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WASHINGTON — In a deep, dark part of the Gulf of Mexico, the number of marine animals plummeted by about 60% in the years following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, a new study found.

In a crucial part of the Gulf between the light surface and the darkest depths, where the BP-operated well failed and dumped 134 million gallons of oil, the number of fish found dropped by 63.5% from the year after the spill to 2015. Crustaceans, including shrimp and krill, a key food for whales, went down 62%, and larger animals like squid and octopuses fell 59.7%, according to a study published Monday in the journal PNAS.

And those populations haven’t come close to recovering, the study found.

Researchers focused on the ocean’s “twilight zone,” a vast area above the seafloor, where much of the surface marine life, including dolphins and whales, feast on creatures. Yet little is known about this gigantic ecosystem, and this region of the Gulf had not been studied before the 2010 spill, said study lead author Tracey Sutton, a biological oceanographer at Nova Southeastern University.

A 2011 post-spill exploration cited in the research, which used six sets of nets at different depths and acoustic sonar, gave scientists a good sense of how much sea life was in the area between the surface and 5,000 feet deep. They returned to the same place with the same equipment three-and-a-half years later and found sea life was between one-third and one-quarter of what it was in 2011.

“We saw this big decline,” Sutton said. “The question was then why? So we looked at all of the natural variables we thought could account for it, namely temperature, oxygen supply and food. None of those vary with the decline. The event that did was the oil spill. So we think that’s the most likely cause of the decline.”

Researchers kept on sampling since 2015 and the low populations remained, with a slight rise in 2022 and 2023 that did not prove statistically significant or lasting, Sutton said.

Documenting the decline

Sutton’s team documented the population declines with three different lines of evidence: what they caught in the nets, what their acoustic sonar found and genetic studies showing the species losing genetic diversity because of inbreeding.

A lot of marine life died instantly after the explosion, which killed 11 workers, and from nearly five months of leaking oil and gas. Those pollutants got stored in the eggs of survivors and subsequent generations of critters got more compromised and weaker, Sutton said.

BP spokesperson Paul Takahashi said the accident “forever changed” the company: “We have made many changes intended to help prevent an event like this from ever happening again.”

Both the oil and the dispersants used to clean the spill hurt fish, but in different ways, said study co-author Isabel Romero, a chemical oceanographer at the University of South Carolina. Oil is more toxic and an overall threat, but the dispersant breaks the oil into smaller droplets, increasing the exposure of animals that live in the deeper water column, she said.

Dispersants caused many problems, and new studies show that in future accidents, it would be better to avoid those chemicals and instead add agents that increase oil-munching microbes, said former National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell, a University of Maryland environmental microbiologist who headed a 10-year, $500 million BP-funded program to study spill effects.

Sutton said his team couldn’t prove an exact causal link to the BP oil spill, but by eliminating the other possibilities and looking at the timing, it’s logically clear that the spill caused the problem.

The krill population dropped 72%. Lanternfish — odd fish with blue-green lights embedded over their bodies — are a third of what they used to be, Sutton said. The stunning but scary dragonfish — with sharp teeth, light organs and a lure attached to its head — also had big losses, he said.

“These are foundational species,” Sutton said. “They’re the things most things eat. So it’s no wonder that we had wholesale changes across the community.”

The inner ocean is more unknown than outer space

Scientists learned much about this unexplored area of the Gulf.

“One of our biggest findings from the whole thing is how connected the whole oceanic Gulf is from top to bottom because the animals move up and down,” Sutton said. “There are predators at the top that dive deep. Lots of things that are deep that come up at night. So the system is one very large pulsing system, rather than just a layered system like people might have thought beforehand.”

Outside scientists were especially bothered by where the spill damaged.

“We know more about space in some ways than we do about the inner ocean. Because we can’t see these regions, there is a tendency to assume everything is fine, but here we have a clear result showing that something went very wrong,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography marine scientist Kaitlin Frasier said in an email.

Frasier, who wasn’t part of the study released Monday, published a post-spill study in 2024 looking at Gulf of Mexico whales and dolphins, finding population drops as high as 83%.

“It’s shocking how a single failure in a drilling rig can have this vast and sustained impact over thousands of square kilometers, with little visible recovery over 13 years after the spill,” said Dalhousie University marine scientist Boris Worm, who wasn’t part of the study. “It is important that we see this, because for the longest time these consequences were completely out of sight and out of mind.”

Worm and Colwell said this damage should be kept in mind as the world talks about deep-sea mining and increased oil drilling in deep waters.

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A federal appeals court decided this week to reverse an injunction preventing the enforcement of a state law banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Mississippi public schools and universities. 

The court has also ordered the case be reassigned to a new district judge, after his staff used artificial intelligence to draft an order in the case. 

The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision means the law can now be enforced in classrooms across the state. It also resolves a key concern of the plaintiffs: that the law would be interpreted to prohibit discussions of issues related to race, sex and civil rights, said Rob McDuff, one of their attorneys.

“This interpretation by the Court is good news for public school teachers and students throughout the state and signals that they can continue teaching and learning about these subjects as they have for many years,” he said.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office defended the law, which was passed during the 2025 legislative session. State attorneys told the court last year that the state government has the right to regulate educational content in public schools. 

But U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate sided with the plaintiffs’ attorneys — arguing on behalf of students, parents and educators — that the law was dangerously vague and violated the constitutional right to free speech. 

As the lawsuit was playing out in court, Wingate came under fire amid revelations that his staff used artificial intelligence to draft an order in the case. The order was riddled with errors — naming defendants and plaintiffs who weren’t parties to the case, misquoting state law and referencing a nonexistent case.

Wingate, who was appointed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, initially declined to explain the errors until U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley demanded an explanation. 

The appeals court judges criticized Wingate in the Thursday order vacating his injunction. 

