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On Aug. 9, Oxford police testified for the first time to the evidence used to charge 22-year-old Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr. for the murder of Jimmie “Jay” Lee. During a preliminary hearing, Ryan Baker, an OPD detective, laid out the steps that police took before arresting Herrington for killing Lee.

A Black student who was well-known in Oxford’s LGBTQ community, Lee’s body is still missing more than a month after he disappeared on July 8. Herrington has not yet entered a plea in the case, but his uncle Carlos Moore has said he believes Herrington did not kill Lee.

To help the public understand how police investigate missing persons cases, Mississippi Today has recreated the timeline of OPD’s investigation into Lee’s death using Baker’s testimony and publicly available documents.  

This post will be updated as more information is released about the investigation. 

July 8 

Around 8:30 p.m., the University of Mississippi Police Department receives a call from Lee’s mom, Stephanie Lee, requesting a wellness check. Stephanie tells police her son’s location isn’t showing up on her iPhone and that it’s alarming for Lee to let his phone die. 

About 15 minutes later, according to UMPD’s initial incident report, an officer checks on Lee’s apartment at Campus Walk, a university-owned student housing complex. The door is slightly ajar, and Lee’s dog is inside. 

UMPD starts pulling video surveillance footage from Campus Walk. The footage, Baker testified, shows Lee leaving his apartment a little after 4 a.m., coming back about 40 minutes later, then leaving again at 5:58 a.m.

July 10 

UMPD posts on social media asking for information about Lee’s whereabouts. The post includes a description of Lee’s car, a black Ford Fusion with a gold stripe on the front hood and a Mississippi license plate reading “JAYLEE1.” 

UMPD then receives a call from Bandit Towing, a company in Oxford. Bandit Towing tells UMPD that it towed Lee’s car from Molly Barr Trails, an apartment complex in northeast Oxford, at 1:52 p.m. on July 8, and gives UMPD a picture of Lee’s car parked in the back of Molly Barr Trails, near a wooded area that stretches to the airport. 

The Oxford Police Department gets involved in the case and receives a call on its tip line from one of Lee’s friends who says they had talked over Snapchat early in the morning on July 8. Lee’s friend tells OPD that Lee was in the car on the way to meet someone “he had previously hooked up with,” Baker testified. 

Lee didn’t say who he was going to meet, Baker testified that the friend recalled, but said he had blocked the person on social media following a fight they’d had a few hours earlier. The person then reached out on Snapchat “under a username Jay Lee didn’t recognize,” Baker testified Lee’s friend said, and “offered to do something to Jay Lee they’d never done before” that was implied to be sexual in nature. 

July 11

To trace how Lee’s car ended up at Molly Barr Trails, Baker testified that OPD starts obtaining video surveillance from businesses along Jackson Avenue, a main thoroughfare in Oxford, and the front office at Molly Barr Trails. 

Footage from the front office shows Lee’s car arriving at Molly Barr Trails at 7:25 a.m. Nine minutes later, Baker testified that the footage shows a “Black male running from Molly Barr Trails” wearing dark shorts, a gray hoodie and black-and-white sneakers. Baker noted during his testimony that the video does not show this same person running into the complex. 

Around 7:38 a.m., footage from a gas station on Molly Barr Trails showed the same person – who officers will later determine is Herrington – jogging into the parking lot and meeting a white Kia Optima with an Ole Miss tag.

July 13

OPD searches Molly Barr Trails with help from K-9s from the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office and releases a video of Lee’s father pleading for more information. 

July 15

Lee’s family organizes a search party at Clear Creek Lake, a conservation area north of Oxford near where the body of Ally Kostial, a UM student who was murdered by her boyfriend, was found in 2019.

July 20

OPD announces the FBI and Mississippi Attorney General’s Office are assisting in the investigation. 

July 21

OPD receives Lee’s Snapchat data – including his messages and blocked contacts – and identifies Herrington as a person of interest. 

Lee’s Snapchat data corroborates the account his friend gave to OPD on July 10. Snapchat’s location data puts Lee in the vicinity of Herrington’s apartment for the last time at 6:12 a.m. on July 8. 

Starting at 5:17 a.m. on July 8, Lee’s Snapchat messages show a conversation with an account named “redeye_24” that Lee doesn’t recognize. OPD determines “redeye_24” is Herrington by identifying the phone number associated with the Snapchat account, a Google Voice number registered to an email for Herrington’s podcast, “Dirt 2 Diamonds.” An account belonging to Herrington is also among Lee’s blocked contacts. 

