Mississippi Today is seeking an experienced reporter to join our health team.
The Community Health Reporter will be a cornerstone member of our health team. Launched earlier this year, the team serves Mississippians with access to data, fact-finding and dissemination of in-depth and explainer public health journalism. This team reports on how the health care system works, and in many cases does not, for Mississippians. We dig deep on how health care providers, hospitals, insurers, governments and consumers are interconnected and impacted, with an eye for equity and access. Our readership includes thought leaders and everyday Mississippians who need accurate and easy-to-understand information on public health matters.
The ideal journalist will be someone with reporting experience who understands the health care considerations of rural and suburban Mississippians alike. This candidate will serve on a four-person team — including an editor, two reporters and a photojournalist — to focus on daily/breaking news stories as well as deeper-dive investigative features, to explore our state’s complicated public health framework and bring some much-needed transparency to its processes.
Mississippi is a gold mine for eager journalists. In this position, you’ll travel the state and meet a diverse range of residents. Between the state’s abortion ban that ultimately led the highest court in the nation to strike down Roe v. Wade, a massive insurance dispute between the state’s largest hospital and largest insurer, an ongoing political battle over Medicaid expansion, and the state’s long-standing, poor public health outcomes, the stories to be told here are limitless.
Expectations:
Work with a small team of journalists who are focused solely on health in Mississippi.
Develop your own health story ideas as well as collaborate closely with a small team of like-minded journalists
Get people to talk, finding willing sources and protect them while telling sensitive and timely stories
Build trust: Many people who have been impacted by poor health services in Mississippi have been victims of predatory actions from other journalists or media outlets. This will require empathy, patience and savvy.
Work with our Audience Team and data and visual journalists to create compelling story presentations.
It’s a plus if you have:
Mississippi reporting experience.
Experience writing a combination of both longform stories and investigations.
A demonstrated ability to work quickly under tight deadlines.
A knowledge and understanding of nonprofit journalism.
Experience working in a collaborative newsroom setting.
What you’ll get:
The opportunity to work alongside award-winning journalists and make significant contributions to Mississippi’s only fully staffed, nonprofit, nonpartisan digital news and information source.
Highly competitive salary with medical insurance, and options for vision and dental insurance.
Cell phone stipend.
29 days paid time off.
Up to 12 weeks of parental family leave, with return-to-work flexibility.
Simple IRA with 3 percent company matching. Group-term life insurance provided to employees ($15,000 policy).
Support for professional training and attending industry conferences.
How to Apply:
We’re committed to building an inclusive newsroom that represents the people and communities we serve. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply for this position, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people and people who are differently abled.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it filed the interim proposal for overseeing Jackson’s water system, which the city council approved on Nov. 17, making the agreement available to the public.
The parties await a federal court’s approval before the agreement, which is set to last a year, takes effect. The DOJ also filed a new complaint against the city for its inability to comply with previous enforcement from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The order names Ted Henifin as Jackson’s interim third-party manager. Henifin, a senior fellow at the nonprofit U.S. Water Alliance, managed the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia Beach from 2006 until 2022, overseeing the city’s sewer system.
The goal of the interim agreement, according to the order, is to stabilize Jackson’s water system while the city and federal government look at long-term solutions, through litigation or a consent decree.
Henifin’s job, as the order lays out, will be to “operate, maintain, and control” the water system in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act, as well as to make capital improvements, including specific projects prioritized in the order. The order also gives the third-party team authority over Jackson city employees and contractors to carry out those projects.
The order gives the third-party leadership broader spending authority than what the city would normally have. For instance, under the order, the management team won’t have to comply with state laws regulating how a governing body procures contracts. The order writes instead that the third-party team “will use best efforts to have the procurement process be competitive, transparent, and efficient.” The order requires that the manager consult with the city attorney over any contracts longer than a year.
The document also gives Henifin and his team power to make rate changes for Jackson water customers.
Within 60 days, Henifin will have to make a funding strategy, which will include a short-, medium- and long-term — over 5 years — spending plan and schedule for the water system. In that plan, Henifin can propose rate changes as well as governing alternatives.