“The proceedings in the district court were a botch job, to say the least,” the order stated. 

In September, Anthony Shults, the state deputy solicitor general, told the three-judge appeals panel that the state has a legal right to regulate the material that public educators teach students. He also said he believed a new judge should take over the case.

McDuff argued that the law’s vagueness would cause chaos, and he told an appellate judge that Wingate’s error was serious, but “it’s not as if AI told Judge Wingate to grant” the injunction.

While the law can now be enforced in public school classrooms and colleges, its scope is fairly narrow as interpreted by the appeals court, McDuff said. 

“In sum, the Act does not apply to students,” the order reads. Other parts of the document say the law names a number of exemptions, including scholarly work, the activities of students and their groups, and creative engagement. 

A footnote says the plaintiffs were wrong to claim that the law would ban the discussion of civil rights history, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the 14th Amendment and Juneteenth.

“We’ve got to study the decision more carefully to see how it plays out in the future and go from there,” McDuff said. “But I don’t think this will be much of a problem in the future.”

A new judge will be assigned to the case at a later date. 

More than a year after state officials declared a public health emergency over rising infant mortality rates, eyes are on Mississippi, and Dr. Dan Edney, state health officer, said the national media attention has helped the cause. 

“The narrative switched from ‘Poor old Mississippi, they’re so pitiful, they can’t keep their babies alive’ to ‘Oh my goodness, look what Mississippi is doing,’” Edney said. “We’re the only state that’s ever declared one.”

In 2025, an infant mortality report showed Mississippi’s infant mortality rate rose from 8.9 deaths per 1,000 births in 2023 to 9.7 in 2024 – nearly twice the national average. Edney then declared the emergency status, which he said has helped his agency cut through red tape to roll out new programs. But state and national stakeholders say more could be done when it comes to transparency and solutions. 

In an interview with Mississippi Today, Edney outlined four initiatives he said his department launched or expanded since the declaration:

• In December 2025, the state Health Department launched the Saving the Smallest campaign around safe sleep. To date, Edney said department employees have distributed 680 cribs and taught hundreds of families safe sleep practices during home visits. 
• In May, the Legislature approved the creation of a Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Committee, which first met in August and needs about $150,000 annually to keep running, Edney said. 
• The state Health Department continues to build its obstetric system of care, designed to streamline hospital transfers for high-risk pregnancies by modeling the trauma system. Hospitals are currently being surveyed and will receive designations in the coming months for the level of care they’re equipped to handle, Edney said. 
• The agency is restructuring its county health departments. In 2025, Edney cut services at some county clinics following insufficient funding from the Legislature. Now, Edney said he is working to offer perinatal care at some of those clinics. He said the agency would start with four or five counties, but did not say which ones. 

Some public health researchers in the state were surprised to learn that the state Health Department characterized its response to the emergency as this four-pronged approach. Mitchell Adcock, executive director at the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, said his team had heard about these initiatives, but didn’t know their status. 

“With a public health emergency, I just thought we would know a bit more about what’s been going on,” he said. 

Meanwhile, provisional numbers for 2025 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show infant mortality in Mississippi went down from 9.7 deaths per 1,000 births in 2024 to 8.4. Most of the department’s new initiatives don’t overlap with those 2025 numbers. The crib distribution began in December 2025. Edney said he couldn’t take credit for that decrease and can’t say what accounts for it, but called it a “substantial reduction.” 

“It’s about 40, 45 babies who survived 2025 who would not have survived 2024,” Edney said.

Once the official data is released, Adcock said his team will start digging into what’s driving those numbers. 

The Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Committee has already shed light on hidden problems, Edney said. Within a couple of meetings, the committee identified several infant deaths resulting from one twin rolling over the other while sleeping, Edney said.

“The pediatricians hadn’t thought about it, the neonatalogists hadn’t thought about it. But the FIMR identified it,” Edney said. “So right there, boom, in just a few months, it was a gamechanger.”

‘counties where there is nothing’

Jonathan Webb, CEO of the national Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, said he believes the emergency designation was appropriate “given where Mississippi ranks.” He thinks states with similar rankings could collectively prioritize the challenge and share what works. 

“It creates awareness and brings some visibility to the issue,” Webb said. “But it also makes it easier to direct funds to programs.” 

Webb said while the declaration is commendable, Mississippi’s plan lacks certain elements he would hope to see in an emergency response, such as a focus on equity. In 2024, nearly twice as many Black infants as white ones died in Mississippi. 

Data from Mississippi’s most recent infant mortality report shows the death rate for white infants in 2024 was one of the lowest over the last decade. But during that same period, the number of deaths among Black infants reached its highest rate. 

“I really think that an honest assessment of our biases individually and as a system has to happen,” Webb said.

Solutions could include the health department partnering with community organizations that serve women of color, creating patient advisory committees and embedding accountability offices into health spaces, he said. 

Webb also highlighted the importance of providing resources and training to clinicians who might be left picking up the slack when hospitals shutter their labor and delivery units. 

“When you have these maternity care deserts and services leave communities, people are still having babies in these communities,” Webb said. “It just falls to the EMS team or the emergency room teams or critical care units, nurses who are in those environments.”

The University of Mississippi Medical Center has a program called STORK, which trains first responders and emergency room clinicians to better respond to obstetric emergencies. In 2022, UMMC doctors launched the program in response to the dwindling options for obstetric care and the concern that a growing number of women would be delivering babies outside dedicated labor and delivery units. Part of the obstetric system of care involves amplifying that effort, Edney said. 

That’s not a bad thing to do, but it’s not a comprehensive approach, said Getty Israel, founder of a Jackson-based women’s health clinic called Sisters in Birth. 

“Is the state doing enough? No,” Israel said, adding that she doesn’t believe the department can shore up meaningful improvements without more funding.  