In the messages, Herrington asks Lee to “come back” to his apartment, but Lee initially refuses, calling the way Herrington treated him earlier that night as an “asshole move.” Lee then says that he thinks Herrington is “just tryna lure me over there to beat my ass or something.” Herrington replies, “you trippin,” adding, “I do feel bad because we cool so I ain’t trying to end it like this.”  

Lee replies the only way he will go back to Herrington’s apartment is if Herrington reciprocates oral sex, and Herrington agrees. Lee tells Herrington it won’t “end up good” if he tries to “hurt me or some shit.” Herrington replies “I know.” 

July 22

OPD pulls the car tags of the white Kia Optima – the car that Herrington met at the gas station parking lot – and realizes an officer pulled the car over during a traffic stop on the morning of July 8. OPD looks at the officer’s body camera, which shows a Black male in the passenger seat wearing clothes that match the video footage from Molly Barr Trails. 

Mid-morning, officers knock on Herrington’s door at DLP Oxford, a luxury student housing complex. Baker testified that Herrington opens the door, answers “a few general questions about knowing Jay Lee” and asks officers to “excuse the mess … because he was moving to Dallas soon.” Baker recalls that clothes and towels were lying on the couch, as if Herrington had just done laundry.

OPD detains Herrington and takes him back to the precinct for questioning. At 2:44 p.m., officers read Herrington his Miranda rights, and he signs a waiver agreeing to give up his right-to-counsel in the interview with Baker and a lieutenant. Herrington acknowledges that he had a casual relationship with Lee and says that on the morning of July 8, he went to Walmart to buy duct tape before going on a run. 

As Baker and his lieutenant are interviewing Herrington, other officers execute a search warrant on his apartment, obtaining several items including his MacBook, keys, and a pair of dark-colored shorts. Officers also seize a Walmart receipt that shows Herrington bought duct tape at 6:41 a.m. The DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office walks its “cadaver dogs” – K-9s trained to identify the smell of a dead body – through Herrington’s apartment. The dogs “alert” three times in Herrington’s bedroom and once in the living room area.

During the preliminary hearing, Herrington’s attorney, state Rep. Kevin Horan, repeatedly asked Baker if OPD had reviewed the training DeSoto County gives its cadaver dogs or checked to see if the dogs had ever before identified the smell of a dead body. Baker said that he had not. 

The dogs also alert during a search of Herrington’s car, and an OPD technician finds blonde hair near the driver’s seat and back passenger seat. In the trunk, Baker testified that an OPD technician found bodily fluid in the shape of a footprint but did not specify what kind.

Police also bring in for questioning the driver of the Kia Optima who says that he was driving on Molly Barr Trails the morning of July 8 when he saw Herrington jogging. The driver says that Herrington told him he was “gassed” from a run and needed a ride back to his apartment. 

Baker gets an affidavit for Herrington’s arrest, and he’s booked into the Lafayette County Detention Center around 8:15 p.m. 

July 25 and 26

OPD expands its search for Lee’s remains to Grenada County and takes possession of Herrington’s box truck in Oxford.

July 27 

OPD receives a forensic copy of Herrington’s MacBook that shows his Google search history. The forensic copy shows that on July 7, Herrington had googled flights from Dallas to Singapore. That night, he looked at a Twitter profile titled #TransLivesMatter that posts pornographic videos of trans people. 

The copy also showed that Herrington was looking at Lee’s Twitter page at 5:21 a.m., a few minutes after he first messaged Lee on Snapchat. At 5:56 a.m., minutes after Lee messaged Herrington he was on his way, the copy shows that Herrington searched “how long does it take to strangle someone gabby petito,” then “does pre workout boost testosterone.” 

OPD also obtains video from Walmart showing Herrington viewing garbage cans shortly before purchasing duct tape at 6:41 a.m. 

July 29

Police search Herrington’s parent’s house in Grenada after getting a search warrant. Officers also obtain video footage of Herrington retrieving a long-handle shovel and wheelbarrow from his parent’s house and putting it into the back of the box truck. 

The post Police investigation into Ole Miss student killing: Timeline, what we know so far  appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The financially struggling Greenwood Leflore Hospital on Monday moved hospital patients to other facilities and closed clinics as the result of a “defective sewage line,” the hospital announced in a Facebook post. 