If the plan does include a rate change for customers, the order requires the mayor to put the change before the city council. But even if the city council doesn’t approve the rate change, the order gives the third-party manager the authority to change the rates anyway, as long as it’s been more than a year since the last rate adjustment. City officials last raised rates in December 2021.
Under the order, the third-party manager does not have the authority to consolidate, or regionalize, Jackson’s water system, or allow another governing body to operate the system.
The agreement also stipulates that documents in the third-party manager’s possession are not subject to public records laws because it is not a federal, state or local agency. The order does require the manager to make a website to inform the public with status reports, requests for proposals, and quarterly updates.
The federal court, after approving this order, would have authority over how Henifin’s team is complying with the agreement to manage Jackson’s water system.
The order lists 13 projects as priorities for the management team to facilitate:
Operations and management contract
Winterization of both treatment plants
Corrosion control
Implement an alternative water source plan
Distribution system study, analysis and implementation, including replacing water lines, prioritizing any lead lines found
System stabilization plan, including a sustainable revenue model
SCADA system improvements, including sensors, actuators
Assess and repair chemical systems at plants and wells
Chlorine system improvements at O.B. Curtis
Intake structure repairs
Restore redundancy at treatment facilities, including pumps
Sludge assessment and removal at water storage facilities
Assess power vulnerability
The agreement gives Henifin’s team a $2.98 million budget for a 12-month period. That total includes $400,000 for Henifin’s salary, travel and living expenses; $1.1 million for staff pay and expenses; $1.4 million for contractor and consultant support; and $66,000 for other expenses, such as phones, computers, and insurance.
The order states that the budget won’t be funded by customers’ water bills. The city will pay for the budget with money from the EPA and other grants.
Gov. Tate Reeves applauded the news, saying in a statement that it’s “excellent news” that “Mayor (Chokwe Antar Lumumba) will no longer be overseeing the city’s water system.”
Reeves also announced that he authorized MEMA to commit $240,000 from the state’s Disaster Mitigation Fund “as a bridge” to help during the transition of control over the water system.
The DOJ also filed a new complaint against Jackson on Tuesday requesting a court-ordered injunction to require the city to comply with federal drinking water laws.
The complaint notes the city’s inability to comply with previous enforcement actions issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, including an Administrative Order issued in July, 2021.
The filing details various violations of that order:
Staffing shortages: in just four months of operation this year, J.H. Fewell didn’t have a certified Class A operator in at least 15 instances, according to the complaint.
Not implementing an alternative water source plan during boil water notices.
Turbidity in the water.
Not beginning the process to rehabilitate filters at J.H. Fewell on time.
Not implementing the city’s corrosion control plan at J.H. Fewell.
The complaint also notes that, because of the system’s deficiencies, contaminants are either present or likely to enter the system.
“State and local actions have been insufficient to prevent the threat of additional failures,” the complaint says. “Such failures are likely to continue to occur, whether under normal working conditions or in extreme weather events.”
Attorney General Lynn Fitch has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny the Biden Administration’s bid to reinstateits student debt relief plan.
Earlier this month, the Biden Administration petitioned the Supreme Court to lift an injunction imposed by a lower court and allow the plan to go forward. The administration cited the impact that legal limbo would have on “millions of economically vulnerable borrowers,” including many of the nearly 439,000 Mississippians with student debt.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett had already twice declined to review the program, but this time, the court asked the Republican attorneys general challenging the plan to respond to Biden’s request to lift the injunction.
The amicus brief that Fitch signed onto, along with attorneys general from 16 other states, calls the plan “illegal, and blatantly so” as well as “among the most egregious examples of unauthorized executive action in American History” due in part to its impact on the federal deficit.
“As the Attorneys General note in their briefs, Congress has repeatedly considered student loan forgiveness and failed to pass it, and President Biden’s actions here are merely an attempt to bypass the Constitutional checks and balances meant to protect the people from administrative overreach,” Michelle Williams, Fitch’s chief of staff, told Mississippi Today in a statement.
All told, the plan, which would forgive up to $20,000 in student debt per borrower, would cost the federal government about $430 billion over 30 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“The President is attempting one of the largest wealth transfers in American history,” the brief reads. “More precisely, he has proposed to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans. But no law permits the President to do this. And the President has no inherent constitutional authority to forgive student debt.”