For the third consecutive year, the health department requested no increase in funding from lawmakers during legislative budget hearings earlier this month. 

On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Fund released a new report highlighting the importance of midwifery-led birth centers, cost-effective clinical spaces outside hospitals where low-risk women can safely give birth with fewer interventions and more hands-on support. Mississippi has none.

Israel has been trying to open the state’s first birth center for nearly six years. Several state laws have stood in her way, she said, including expensive monthly fees certified nurse midwives are required to pay physicians to practice within their scope. 

A willingness from lawmakers to break the status quo, and to fund the construction of more community health spaces, “could reduce so much of the risk that women experience that leads to death,” she said. 

Nearly half the state’s counties are maternity care deserts, where there are no obstetric clinicians or birthing facilities, according to the March of Dimes. There should be more of a focus on shrinking those deserts by offering more reproductive health services, Israel said, than on routing women out of those deserts. 

“We need to build infrastructure in those counties where there is nothing,” Israel said. “You’re relying on an EMS system to drive how many minutes, how many miles, to get to a woman’s house in a rural place?”

The Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame announced its 2027 class on Thursday, the most diverse group of inductees in the history of the Magnolia State sports shrine.

The class, which will be inducted in ceremonies next July, includes three women, three football greats and two Major League Baseball standouts.

In alphabetical order, they are: Mississippi State football great John Bond, Jackson State and Major League Baseball standout Dave Clark, Southern Miss and professional football linebacker Rod Davis, Pearl native and Olympic gold medalist sprinter Bianca Knight, Ole Miss All American and 10-year NFL veteran Kris Mangum, Ole Miss and Major League Baseball star Seth Smith, Mississippi State and WNBA basketball great LaToya Thomas and Shirley Gibbs Walker, who coached Alcorn State to 493 victories and 12 SWAC basketball championships.

A brief bio of each:

John Bond

Few athletes in Mississippi State history made such an immediate impact as John Bond did on Bulldog football. The Bulldogs were 3-8 in 1979, Emory Bellard’s first season as the coach. In 1980, with Bond running Bellard’s Wishbone offense, the Bulldogs won nine games, including a historic 6-3 victory over Bear Bryant’s No. 1 ranked Alabama Crimson Tide. Bond, who ran for more than 2,000 yards and passed for more than 4,000, remains the only State quarterback to defeat LSU four times.

Dave Clark

Clark, from the northeast Mississippi town of Shannon, was the 11th overall pick in the first round of the 1983 Major League draft. Clark, an outfielder, played 13 Major League seasons before embarking on a long coaching and managerial career in baseball. Currently a coach for the Houston Astros, he has managed, coached and won championships at the Minor League and Major League level.

Rod Davis

Davis won the C Spire Conerly Trophy, for Mississippi’s top college football player, in 2002 when he was the nation’s leading tackler for Southern Miss. He is the answer to an interesting trivia question: Eli Manning won the Conerly Trophy as a sophomore and a senior. Who won it Manning’s junior season? Davis, a three-time all-conference player at USM, is the school’s all-time leading tackler and was the Conference USA Defensive Player of the Year in 2003. The Gulfport native is currently the athletic director and head football coach at Florence.

Bianca Knight

Knight, a Pearl native, won Olympic gold, running a world record time in the 4×100-meter relay at the 2012 London Games. She was also a 2011 world champion in the same event. She won the 2008 NCAA indoor 200-meter championship, running for the Texas Longhorns after a remarkable high school career at Ridgeland High, where she captured 23 state championships.

Kris Mangum

Kris Mangum follows his older brother, John Mangum, into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. Mangum won All-SEC and All-American honors as an Ole Miss tight end and then played 10 seasons for the Carolina Panthers, excelling as a blocker and catching nine touchdown passes. He helped Carolina reach the 2004 Super Bowl. As a freshman in 1992, he helped Alabama to a national championship before transferring to Ole Miss, where he was a three-year starter and standout.

Seth Smith

Smith, a Jackson native, will be remembered as one of the greatest hitters in Ole Miss baseball history, who wasted no time making his presence known. He was the SEC Freshman of the Year, hitting .402, while also serving as the backup to football quarterback Eli Manning. In three seasons at Ole Miss, he recorded an on-base percentage of .410 and a slugging percentage of .473. He played 11 Major League seasons with five ball clubs and hit 126 home runs. In 2007, he helped the Colorado Rockies reach the World Series.

LaToya Thomas

Thomas, a Greenville native, was a four-time All American and two-time SEC Player of the Year in women’s basketball at Mississippi State. She finished her State career with 2,981 points and an average of 23.8 points per game. Her jersey, No. 32, is retired and hangs in Humphrey Coliseum. She was selected first overall in the 2003 WNBA draft and played professionally in the WNBA for six seasons and internationally for 11 seasons.

Shirley Gibbs Walker

The basketball floor at Alcorn State was named in Gibbs Walker’s honor in 2015 after her 30-year coaching tenure that included 493 victories, 12 SWAC regular season championships, six SWAC Tournament titles and three NCAA Tournament bids. The Bude native was inducted into the SWAC Hall of Fame in 2010.

COLUMBUS – Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned in Mississippi for Scott Colom on Thursday, calling the Democratic Senate nominee a historic candidate whose victory would send a statement that America has begun to reject President Donald Trump and his party.

Harris’ arrival followed a steady stream of campaigning for Colom by Democratic senators and a last-minute large investment from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, as Democrats grow increasingly hopeful that Colom can pull off an upset over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in ruby-red Mississippi. 

Speaking to an energized crowd at the Columbus High School gym, where Colom played basketball as a youth, Harris said Mississippi’s increasingly competitive U.S. Senate race is a fight worth waging for Democrats. 

