical points, we need more humanizing insight into what makes it essential to them.

The Cost of Wisdom

In the second story, the home’s foyer had a large rug on its floor that had been in the family for generations.  Understanding that, I would have offered to remove my shoes.

We benefit from being curious about the interests, the “for what” the other person engages with, rather than just the “what” or their position. It may seem inefficient, but it pales compared to the value curiosity brings to relationships. Good relationships are win-win; our team leans on telling and hearing stories to build relationships. They are the wellspring of “for whats” and “whys.”

The truthful stories that your neighbor or coworker tells to you and themselves comprise reality as they see it.  Your stories teach your in-laws and teammates history from your the learned or experienced vantage point. Dialogue and stories make our actions and attitudes make sense.  This is where trust begins to form.

Dialogue over Debates and Diatribes. 

As you begin your week, remember that how we engage matters as much as why.  Diatribes and speeches don’t make us good neighbors, and debates require someone to lose.  We like authentic connections and hearing familiar themes in the stories of others.  This week, open and honest dialogue is the strategy; to thrive together should always be the goal. We’ve paid too much for everything else.

Talk more; proclaim less. It’s one of our mottos here at The Center for Practical Ethics (TCPE). Put another way, we might say our goal is to foster conversations rather than diatribes. This task is more difficult than most realize. What we know as ethicists is that merely having conversations isn’t enough. There’s a wide variety of skills needed for fruitful dialogue to take place, and some are harder to come by than others. 

The ideal conversation partner is curious and humble, able to actively listen, knowledgeable about his or her own positions, familiar with basic principles of logical argument, charitable when interpreting claims, and—most importantly—willing to be wrong. Our work centers around equipping students with these skills and helping them navigate the complex ethical issues within our society’s most contentious disagreements. 

This year, National Week of Conversations (NWoC) coincided with Ethics Week here at the University of Mississippi (UM). Many of our events are conversation-based because dialogue is the best way to evaluate the ideas of others and open ourselves up to new information and interpretation of facts, while gaining a better understanding of our own views. 

Two of our events in particular are worth examining more closely to see why NWoC and the work we do at TCPE are critical for sustaining civil society and the myriad public goods we all take for granted. First is our signature Just Conversations event. Students are placed in small groups and given a couple of ethical dilemmas to discuss. Trained student moderators guide the discussion to point out important aspects of the dilemmas, such as logical fallacies, analysis of stakeholders, ethical concepts and assumptions, and varying methods to achieve goals. Students often discover they agree with others—on the dilemma outcome and the details—far more than they expected.

Second, we have invited free speech scholar Sigal Ben-Porath to give a talk about her new book Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy. Ben-Porath contends that universities are laboratories of democracy where students must learn to engage with disagreement. If the university is to be a place where truth is discovered, it must take seriously its historic social and educational obligation to train students in the skills needed for civil discourse and critical thinking. Her work is especially relevant in our ever more polarized times. 

What these events demonstrate is that conversations—that is, engaged and fruitful conversations—must take place at all levels. Students must learn to talk to students just as much as faculty must learn to talk to faculty and administrators to administrators. What’s more, these groups must talk to each other because while each of us have a role within academia (faculty, staff, student, dean, vice chancellor, etc.), we are also all citizens who work and live together.

Policies must be made, votes cast, businesses founded, churches attended, friendships established, and life lived. TCPE focuses on the skills of civil discourse by providing opportunities to cultivate those skills through Ethics Week, and highlights conversations that ask us to reflect on the role of universities as part of the NWoC.

Join the conversation.

Join us at Noon on Friday, April 19 for a VIRTUAL lunch and learn session exploring tools to make us better listeners, and in turn, better equipped to engage in meaningful conversations across differences.

The session will be led by Dr. Graham Bodie, professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Media and Communication in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.

This event is free and open to the public. Register to receive more information.

REGISTER FOR FREE

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Lawmakers and advocates regularly refer to Mississippians without health insurance who are in the “coverage gap.” But what is the coverage gap, why does it exist and how does it relate to Medicaid expansion?

The post Q&A: Explaining the health care coverage gap appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Note: This editorial is featured in Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter. Subscribe to our free newsletter for exclusive access to legislative analysis and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is a good man who has dedicated his adult life to helping Mississippians.

That’s why so many Mississippians are baffled by his dug-in position on Medicaid expansion, which right now threatens to kill one of the most transformative policy proposals that has moved through the Capitol since the 1980s.

Medicaid expansion would provide health insurance to 200,000 Mississippians, most of whom work in low-income, no-benefits jobs and cannot otherwise afford it. It would give so many of those people the chance to stay healthy and keep regular work for the first time in their lives. It would bring billions in additional federal money to the poorest state in the nation, where more than half our rural hospitals are on the verge of financial collapse and so many other needs are underfunded.