In defending the plan, the Biden administration has repeatedly cited the HEROES Act, a law passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that permits the president to forgive student loans during a “national emergency.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has been considered a national emergency since President Donald Trump issued a proclamation in March 2020. When Biden announced his student debt relief plan in August, he said it was intended to provide “ families breathing room as they prepare to start repaying loans after the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic.”
But Fitch and other AGs in the brief claim the HEROES Act does not “clearly” authorize the president to cancel student debt in the way Biden intends to. The brief also claims the COVID-19 pandemic no longer constitutes a national emergency.
“More important, even assuming the COVID-19 pandemic at some point qualified as a “national emergency,” certainly it does not qualify today, when American life is mostly indistinguishable from what it looked like in pre-pandemic times,” the brief states. “But even though COVID-19 is now irrelevant to nearly all Americans, the entire country remains in a state of declared disaster.”
The Republican-led legal challenges have already resulted in the U.S. Department of Education making a number of tweaks to the program, including removing about 800,000 borrowers from eligibility whose loans are backed by the federal government but held by commercial banks and closing the online application portal.
Biden has also extended the pause on student loan repayment until the legal challenges are resolved or June 30, 2023, whichever comes first. Biden had said the pause would expire at the end of this year.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Attorney General Lynn Fitch sent after the story originally published.
Former NFL quarterback Brett Favre nagged former Gov. Phil Bryant for help funding a new volleyball facility at his alma mater and a pharmaceutical start-up he had invested in.
Bryant’s subordinates then funneled a total of $7.1 million in federal welfare funds to the two projects, plus another $1.1 million to Favre himself, within what officials have called the worst public fraud scheme in state history.
Favre now says he’s receiving all the blame while officials are letting Bryant off the hook.
In a new motion to dismiss civil charges against him, Favre argues the state welfare department, Mississippi Department of Human Services, has neglected the roles of former Gov. Bryant and the auditor Bryant appointed, Shad White, in the misspending of millions of welfare funds.
“MDHS also has ignored the numerous public officials responsible for overseeing MDHS, such as former Governor Dewey Phillip Bryant and current State Auditor Shad White, who, despite his statutory obligation to conduct annual audits of MDHS, did not ‘question’ MDHS’s transfers of tens of millions of dollars to MCEC (Mississippi Community Education Center) until 2020, nearly five years after those transfers began,” reads Favre’s motion, filed by his Austin, TX-based attorney Eric Herschmann.
The welfare department’s civil suit, filed last May, alleges Favre agreed with MDHS Director John Davis and nonprofit founder Nancy New to transfer $2.1 million in funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to a pharmaceutical company called Prevacus, in which Favre was a major stakeholder. The suit also alleges Favre took $1.1 million in TANF funds for work he didn’t conduct.
Favre denies both allegations, alleging MDHS has fixated on the two items Favre publicly supported — Prevacus and the volleyball project — as a way of “blaming Favre, publicizing his involvement, and bringing its baseless claims against him in this lawsuit.”
The civil suit, which targets 38 individuals or companies, only seeks to recoup $24 million of at least $77 million that forensic auditors found was misspent. Favre argued MDHS is “selectively suing only a fraction of those who allegedly received the funds, while inexplicably ignoring the numerous other recipients.”
Favre has received significant national coverage in recent months for his proximity to a deal in which officials converted $5 million in welfare funds to build a state-of-the-art facility for University of Southern Mississippi’s volleyball program, where his daughter played. The fraud scheme, which involved dressing up the stadium up to appear as a wellness center for impoverished Mississippians, led to a criminal conviction against New’s son Zach New.
Favre has not faced any charges in connection with that deal. Gov. Tate Reeves directed the welfare agency not to include the volleyball project — the largest known purchase within the scandal — in its civil suit.
But in his motion, Favre called out the former governor and others for perpetuating the scheme.
“Davis and New did not (and could not have) authorized structuring the $5 million in funding as a sublease on their own,” the filing reads. “They needed and obtained the approval and assistance of other State officials and agencies—including Governor Bryant, the Attorney General, the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, Southern Miss itself, and the Southern Miss Athletic Foundation.”