“We’ve got 12 days to make history. And I’ve traveled here because, indeed, Mississippi Matters,” Harris said, referencing Colom’s campaign slogan. “The power is with the people. And the people are with Scott.”

Republicans appear to be taking Colom’s challenge seriously. The day before Harris arrived in Mississippi, party leaders announced on Wednesday that President Donald Trump will campaign for Hyde-Smith in the northeastern town of Corinth on Monday.

The crowd at Colom’s rally chanted “Mississippi Matters!” throughout the evening, and cheered, “We want Scott!” as Colom continued to connect the high cost of gasoline and groceries to Hyde-Smith’s approval of Trump’s war with Iran and tariffs. Colom delighted the crowd with his favorite label for his Republican opponent: “Cindy High Prices.”  

“She’s given away our voice, she’s given it away to her MAGA daddy,” Colom said.  

Harris said Trump is leading “the most corrupt administration in American history,” and that Hyde-Smith, a devoted Trump ally, deserves to lose. 

“The junior senator from Mississippi voted in favor of a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid,” Harris said. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We deserve better.” 

Earlier on Thursday, Harris and Colom were at a community health center in Clarksdale for a roundtable discussion about rural healthcare. They were joined by U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democratic member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation, whose district includes Clarksdale, as well as local doctors, a mother who lost a child as a result of inadequate healthcare access and other local leaders. 

Healthcare is an animating issue for voters in Mississippi, a state that has for years struggled with hospital closures and poor health outcomes. Mississippi, one of the nation’s poorest states, hasn’t expanded Medicaid, and many residents struggle to afford care. Throughout his campaign, Colom has hammered Hyde-Smith for voting for Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashed Medicaid funding. 

“Our junior senator is going to do nothing to fix rural healthcare in Mississippi,” Colom said. “She’s going to do nothing to fix hospitals in Mississippi. She’s made that clear. She’s got no solution. I’m offering solutions.”

Colom promised to work on reversing cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies. 

Harris said voters in areas such as the Delta have the opportunity to turn their hardships into action by voting for Colom. 

“People are feeling and experiencing pain, and the feeling of being unseen, unheard, alone, hopeless and therefore feeling powerless,” Harris said. “This is a moment where we can understand in this election season with less than two weeks to go, we can turn that pain into purpose.”

Harris’ trip marks her second visit to Mississippi in the past year. She came to Jackson in January for her book tour and spoke before a packed crowd. 

Harris has said in multiple recent interviews that she’s focused on helping Democrats win in November. But she’s not ruled out another presidential campaign after losing the 2024 general election to Trump.

In a statement ahead of the rally, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm said Colom’s embrace of Harris shows he is out of touch with voters in a state Trump won handily 

“Scott Colom is a Chuck Schumer-backed, George Soros-funded, Transgender Defender so out of touch with Mississippi that he is campaigning with Kamala Harris, who lost the state by 22 points,” said NRSC Regional Press Secretary Samantha Cantrell. 

With a little over a week left until the midterm elections, Mississippi has become a surprising battleground state where national party figures are swarming the state to energize their bases. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will stump for Colom on the Gulf Coast on Tuesday. Those who have already visited Mississippi for Colom include Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Feeling confident about retaking the Senate and House majorities, Democratic leaders have begun to invest in Mississippi, a state that has long been solidly Republican in federal elections. But the state has the highest percentage of Black voters in the nation, a core voting bloc of the Democratic Party. 

If Mississippi, a state which hasn’t voted for a Democratic U.S. senator since 1982, were to elect Colom over Hyde-Smith, it would be an embarrassing rejection of Trump in the Deep South and prove a historic win in the state that hasn’t elected a Black person to a statewide or federal office since Reconstruction. 

Colom on Thursday seemed visibly moved by the possibility of Mississippi, a state that was the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement and where white supremacists actively worked for decades to disenfranchise Black citizens, potentially electing its first Black statewide official. 

He told the crowd that the state has a chance to write “a new chapter” on Nov. 3 and depart from its past where candidates used divisive and sometimes racist rhetoric to divide voters. 

“So many times throughout history that worked,” Colom said. “But not this time.”

Sarah Whites-Koditschek and Mukta Joshi are investigative reporters at Mississippi Today spending a year as New York Times Local Investigations fellows. They can be reached at sarah.whites-koditschek@nytimes.com and mukta.joshi@nytimes.com.

Multiple experts who reviewed video footage of the police shooting in Senatobia said officers unnecessarily escalated the encounter and put themselves in harm’s way in the moments before one of them fired into a car, killing 1-year-old Kohen Wiley.

Six experts, including a forensic reconstructionist and five consultants in police training and use of force, said at least one of the officers clearly put himself at risk when he stepped in front of the car while pursuing two women accused of taking a box of diapers and baby clothes from Walmart.

That decision goes against training widely provided to law enforcement officers, who are taught not to stand in front of a car in an attempt to stop someone from fleeing, the experts said. 

It also appears to violate Senatobia Police Department’s use-of-force policy, which says an officer’s “first responsibility” is “to move out of the path of an on-coming vehicle.” 

“It’s just a tragedy. It could have been avoided,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a group that advises police departments on use of force. “You don’t stand in front of the car, period. You stand off to the side.” 

Reporters for Mississippi Today and The New York Times asked six policing and use-of-force experts and an attorney who defends law enforcement to examine video footage that was collected by state law enforcement and leaked to a Mississippi news outlet this week. The footage is incomplete, but provides the most detailed insight so far into how officers came to shoot Kohen during what began as a routine shoplifting call in June.

Kohen’s death set off protests in Senatobia and sparked outrage across the country, in part because Kohen, who is Black, was shot by a white police officer, who Mississippi Today later found had been accused by two separate colleagues of making racially offensive comments toward them. 