It would save lives and livelihoods, and it could legitimately change the trajectory of the state.

But Hosemann’s stubborn position on one element of any potential expansion plan — requiring Medicaid recipients to work — jeopardizes the entire proposal. Across the nation, 13 states have tried to implement various forms of a work requirement for Medicaid recipients. The federal government, which runs and funds Medicaid, shot down all 13 efforts.

As legislative leaders will soon meet to try to agree on an expansion bill, Hosemann is doubling down on his insistence that any final plan include the work requirement, adding that its omission from a final bill will not get the Senate votes to pass. If he sticks to his guns, this would almost certainly mean Medicaid expansion dies in Mississippi.

“If you’re not working, then you need to go get a job,” Hosemann said in a conservative radio interview just two days ago, reiterating his desire for a work requirement. “… We want them to be working. We have a 53.9% labor participation rate. That’s horrific, the worst in the country … If you want a job in Mississippi, you can get one. And so we thought it was very important to have people who are working to have the opportunity to have health care. That’s why we passed what we did.”

The state’s labor participation rate is, indeed, dismal. But the lieutenant governor in the interview didn’t mention the very legitimate reasons so many Mississippians, the unhealthiest American citizens with some of the nation’s worst rates of chronic illnesses, cannot work. He did not detail the many financial barriers to those same Mississippians, who are the poorest in the nation, have to finding and keeping steady employment. He did not touch on the state’s child care crisis, which for many Mississippians makes regular child care more expensive than what a person can make in a full-time minimum wage job.

READ MORE: To work, Selinda Walker needs health care. To get health care, she needs work.

The irony of Hosemann being the roadblock to passing Medicaid expansion is not lost on people who closely observe Mississippi politics. For years, Hosemann has been among the only prominent Republican leaders to express openness to it (though he has always refused to use the term “Medicaid expansion”). As he sat largely alone on that limb, conservative Republicans worked hard to use it against him, even helping earn him the moniker “Delbert the Democrat” from his 2023 GOP primary challenger Chris McDaniel.

On expansion and several other issues, Hosemann, who crushed McDaniel in that primary, has been a more moderate voice than most of his right-wing Republican counterparts. In a polarized state in a polarized political era, many people respect him greatly for that. Few modern Mississippi politicians could boast legitimate bipartisan support, but Hosemann certainly is on that list.

I’ve closely covered and gotten to know Hosemann for many years now. I’ve personally witnessed his strong character. I’ve taken up for him a great deal, even landing the nickname “Delbert’s bootlicker-in-chief” from his political opponents last year. What I’ve seen is a measured, thoughtful and wildly intelligent leader. He’s a true numbers guy and a policy wonk, and he’s surrounded himself with smart advisers.

He’s focused as much of his career on health care improvements as any modern Mississippi elected official. Before he entered public life, he was a legal adviser to health care organizations. Since he was elected, he’s visited struggling hospitals and built strong relationships with the most important health leaders in the state, who have persistently talked with him about the benefits of expanding Medicaid. He even visited Arkansas before last year’s legislative session to personally learn and study their unique expansion model. He knows what’s at stake, and he knows the solutions.

Most people assumed Hosemann would be the out-front leader on expansion, but that has not yet happened. He appeared flat-footed when House Speaker Jason White pushed a traditional expansion plan through his GOP-controlled chamber with overwhelming ease. And what he proposed a month later is not an expansion plan at all.

Hosemann and his fellow Senate Republican leaders tossed aside the House proposal without public debate or serious consideration and proposed their own plan that would draw down hundreds of millions dollars less than the House’s traditional expansion plan would. Additionally, the Senate plan would insure between 150,000-200,000 fewer Mississippians than the House plan.

But none of the differences in the House and Senate plans would matter at all if Hosemann keeps his heels dug in on the work requirement. The federal government will not approve it, and a federal court challenge — very much a shot in the dark during a big presidential election year — could cost state taxpayers millions and continue to leave people without health insurance and hospitals without financial help for years to come.

Across the nation, 20 Republican-controlled states expanded Medicaid even without being able to include their coveted work requirement. Those states came up with creative solutions that still drew down the full federal dollars and opened wide the door for increased health care access while instilling the value and importance of hard work.

READ MORE: These Republicans wanted a Medicaid work requirement but couldn’t get approval. So they got creative.

Hosemann, often to his credit, has made a point to let Senate Republicans make their own decisions and not strong-arm them into unfavorable votes. But at the end of the day, some of the most transformative policy proposals require strong leadership. In North Carolina, for instance, the latest red state to expand Medicaid, bold and pragmatic leadership from the Republican Senate leader who previously stood against expansion prevailed.