The motion also confirms that then-Southern Miss Athletic Director Jon Gilbert introduced Favre to New, who sat on the Southern Miss Athletic Foundation board.
“New was well connected with numerous Mississippi officials, including Davis and then-Governor Bryant, and close friends with Governor Bryant’s wife Deborah Bryant,” it said.
The money in question flowed through New’s nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, or MCEC, and therefore out of sight from public view. Favre zoned in on New’s connections to state officials, even corralling current Gov. Reeves into his rebuttal.
“State officials like Davis, former Governor Bryant, and current Governor Reeves were aware that New, through MCEC, used State money to provide services and funding to various State initiatives, through, among other things, the Family First Initiative of Mississippi, an anti-poverty program which was started by Governor Bryant in conjunction with other state officials,” his filing reads. “Deborah Bryant and New hosted fundraisers together at the governor’s mansion. Governor Reeves even filmed a campaign ad in 2019 at New’s school.”
For years, the misspending went unnoticed by the state auditor’s office as MDHS dismantled internal controls, failing to keep so much as a list of organizations it funded.
Bryant appointed White, his former campaign manager, to state auditor in July of 2018. White’s investigation into welfare misspending began after an MDHS employee brought a small tip about Davis’ potential fraud to Bryant in June 2019.
White made six arrests in the case, including Davis and New, in February 2020. The payments to Prevacus were central to the indictment. A day earlier, Bryant had scheduled a meeting with Prevacus’ founder Jake Vanlandingham, a Florida neuroscientist who offered the governor stock in the company in exchange for his help, according to texts Mississippi Today obtained two years later. The texts showed Favre had even excitedly texted Bryant to tell the governor when they finally started receiving funding from the state in early 2019.
Days after the arrest, Bryant cut ties with the scientist and White publicly named Bryant as the “whistleblower” in the case.
“State Auditor White—who was previously Governor Bryant’s campaign manager and policy director and was appointed State Auditor by Governor Bryant—made this (whistleblower) designation knowing that Governor Bryant was both aware of and supported MCEC’s payments to Prevacus at issue in this lawsuit, as well as its $5 million payment to Southern Miss in connection with the construction of a wellness center,” Favre’s filing reads.
In Favre’s motion, his first significant jab in the case, the athlete argues that the welfare department has targeted him for his celebrity in an attempt to divert attention away from its own wrongdoing.
Mississippi Today first connected Favre to the welfare scandal in February 2020 in its reporting on the welfare-funded volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi and Favre’s attempts to lure Prevacus to Mississippi with Bryant’s help. White made the first official finding against Favre in his annual audit released in May of 2020. The report noted that his company, Favre Enterprises, received $1.1 million under a promotional contract, including supposed appearances at which “the individual contracted did not speak nor was he present for those events.”
Favre has repeatedly denied that he failed to fulfill the terms of his agreement with the nonprofit. Mississippi Today obtained a 2018 invoice that shows conservative talk radio network SuperTalk ran Favre’s ad promoting Families First more than two dozen times during a three-month period.
“As to the $1.1 million MCEC paid Favre,” Favre’s motion reads, “it did so in exchange for Favre agreeing to perform services for MCEC, including recording a radio advertisement promoting Families First of Mississippi, a program launched by Governor Bryant, in conjunction with MDHS and MCEC, to provide services to needy Mississippians.”
Favre returned the $1.1 million — a fact he laments is missing from MDHS’s complaint — but the auditor’s office maintains that he still owes interest on the funds.
“It’s ludicrous to say that Mr. Favre has been singled out in any way,” the auditor’s office said in a statement Monday evening. “And as far as our office is concerned, Mr. Favre remains liable for $228,000 in interest for nonperformance of the contract in question.”
Auburn ordered an Ole Miss coach on Cyber Monday and got a refurbished former Ole Miss coach instead. Coach Kiffin is sticking around Oxford. Coach Prime has been offered a gig by Colorado. Coach Leach is still giving entertaining press conferences. Kids who are worried about the naughty and nice list just need a better agent.
Agents with the U.S. Department of Labor fined 11 Delta farms for misusing a popular visa program after a sweep of investigations in the wake of public outcry and a Missisisippi Today investigation that found Black local workers being underpaid and phased out of farm jobs in favor of white workers from South Africa.