In September, Mississippi Today revealed that Harold Vanderford, the department’s chief who had taken no action against Foster in either complaint, routinely used racist slurs in text exchanges with a colleague in the department. Vanderford was fired soon after.  

Foster resigned from his position at the department this week, and city leadership accepted his resignation late Wednesday.

A close examination of the footage, in consultation with the experts, raises questions about how the officers responded, and whether Foster’s life was in danger when the shots were fired. It also leaves critical questions unanswered, including what the officers knew about the women they were chasing and whether any of them knew a child was in the car.

Of those who reviewed the footage for Mississippi Today, only David Mastagni, an attorney who represents police, defended the officers’ tactics. He cautioned against judging their actions based on video footage, saying it appears far different than what an officer experiences in the moment. 

“It’s capturing from a perspective, and it has tranquility and hindsight and all that, where we can slow it down and look at it,” he said. 

The other six experts were unanimous in many of their criticisms.

In the video, the confrontation with the officers begins after Latoya Ferrell, Vellesiya Wiley and her son Kohen have gotten into a gray sedan parked outside Walmart. An unidentified officer runs up to their driver side window and tries to open the door as the sedan pulls backward out of a parking spot. 

One officer yells, “Stop,” and the car pauses before continuing backward and slamming into an S.U.V. 

Several experts noted that this is the moment when at least two officers pull out their guns. Russ Hicks, a police consultant, former instructor and assistant commander, said the officers drew their weapons before the car drove toward them.   

“What concerns me is taking out the gun so quickly in this kind of a case,” Hicks said. “Officers only draw their guns if they believe they’re going to use them.”

The officers then surround the car, with two of them, including Foster, standing in front, in the only possible path for the driver to flee. 

Hicks called this a critical mistake that put the officers, the car’s occupants and bystanders at risk. 

“This is a provocational tactic where they’re standing in front of the cars and now saying, ‘I need to use deadly force,’” Hicks said. 

When the car moves forward, Foster appears to be in its path. The video shows the car’s front wheels turning left at the last moment in an apparent effort to avoid hitting him. As Foster pivots out of the way, he fires his gun and the car passes between him and another officer. 

Several of the experts took issue with Foster’s decision to fire. They said shooting into a car – even if it is threatening an officer’s safety – is almost always inappropriate because killing the driver is unlikely to bring the car to a stop and protect the officer.

“If you hit the driver, now you have an unguided missile,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina. 

Foster shoots four times, according to the experts who reviewed the video.

The officer’s first shot was fired when his right leg was in front of the car’s bumper on the passenger side, said Jeremy Bauer, a forensic reconstruction expert. By the second shot, the officer’s left hip is lined up with the right passenger mirror and his chest is parallel to the passenger side.  

In the third shot, “We actually see the evidence that he shoots into the right front passenger window,” Bauer said. “We see glass shatter.”

The final shot was fired when Foster was standing near the rear tire, he said. 

Mastagni said officers often experience a delay between facing a threat and firing. 

“It’s not uncommon that the bullet strikes at a different spot on the car than where the officer was intending to shoot at the time that they perceived the threat,” he said. 

The publication of the leaked footage set off a social media firestorm, and multiple local news outlets reported in definite language that the car had struck two officers. But the experts said it was impossible for them to determine whether the vehicle had made contact with any of the officers based on their immediate review of the video.  

In a press conference Wednesday, Gov. Tate Reeves said it was “very clear and evident” that the driver had “attempted to run over” the officer. But Reeves said he had not watched the video. 

The leaked footage does show the car coming close to Foster’s leg as it turns left away from him, but he does not appear injured after it passes. While the car is in reverse, its front bumper comes close to another officer’s foot and leg as he steps to the side away from the vehicle.

Both he and Foster join the other officers in running to their cars to continue the pursuit.

The state’s attorney general, Lynn Fitch, announced her office had found the shooting to be justified, and would not pursue criminal charges against Foster. She did not provide the reasoning for her decision, saying only that there was insufficient evidence of criminal conduct to present the case to a grand jury. 

“The bar for criminal prosecutions is obviously high. It’s probably extremely high in Mississippi,” said Michael Gennaco, a former federal civil rights prosecutor and founder of the OIR group, a police oversight consultancy. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong, or ill-advised or tactically deficient.”

Gwen Dilworth contributed reporting. 

The University of Mississippi Medical Center broke ground Thursday on a cancer center officials say will help improve outcomes for patients in a state with some of the nation’s highest cancer mortality rates.

The new building is critical to the UMMC Cancer Center and Research Institute’s goal of achieving National Cancer Institute designation, which could expand Mississippians’ access to cutting-edge clinical trials and treatment options, officials said. 

“We have a real problem here in Mississippi with cancer outcomes,” said Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the medical center’s vice chancellor for health affairs, at the groundbreaking ceremony. “Mississippians need the highest level of cancer care and access to the latest clinical trials right here at home.” 

The five-story building will be located on State Street across from the medical center and “bring together education, research and treatment under one roof,” according to the project’s fundraising website. The site is adjacent to the American Cancer Society’s Jackson Hope Lodge, which provides free lodging to cancer patients and their caregivers. 

The National Cancer Institute is a part of the National Institutes of Health and recognizes cancer centers that meet rigorous requirements for laboratory and clinical research and translate scientific knowledge into innovative treatments for patients. 

There are 74 NCI-designated centers nationwide, but none in Mississippi, Louisiana or Arkansas. Cancer patients in Mississippi seeking care at a designated center must travel out of state to receive care. Nearby states with NCI-designated centers include Alabama, Tennessee and Texas. 

If the cancer center achieves this designation, it will not only serve Mississippi families, but also people in neighboring states, Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday. 

“We’re working to save lives well beyond our borders,” Reeves said. 