“I felt that I had a certain responsibility — that if the reasons that I had articulated for 10 years no longer exist, then I had a responsibility to be honest with myself and be honest with other people about that,” Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger told The New York Times last year. “And so I talked to my members, and I told them where I was — and why.”

In 2020, Hosemann employed this exact strategy to help garner enough Republican votes to change the state flag, then the last in the nation containing the Confederate battle emblem. Those were tough votes for many Republicans, but one-by-one, Hosemann brought in the holdout senators, laid out his own position to them and asked them to consider changing their votes. It worked.

If Hosemann has a willingness to find creative solutions around the work requirement or talk to his Republican Senate colleagues about supporting a real Medicaid expansion program, he’s not publicly expressed it. If he doesn’t, lawmakers will likely go home without expansion in early May despite being closer to true transformation than ever.

Whether the effort passes or dies in the coming days will likely be in Hosemann’s hands. But two major questions remain: Can the most prominent Republican champion of Medicaid expansion for years get it across the finish line? And does he even have the desire to?

READ MORE: Senate Republicans should know: This is literally life-or-death.

The post The unlikely Mississippi politician who could tank Medicaid expansion appeared first on Mississippi Today.

With a preliminary identification of remains pulled from the Pearl River as that of missing Belhaven Heights resident Dau Mabil, his brother has secured a restraining order barring the body’s release before an autopsy and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson is requesting a Justice Department investigation.

A preliminary autopsy of a body recovered from Lawrence County was completed and an official DNA confirmation is expected by early next week, said Bailey Martin, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety. In a Facebook post, Lawrence County Sheriff Ryan Everett said the preliminary autopsy “did not reveal any type of foul play. The official determination may be made at a later time, pending further testing.”

On Thursday, Mabil’s brother, Bul Mabil, and his attorney Lisa Ross gathered at the Museum Trail entrance in Belhaven Heights where Dau Mabil was last seen. 

“We want to know what happened to Dau,” said Bul Mabil.  “And if anybody has put their hand on my brother, these people will have to be held accountable. And that’s why I’m here to get to the bottom of it.” 

Video surveillance from the area showed what is believed to be several people moving a body into a truck, said Lisa Ross, Bul Mabil’s attorney. 

They were at the trail to show where Mabil likely fought for his life and to encourage people to come forward with any information about his disappearance. 

On Thursday morning, Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Dewayne Thomas approved Bul Mabil’s request for an emergency temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent the release of Dau’s body until autopsies can be done by the State Medical Examiner’s office and an independent examiner, according to court records. 

“Given the nature of Mr. Mabil’s disappearance and the location of the body found, it is likely that an autopsy will be required to determine if foul play was involved,” Thomas wrote in his order.

Defendants named in the restraining order are Mabil’s wife, Karissa Bowley, the Capitol Police and the State Medical Examiner’s office. Judge Thomas’ order notes that none of the defendants or attorneys representing them came to the Thursday morning hearing. 

“We were very concerned that a body could be released without a proper autopsy being done,” Ross said. “We know that autopsies are very important in determining a cause of death, and this family wants to know the cause of death.”

Bowley did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. 

On Wednesday, Thompson asked the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the disappearance of the Jackson man.

“Your immediate attention is necessary because I have been informed your immediate action is necessary because of the circumstances surrounding his disappearance,” Thompson wrote in a Wednesday letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

In the letter, Thompson mentioned the discovery of human remains in the Pearl River over the weekend, which he was informed could be Mabil. 

Mabil, 33, was last seen March 25 after his wife said she received a text message from him and he left without his phone. Video footage showed him near Jefferson Street between Fortification and High Street, along his usual walking area between Belhaven Heights and downtown. 

The family filed a missing persons report with the Capitol Police, which has jurisdiction over the Belhaven and downtown area where Mabil lives and was last seen. 

The family said they did not believe that he disappeared without a reason. 

Bul Mabil is calling on Capitol Police and the Jackson Police Department to work together and find out what happened to Dau. A spokesperson from the Department of Public Safety declined to comment further because of an open and active investigation. 

Bul Mabil said his brother was the youngest of six siblings. Their mother who still lives in a refugee camp is devastated by his death. Dau Mabil has a son. whom Bul Mabil said he plans to raise.

The brothers were brought to Jackson after escaping war torn Sudan, and in America they hoped for a better life. 

“None of us believed that we would lose our lives here … and look what happened?” said Bul Mabil. “My brother is not here.”

The post Brother wants answers after body pulled from Pearl River IDed as missing Jackson man appeared first on Mississippi Today.