“The allegations made by Mississippi Delta farmworkers are alarming,” Wage and Hour Division District’s Jackson director, Audrey Hall, said in a statement. “The outcome of these investigations confirms that employers denied many farmworkers their lawful wages and, in some cases, violated the rights of U.S. workers by giving temporary guest workers preferential treatment.”
Mississippi Today’s investigation found at least five farms who paid their local workers – usually Black men – less money per hour than those on farm work visas through the H-2A program – usually white men from South Africa – over the last few years.
The labor department’s Wage and Hour Division fined the 11 farms a total of $122,610 and recovered wages for 45 workers totaling $134,532 in its latest string of investigations.
Investigators found violations against both local workers and those working on temporary visas through the H-2A visa program. Delta farms have been increasingly relying upon foreign farm workers from South Africa over the last several years.
Agents found employers paid local workers lesser wages per hour than their foreign counterparts for the same type of jobs; failed to disclose all conditions of employment, including accurate anticipated hours and bonus opportunities; illegally deducted money from visa workers’ paychecks, including costs of travel; and did not keep proper records.
For the first time in 25 years, the Delta has its own Wage and Hour Division investigators stationed in Greenwood and Clarksdale. Prior to the recent hires, the nearest investigators were in Jackson.
“The Wage and Hour Division is determined to protect the rights of workers of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized and faced with persistent poverty and inequality,” Regional Administrator Juan Coria said in a statement.
The 11 farms are:
Clark & Co. in Shelby
Egremont Baconia Farms in Cary
White Farms AJV in Marks
Van Buren Farms II in Belzoni
Bulldog Farms LLC in Tutwiler
Custom Ag Services LLC in Isola
Bruton Farms Partnership in Anguilla
Durst Farms in Rolling Fork
Carter Plantation LTD, in Rolling Fork
Harris Russell Farm in Moorhead
Murrell Farms in Avon
Harris Russell Farms was named in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Black local workers in April. The workers made up to $3.38 less an hour than their South African counterparts, according to the lawsuit.
The Mississippi Center for Justice first filed a lawsuit against Pitts Farms – which was also a subject of a DOL investigation – accusing the Sunflower County farm of underpaying Black workers in favor of white workers from South Africa last year.
Mississippi Today found that while the DOL did investigate Pitts, the investigations only examined two years of payroll. That left the men who lost out on jobs or pay outside that two-year window with little recourse.
It’s unclear if the latest string of investigations also only covered a two-year investigation period, which was the agency’s standard as of June. U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told a Mississippi Today reporter at that time the DOL would be examining how it handles H-2A investigations.
Pitts Farms workers described their mistreatment to Mississippi Today – including being paid less per hour to train their replacements – and then echoed their experiences during a public meeting with Walsh, who visited the Delta in June.
U.S.Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh (6th from left) and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (second right) with Black farmers in the Delta involved in the Pitts Farms lawsuit, during a meeting at the Mississippi Center for Justice in Indianola, Thursday, June 30, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
The H-2A program is intended to fill gaps in the workforce where enough local workers are not available. Meanwhile, the Delta has high percentages of unemployment.
The DOL described its Delta investigations “ongoing” in response to the allegations of wage theft and illegal displacement of local U.S. workers in Mississippi.
Workers who think they have been incorrectly paid or have questions about their rights in the H-2A program can call the Wage and Hour Division confidentially at 866-4US-WAGE (487-9243).
Editor’s note: The Mississippi Center For Justice President and CEO Vangela Wade serves on Mississippi Today’s board of trustees.
“I look forward to working with (education leaders and elected officials) because this is our state, this is our home, and we want to see it continually improve,” he said. “What could be a greater gift to a native son?”
Speaking to reporters via Zoom, Taylor discussed a range of topics:
Initial priorities: He wants to get to know the staff at the Mississippi Department of Education and meet local superintendents across the state to understand their districts’ strengths and weaknesses.