Speakers at the groundbreaking ceremony praised Woodward for her work advocating for the cancer center, noting the accomplishment is a fitting capstone to her more than four decades at UMMC. Woodward announced Oct. 15 that she plans to retire in June 2027. Dr. Alan Jones, the medical center’s associate vice chancellor for health affairs, will succeed her. 

Jones said the achievement of NCI designation will take time. 

“But we will achieve it, and we will change the outcomes of cancer patients,” he said. “That is our promise.”

Funding for the center has been drawn from state and federal sources and private donors. Reeves in April signed legislation appropriating $100 million in state funds to build the cancer center. 

Mississippi’s congressional delegation has supported the appropriation of $22 million in federal funds toward cancer research labs and the new cancer center building, and UMMC has requested $16 million in federal support for the project for the upcoming fiscal year, Woodward said. 

John and Sandy Black of Madison donated $25 million to support the new facility in 2025. The medical center has raised more than 80% of its $125 million capital campaign goal, according to a press release. 

A new building is just one piece of the medical center’s efforts to gain the designation. Dr. Rodney Rocconi, the director of UMMC’s cancer center, previously told Mississippi Today that achieving it will require the center to recruit faculty, expand its research capacity and demonstrate strong programming in community outreach and prevention.

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in Mississippi, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease disproportionately affects Black Mississippians, who in 2022 had a 13% higher cancer mortality rate than white residents, according to a 2025 report by the Mississippi State Department of Health.

Only six counties in Mississippi fall below the national average of 143 cancer deaths per 100,000 people, according to 2020-2024 data from the National Cancer Institute. Some counties, including Humphreys, Tunica and Issaquena — all located in the Mississippi Delta — have death rates nearly twice as high as the national average. 

Eddie Moore, 44, of Clinton, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2020 and given a prognosis of three months to live. He is still receiving treatment at UMMC. 

He said Thursday he is grateful for the treatment he has received at UMMC and believes the construction of a new cancer center will help more people like him.

“It’s a hope for the future,” he said. 

Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining immigration and criminal justice issues. She can be reached at mukta.joshi@nytimes.com.

BATESVILLE – The family of Kohen Wiley, the 1-year-old boy fatally shot by the Senatobia police this summer, gathered with state officials Thursday to view unredacted footage of the confrontation, two days after leaked clips were published by a local news outlet and widely circulated on social media.

The viewing was arranged by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation in Batesville, the family’s hometown, and was closed to the public. Only the toddler’s parents, grandmothers and two members of the family’s legal team were allowed inside. 

The Mississippi attorney general, Lynn Fitch, said on Monday that her office would not seek criminal charges against Hunter Foster, the Senatobia officer who fired his weapon at a car while officers pursued two women accused of stealing diapers and baby clothes from a Walmart on June 14. 

Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, walked out of the meeting after watching the first clip, which had been captured by Foster’s body-worn camera. Wiley said she had already been hesitant to attend after seeing the leaked footage two days before. She said she felt she didn’t need to see any more, especially after Fitch said the shooting was justified. 

Kohen’s death set off local protests and raised questions about why the police needed to use deadly force over what appeared to be a minor crime. 

READ MORE: Senatobia officer put himself in harm’s way before fatally shooting 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, experts say 

At least five officers chased the women into the parking lot and then drew their guns when a car carrying Kohen and the women backed out of a parking space and tried to flee. 

The car, driven by Latoya Ferrell, moved in the direction of two officers. The authorities publicly stated at the time that the car nearly struck one of them. In the body camera and surveillance footage leaked this week, it is difficult to tell if the car hit any of the officers. 

Foster, the only officer investigated by state authorities in the incident, fired his weapon four times, the footage showed. Foster has not responded to multiple requests from Mississippi Today reporters for comment over the past several months. Martin Zummach, Foster’s lawyer, said Monday that the attorney general’s decision was “expected” and “overdue.”

Wiley’s mother, Veronica Roberson, who attended the meeting Thursday, said footage from the shooter’s body camera clearly showed he was beside the car, not in front of it, when he fired some of his shots. State officials did not slow down the video or give a frame-by-frame presentation to the family, Ben Crump, the family’s lawyer, said.

The shooter’s body-cam footage was not included in leaked clips published this week by Darkhorse Press, a Mississippi news outlet. State officials are expected to publicly release the video now that the family has viewed it.

Roberson said that the family tried to ask officials about details of the encounter during the private screening, but they said they “weren’t going to get into all that.”

The footage shown in the screening began with a group of officers sitting in a room inside the Walmart, watching unrelated security footage, Crump said. A person who apparently worked at the store and had tried to stop Ferrell and Wiley near the exit then entered the room and said, “They’re running.” Video shows officers sprinting out to surround the car carrying the two women and the toddler. 

Roberson said that when they asked officials if the car had injured any officers, “they said the car had made contact with Foster.” 

The footage leaked this week shows the car driving toward Foster but turning away from him as it gets close to him. Foster puts his hand on the hood of the car and pivots to avoid being hit. He does not fall down. It is difficult to discern whether the car touches his body. He then continues running and chasing the car along with other officers after the car had passed. In subsequent footage, he is seen standing outside the hospital where Kohen was declared dead. 

Shortly after the viewing, Crump held a press conference in Senatobia and criticized the attorney general’s determination that the shooting was justified, repeating that the shot from the side was not justified. He questioned the officers’ drawing guns in response to alleged shoplifting, which would have amounted to a misdemeanor offense. Neither woman has been charged. 

Van Turner, the Mississippi lawyer representing Kohen’s family as a member of Crump’s legal team, said he would ask federal authorities to review the footage.

The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus called for Fitch to give a detailed explanation of how she had reached her decision, and for an independent review of the Senatobia Police Department’s practices.

“Attorney General Fitch cannot reasonably expect public confidence in a decision the public has not been given the evidence to evaluate,” Representative Kabir Karriem, chairman of the caucus, said in a news release. “Announcing that a review is complete does not fulfill the responsibility to explain how a police encounter ended with a baby dead.” 

Mississippi Today Justice and Special Projects Editor Debbie Skipper contributed reporting. 

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful ideas to be shared about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.   

I first heard William Faulkner’s quote “To understand the world you must first understand a place like Mississippi” from Chris Routh, former Hinds County deputy public defender.

These words were an invitation that would come to resonate far more deeply over the next five years as my husband and I traversed across the state, two parts of a small but mighty filmmaking team behind The Dead Zone, a Sundance-supported feature documentary exploring the presumption of innocence in America. 

As a documentarian, I embed myself in people’s lives, sometimes for years, to intimately understand their lived experiences in pursuit of telling stories that reveal something deeper about the human condition and the systems that shape us. 

Faulkner’s words took on a complicated duality. The state became both a cautionary tale – a place where the failures of our criminal legal system are impossible to ignore – and a source of unexpected hope for what it might take to confront one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time.

When I first embarked on this film back in 2021, America was experiencing a racial reckoning over social injustices and a surge of criminal justice reforms ensued. Progressive prosecutors were elected across the country and public sentiment in favor of bail reform gained momentum.

However, as fears of rising crime skyrocketed, and tensions over constitutional rights exploded, criminal justice reforms started to go in a pendulum swing. Our cultural and political silos made it nearly impossible to collaborate on meaningful solutions.

Nearly 400,000 people were stuck in jail before trial, presumed innocent. This is the equivalent of nearly every Ole Miss homegame football attendee over the course of a season being detained behind bars.

I set out to understand this issue, why the pretrial population had skyrocketed and how our so-called ideals –  like the presumption of innocence, due process, equality under the law – clashed with our lived realities.

I originally set out to explore issues like cash bail, unlawful detention and their relationship to community safety. Yet an old adage in filmmaking is that you might start with an idea of what your film is, but over time the true film will reveal itself to you. And if you end in the same place you started, it probably wasn’t that good of a story in the first place.

After speaking with dozens of legal experts, directly impacted people, advocates and law enforcement officers, I realized I needed to take a systemic approach and document the story from multiple perspectives inside the system –  public defenders, judges, prosecutors and the accused.

One name kept emerging from across our conversations: Public Defender Chris Routh in Jackson. It turned out Mississippi was part of the epicenter of change and hope where I needed to be. The story was revealing itself.

The night before we met Chris, my husband and I sampled beers at Fertile Ground brewery to ease into the filming week in Jackson. The next day we drove to the Hinds County Public Defender’s office downtown. The receptionist buzzed us in, and I immediately noticed the flickering fluorescent lights, magazines from years past scattered across the lobby coffee tables, and a few Christmas decorations still up despite it being May.

But what really caught my eye was a sign on a wall that said: “I hear much of people’s calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.” Daniel Defoe.

We sat down and got to know Chris and Chief Public Defender Gail Lowry. Little did they know that this first meeting would inspire a years-long collaboration in the making of this film. We embedded in their office and in Hinds County courtrooms observing quietly and patiently as their undersized but dedicated team took on thousands of cases – from bail hearings to trials – during record turnover.

Over the course of the first year of our filming, their office lost 10 out of 12 lawyers, all of them to higher paying positions that the defender’s office couldn’t match.

Chris and Gail persevered through the storm, working tirelessly to bring in additional funding, attract, train and retain new lawyers all the while managing their own heavy caseloads. A Sisyphean call, but an essential one.

About 80% of defendants in Mississippi require a public defender, yet it’s one of just five states in the country that lack a statewide public defender system.

This is one reason Andre de Gruy, state public defender for Mississippi, has been fighting to address a lack of public defenders, a shortage exacerbated by a myriad of issues like poverty, lack of alternatives to pretrial detention and prosecutorial accountability.

These factors created the perfect storm of people waiting years for their trial in overcrowded jails not convicted of any crime. The gruesome reality of this limbo is that an estimated two people die every day in jail in America awaiting trial.

Unique to Mississippi, the accused oftentimes lack consistent public defenders and could be held with no time limit. This limbo is referred to as the “Dead Zone,” a term used by Jerry Mitchell who reported on this situation.

Attorney Michael Carr, who represented indigent clients in the Delta, also told us that to understand the human toll of the Dead Zone we had to talk to one man in particular: Duane Lake.

Duane grew up in Clarksdale, and was the father of three young children at the time he was arrested for a triple homicide. He went on to spend over six years trapped in a mold and rat-infested jail awaiting trial. His charge carried the threat of the death penalty and legislators had been floating bringing back death by firing squad at one point.

For three of those years, Duane was stuck in legal limbo without a lawyer – the Dead Zone – because there was no one to represent him between his arrest and his indictment. His indictment took three years in part due to how infrequently the grand jury meets and a lack of available defenders.

We met Duane about a year after a jury found him not guilty. He had moved out of state to Kentucky to rebuild his life. Unlike someone who is convicted and later exonerated, Duane was not entitled to any compensation or recourse because he was held pretrial. Not even an apology.

Like Chris, Duane embraced us cautiously but with open arms. We first filmed him making Mississippi soul food delicacies in his new home in Louisville: grits with plenty of butter and a little bit of sugar. Very quickly, Duane let us into his world and opened up to us, letting us document his journey of building a new life while confronting the realities of what he had just lived through and lost.

Filmmakers inhabit a privileged but complex role. Those privileges include seeing the world through new perspectives and getting to witness the lives of others. 