Critical race theory: Taylor said critical race theory is not taught in public schools. He understands it to be a legal theory, and that it would be inaccurate to say that he supports it. “I’ve had to say to myself, ‘I’m an educated man, but I’m afraid I can’t speak intelligently about what critical race theory is,’” as it does not relate to his work. It is the responsibility of schools to help students become critical thinkers, but not to push them in any particular direction, he said.
The teacher shortage: Teacher shortages and investing in quality teachers are some of the major challenges facing the state, he said. He named solutions, including building relationships with teacher training programs at universities, alternate licensing programs, and more work with local administrations regarding how they supervise teachers. He also discussed creating supports to help teachers stay in the classroom.
Continue and expand Mississippi’s progress in literacy work.
Work with the statehouse: He wants MDE to partner with the Legislature to help inform the bills lawmakers create based on what data and research show are successful.
A continuous school year: When specifically asked about moving to a year-round school schedule, something Lt. Gov. Delbert Hoseman has voiced support for, Taylor said the research shows that year-round schooling is beneficial and would support a proposal of this type.
Parental involvement: Taylor believes parentsshould have a strong voice in public education. He said he knows they want the best for their children and wants them to feel heard and like they can trust their schools. He sees it as his duty to make the experience of education the best that it can be for students and teachers across the state.
Moving back home: He plans to live in the metro Jackson area, but hopes to get some land where he can dig in the dirt and enjoy the outdoors. He also owns land in Greene County with his brothers where they hunt.
Representation: “I hope that for students of color, they see that they have the opportunity to rise to a position such as this. I would certainly like to think that I was not selected because of my color but because of my body of work. I do recognize that there are a lot of young Black boys and young Black girls who see themself in me, but I would ask them to not only see themselves in me but in everyone that they come across because that’s certainly what happened to me.”
Taylor will start in his new role in January of 2023, pending confirmation by the state senate.
Almost a year has passed since Harlene Blair of McHenry last saw her 21-year-old son Eli Marrero, alive. Now she wonders if she’ll ever find out why he died in law enforcement custody.
Blair told MCIR she was told her son was found hanging from a light fixture in his solitary confinement cell in the Stone County Correctional Facility on Jan. 29, 2022 — five months before his 22nd birthday.
Blair said her son’s case hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves from the investigators or the media. “I’m kind of afraid the police will mess with me if my name is printed, but I don’t care. I’ve called everybody from the TV stations and the newspapers all the way to the governor,” Blair said. “I’ve called fifty law firms — all of them said they’d have a conflict of interest since they have to work with police.”
Blair said her son was arrested at her home after Thanksgiving in 2021 for not reporting to his probation officer in relation to stealing a car. Blair said the car belonged to Marrero’s cousin, and Marrero’s defense was that he thought he had permission to drive it. Blair said she saw papers Marrero had received after his release, and she saw no mention of needing to report to anyone. She said her questions to the sheriff at his arrest were rebuffed.
“I asked them for the paperwork with the warrant, and they wouldn’t give me anything, and they wouldn’t let me hug him goodbye,” Blair said.
The sheriff would not respond to questions for comment.
Eli Marrero, diagnosed with Schizophrenia when he was 16, was 21 when he was discovered hanging in his Stone County jail cell on Jan. 28, 2022. Credit: Photo courtesy of Harlene Blair
Marrero suffered from schizophrenia, diagnosed at age 16. Blair said he received treatment at Gulf Coast Mental Health Center in Wiggins. She said she did not think Marrero was medicated while he was in jail, even though she said she told the sheriff’s department he needed his medication when they came to arrest him. “They sent two cop cars to come get him,” she said.
Attorney David Sullivan of Gulfport, who was Marrero’s public defender on the car theft charge, told MCIR that he didn’t understand why Marrero would have been arrested in the first place for not reporting to his probation officer. He said that in cases like that, police usually arrest a person as they encounter them in the community — not going out of their way to find him at home.
And even if he were sentenced on the charge, Marrero might have been credited with time served or even have gotten a second chance from the judge, Sullivan said. “He wasn’t looking at years in prison. He did that time because he couldn’t afford to bond out. He would have been parole-eligible anyway.”
He said Marrero was not entitled to a public defender for a probation violation charge so he was no longer involved in the young man’s defense.