In Jackson, we traveled through elevators at the state public defender’s office gilded with reliefs of Robert E. Lee (the building’s original namesake), through the breezy doors of Hal and Mal’s restaurant, up the carpeted stairs of First Baptist Church for public safety speakouts and through the speakeasy hallway behind Brent’s drugs in Jackson’s Fondren community.

We sampled hot tamales in Cleveland, on the way to the crossroads of Clarksdale and savored the best gumbo we’ve ever had – homemade by Chris himself. We filmed wind turbines whipping in the horizon as cotton rows – an omnipresent reminder of the state’s past – reflected hazy pink sunsets along the Delta highway.

These details may seem ancillary, but they became part of how we came to know Mississippi and, more importantly, how we came to know the people who invited us into their lives.

For us, filmmaking begins with relationships. We believe you have to build trust before you can ask someone to share the most vulnerable parts of their lives. That takes time, honesty, consistency and a willingness to be transparent about who you are, why you’re there, and what you hope to understand. It also means showing up long after the cameras stop rolling.

For us, we couldn’t look away from the injustices we came to witness and the stories we heard from Duane and Chris. We kept coming back and we kept being invited back.

From Chris to Duane and our two additional main participants – Judge Genesis Draper in Houston and Memphis District Attorney Steve Mulroy – this story revealed itself as a powerful, intimate portrait of our country at a crucial inflection point and of the people on the frontlines protecting our justice system against insurmountable odds. Our film asks us all to ponder: Do we still uphold and believe in the core values we claim to? Or is the presumption of innocence dead?

Chris and Duane showed us the importance of keeping on this story, why it matters and the impact it could make. Through all four of our protagonists’ personal journeys, we observed challenges to improving a system that was designed to be broken, but also opportunities for change and above all, the importance of bearing witness.

By cutting through partisan politics and courtroom silos, we hope our film can disarm preconceived notions allowing audiences to embrace a different trajectory forward – one that puts humanity, equality and compassion on a pedestal.

In late 2023, inspired in large part by Duane’s story, Mississippi passed legislation ending the Dead Zone. By law, people who can’t afford a lawyer are now entitled to continuous representation throughout the pretrial process starting from their initial appearance. In theory no longer will a person go without a lawyer between arrest and indictment like Duane.

Earlier this year, Gail Lowry fought and received additional funding for the Hinds County public defenders office. Andre de Gruy is working with groups like the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center to forward new pilot programs across the state to dramatically decrease unnecessary lengthy pretrial detention and provide adequate representation from the start.

Indeed, Faulker was right that Mississippi is a lens through which we can better understand our country, and the world.

When we widen the lens, Mississippi could still be the example for the rest of the country. The cradle of our nation’s most challenging issues could also possess the heart of our greatest solutions. 

Emily Thomas is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and founder of Lemon Tree Productions. Her work is rooted in intimately documenting the human experience to illuminate pressing social justice and environmental issues. She recently was the cinematographer on Baby Doe (SXSW ‘25), the associate producer of Bodyguard of Lies (Tribeca ‘25, Paramount+), and director of Last Days at Paradise High (The New Yorker). As a cinematographer, she has worked on films for Netflix, VICE, The New Yorker, PBS and Frontline. Previously, she was a journalist for VICE, Storyful and The Huffington Post, and was an open source investigator at the Human Rights Center. She is a PGA Create alum, a Prison Journalism Project mentor and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is currently directing the feature documentary, The Dead Zone, and is based in Baltimore.

The Dead Zone documentary is currently in post-production, to learn more or to bring a screening of the film to your community and be part of the impact campaign get in touch with the film team here: https://www.deadzonefilm.com/

Many Americans – particularly white Americans – have zero-sum ideas about race, or they believe that one group’s win must mean another group’s loss, author and public policy expert Heather McGhee says.

These ideas are “a framework that is relentlessly marketed to white people by people who have a political and economic profit to gain from that kind of thinking,” she told an audience Wednesday night in Jackson. 

“It was originally sort of developed in order to justify enslavement. It was sold to the masses of Europeans who were here who were never going to be part of the colonial plantation class, who were never going to be the very wealthy,” she explained.

“And they were sold a racial bargain as a way to stop what at that point had become a rising movement of white-Black cross-race servant uprisings,” she explained.

During Operation Shoestring’s “Conversation About Community” event at the Two Mississippi Museums, McGhee said racist policies harm all of society, not just people of color.

McGhee discussed ideas found in her book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” based on her 2020 TED talk. She was joined by Robert Luckett, director of Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center.

In researching for her book, she found that racist politics and policy-making have prevented advancements in many areas, from education to labor unions. 

One example she gave was the Oak Park swimming pool in Montgomery, Alabama. The Oak Park facility was one of thousands of public swimming pools constructed during the New Deal Era, but it shut down in the 1960s to avoid serving racially integrated crowds.

McGhee called it, “a perfect metaphor to describe what we had lost in our society” when the New Deal consensus on the government having an obligation to invest in public goods fell apart due to the backlash against racial integration. 

Despite challenges such as artificial intelligence and the movement opposing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, she remains optimistic about the power of people to create change. 

“We have to be willing to stand up together with a shared sense of purpose and say, ‘We have to rewrite these rules together,’” McGhee said.

After a question-and-answer segment, audience members were encouraged to buy copies of McGhee’s book and could line up to have them signed.

The groups will finish the book by Dec. 11, then reunite at the Two Mississippi Museums again on Jan. 19, for the National Day of Racial Healing. That day, there will be a conversation with Gail Christopher, the holiday’s founder and McGhee’s mother.

Community advocate Celess-Mari Johnson drove three hours up from the Gulf Coast to hear McGhee speak. She was joined by a few college friends, and they plan to form their own reading group.

She has already begun reading her copy of McGhee’s book. “I think the title says it all,” Johnson said.

“There’s a cost at all levels for everybody involved, and not just one population, not just one generation,” she added.