Jail suicides on the rise
Jail suicides are becoming more common — 340 persons in state and federal prisons and 355 in local jails died by suicide in 2019, based on the most recent mortality data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of suicides in local jails increased 5% from 2018 to 2019, while suicides in state and federal prisons remained stable.
Suicides accounted for almost a third of deaths in local jails and 8% of deaths in state and federal prisons in 2019, according to the BJS. Nearly a fifth of the nation’s 1,161 state and federal prisons and a tenth of the 2,845 local jails had at least one suicide in 2019.
Over the 20-year period from 2000 to 2019, more than 6,200 local jail inmates died by suicide while in custody. Suicide deaths among jail inmates increased 13% over the period. Those who died by suicide were most often male, non-Hispanic white, incarcerated for a violent crime and died by self-strangulation.
More than three-quarters of jail inmates who died by suicide from 2000 to 2019 had not been convicted and were awaiting adjudication of their charge, according to the report.
The Mississippi Department of Mental Health is trying to get a handle on just how many prisoners in jails are battling mental illness, said Dr. Tom Recore, the head of forensic services for Mississippi since April 2022.
The department recently completed a year-long longitudinal study of just how long it takes for a mentally ill inmate to be ordered to have a competency hearing. The figures were stunning: inmates spent an average of 555 days in jail from the alleged offense until a judge ordered they be evaluated to see if they were competent to stand trial.
“The averages are high because of a handful of counties,” Recore explained.
Once the order was sent, it typically took another 191 days to process an inmate through a competency hearing, an evaluation period, and an order of noncompetency being entered. That amounted to 748 days — a little more than two years — according to the study.
Some of those inmates had been indicted for their crimes, and some had not — depending on when their cases were presented to a grand jury, which is the responsibility of the county, Recore noted.
One of the reasons that the first waiting period is so long is the inmates’ attorneys typically have to request a competency hearing, and Mississippi does not have a full-time public defender system in place. In Stone County, most public defenders are private attorneys from the Coast who do the work for $500 per inmate, Sullivan noted.
The Office of the State Public Defender was established in 2011 to unite various state agencies providing public defense under one umbrella and to develop proposals for a statewide public defender system. It issued its final report in 2018 to the Legislature, outlining a proposal for a statewide public defender system. The office’s annual report in 2021 shows that implementation of the proposals is not complete, with the office proposing three pilot programs, one in each Supreme Court district, to be presented to the Legislature next year.
House Bill 360 to provide funding for these pilot programs passed the House in 2022 and died in the Senate Judiciary B Committee on March 1, 2022, according to the bill status website. The OPD’s 2022 annual report noted that efforts will be made to pass this pilot program in 2023.
Eli Marrero racked up multiple incident reports in the Stone County Correctional Facility c prior to his suicide on Jan. 28, 2022. Credit: John Fitzhugh/MCIR
A troubled man and problematic inmate
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which has oversight over inmate deaths in the state, is investigating Marrero’s death. Because the investigation is ongoing, records of the case are unavailable under the state’s Open Records Act, according to Robert E. Wentworth, staff officer in Mississippi Department of Public Safety’s legal division.
But arrest records and incident reports obtained by MCIR paint a picture of a troubled man who became a problematic inmate.
According to his Dec. 2, 2021, interview, Marrero told booking officer Vickie Clark that he suffered from mental illness but did not receive treatment for it. He also said he had received treatment for substance abuse in the past, although it was not clear from those records where he received such treatment. His brief mental status exam at that time was deemed within normal limits.
During previous jail stays, Marrero had other incident reports — once for attempting to exit the jail through the fire escape door on the bay back to his lockdown cell after a court date in April 2021. Cpl. Aaron Lumpkin noted Marrero said God told him to go outside instead of to his cell. Attempts to get him into his cell resulted in an altercation between Lumpkin and Marrero, with two correctional officers assisting Lumpkin in getting Marrero into cell 135A, noted on Marrero’s transfer papers as a “suicide cell.”
Less than a month later, Marrero was the center of a multiple-inmate verbal altercation where other offenders accused Marrero of using racial slurs and of walking in on them during showers. As a result, Marrero was placed on lockdown without contact with any other prisoners, per Lumpkin’s report on the incident, or his mother.
On July 29, 2021, Marrero flooded his cell and other areas of the jail with “toilet water,” according to the report. He would not leave his cell when told to do so, resulting in Capt. Eddie Rogers, chief of security at Stone County Correctional Facility, spraying him with a one-second burst of pepper spray and a brief scuffle between them to get Marrero out of his cell, with six other officers in attendance, according to Lumpkin’s incident report.
Marrero lashed out at a particular inmate during his jail stays, identified in the records as Octavian Stanley — first on July 20, 2021, with the two shouting threats at each other, then, according to an affidavit filed on Dec. 29, 2021, alleging Marrero had jumped Stanley from behind and hit him in the head. An incident report from that day corroborates that Marrero had attacked Stanley while the inmate was cuffed. The scuffle resulted in a decision that the two should not be out of their cells at the same time for any reason.
Three days before his death on Jan. 25, 2022, Marrero was also written up for attempting to assault an officer. The officer noted that Marrero swung his handcuffed fists at the officer’s face. The officer blocked his swing and shoved him into his cell. According to the incident report, two other correctional officers witnessed the assault.
Blair confirmed Marrero, as a teenager, stayed in trouble at school because of problems with attention deficit disorder and got his GED after dropping out.
An April 24, 2017, article in the Biloxi Sun Herald quotes Capt. Ray Boggs as saying Marrero escaped from youth court after a hearing, possibly running off with his girlfriend who had a car waiting outside the building, injuring Chief Deputy Phyllis Olds.
‘This is not the place they need to be’
Marrero’s autopsy dated Feb. 1, 2022, which MCIR obtained from Blair, was signed by State Medical Examiner Dr. Staci Turner. It found ligature markings on Marrero’s neck, partially encircling it, which the examiner found consistent with the history given that Marrero had been found hanging in his cell. No spinal cord injury was present, nor was there any substances found in his body per the toxicology report. All other organs were normal with no evidence of natural disease.
Stone County Coroner Wayne Flurry said he was called to Memorial Hospital in Stone County, where Marrero had been taken in an effort to revive him. Flurry said he was told Marrero had been found hanging from a light fixture in his cell. Since Marrero had died in jail, the case was referred to MBI to investigate, and Marrero’s body was sent to the state Crime Lab for autopsy. “I referred it to the State Medical Examiner because all I had to go on was what I had been told,” Flurry said. “I did not go to the jail.”
Marrero’s case is not the first time Stone County Sheriff’s Department has been investigated for how it handled the mentally ill. In June 2019, Pablo de la Cruz, then a sheriff’s K-9 deputy, resigned amid an investigation into the alleged mistreatment of a mentally ill man picked up on a court order related to his health.
Blair said not knowing what exactly happened to her son was the most difficult part about his death. “Nobody would tell me anything,” she said. “Every time I asked why he was in solitary confinement, they said he’s not fit for general population.”
Rogers said it was known throughout the jail and the community that Marrero had problems. “One minute he was fine, the next minute you were like, what are you even saying? It would sound like he was speaking in Arabic,” Rogers said.
“It’s a sad situation,” Rogers said. “This is not the place they need to be. But I don’t know if Mississippi is ever going to do anything about it.”
Recore said the state is attempting to build a new system of services that quickly identifies mentally ill individuals in the prison system, gets them evaluated for competency, and gets them the necessary treatment they need to be restored to competency if possible — or kept in the least restrictive environment available if that’s not possible.
Blair said she feels like some simple measures could have kept her son alive. “I would like them to take the bedsheets out of solitary confinement and to keep a better eye on the people in there,” she said, noting her son should have been checked on every 30 minutes or so if he was at risk for suicide.
Wendy Bailey, executive director at the Department of Mental Health, said the state is attempting to provide a continuum of care with two pilot programs based out of Region 8 Mental Health in Brandon and Region 12 Pine Belt Mental Health to connect inmates with medical treatment earlier in their confinement.
She said anyone who is concerned with the mental health of inmates should familiarize themselves with these new programs. “If you have everybody at the table, all the advocates for care, we can create a system that Mississippi can be proud of,” Bailey said.
This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for our newsletter.
Email Julie Whitehead at julie.whitehead.mcir@gmail.com.
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