It’s unclear how many total patients were moved and discharged. Ten people, including those in the hospital’s ICU, were transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center Grenada, about 45 minutes away, said Marc Rolph, a spokesman for UMMC. 

Mississippi MED-COM, the emergency communications center housed at UMMC, assisted in finding beds elsewhere for the admitted patients at the 208-bed hospital. 

A hospital employee who spoke to Mississippi Today on the condition that her name not be used said there has been an “extremely foul odor filling the elevators and certain other areas in the hospital” for several days now.

The hospital’s official announcements offered few details about the problem. 

“Greenwood Leflore Hospital continues to experience a hospital-wide issue with a defective sewage line,” the hospital posted on Facebook after 4 p.m. Monday. “Currently we are discharging or transferring all inpatients.  For the safety of our patients and staff, until further notice we are canceling surgeries and outpatient testing.”

In the first post about the issue, around mid-morning, the hospital said it was “assessing the situation with our inpatients.”

Hospital spokeswoman Christine Hemphill did not immediately return a call requesting comment Monday night. 

Dr. Roderick Givens, who practices radiation oncology at the hospital, was among the doctors whose clinics were forced to close because of the sewage issue. He said that hospital leadership had told a group of physicians in a briefing around lunch time that the problem was a leak somewhere underneath the hospital, which hadn’t been located as of the briefing. 

“They’re closing the hospital until that can be located, contained and everybody’s safe, because obviously you don’t want to have a hospital facility that’s got the odor as well as the potential hazard from a bacteria with a sewer line potentially affecting inpatients as well as outpatients,” he said.

The Greenwood Commonwealth reported earlier Monday that the hospital said it did not have a timeline for reopening. 

At least two state agencies were contacted about the event. The state health department supported the hospital during patient evacuation, said Jim Craig, the department’s senior deputy and director of health protection.

“MSDH staff were on scene coordinating information sharing on hospital status, evacuation status, and resource needs to support the evacuation,” the department said in an email. “MSDH Division of Health Facilities Licensure and Certification provided necessary notifications to CMS and will work to ensure the facility is cleared for occupancy once repairs are complete.”

Malary White, chief communications officer at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said MEMA had been alerted but had not sent any personnel or equipment to the scene.

“We monitor the situation, in case the county gets overwhelmed we step in to help (by request),” she said.

One facet of the sewage problem was a blockage that also affected surrounding streets. Eddie Curry, the former director of Greenwood Wastewater Treatment, was at the hospital Monday to help out. He said the crew used a high-pressure hose to clear the pipe blockage. Then workers used a vacuum truck to clean some of the debris and waste left behind. 

“Grease or rags, and or anything could get here and build up in the mouth of that pipe and it could stop it, won’t let it flow,” he said. “But once you take the sewage truck, go in and put water pressure to it, it unclogs it. You may not have trouble for the next three or four years.”

Curry said as far as he was concerned, the problem was fixed when he left in the afternoon. 

Eddie Payne, the current Wastewater Treatment Director, said he wasn’t aware of a leak underneath the hospital. Sewage or dirty water may have backed up while the pipes were blocked, requiring clean-up work after the blockage was cleared. 

The relationship between the blockage and the hospital’s closure was not clear Monday night, but a leak may have been caused by pressure building up in the pipes as a result of the blockage. 

Givens said his patients’ treatment won’t be interrupted if the hospital closure lasts a few days or so.

“If it’s a long-term problem then we’ll have to look at some other measures, for example if we have to get them treated at another facility or something like that,” he said. “But I’m anticipating that we should be back and up and running within a couple of days.”

The hospital, which is jointly owned by Leflore County and the city of Greenwood, laid off 30 people in May to offset losses during the pandemic. It announced in June that it is in talks with UMMC on a joint operation agreement. 

“GLH began the process of seeking affiliation partners as the hospital emerged from the Delta and Omicron waves of the pandemic,” the hospital said in a press release. “Affiliation, particularly with a larger system like UMMC, the state’s only academic medical center and largest hospital, can result in cost efficiencies that are necessary to attain sustainable operations over the long term.”

In July, CEO Jason Studley resigned.

Kate Royals contributed reporting.

The post Greenwood hospital transfers, discharges patients and closes clinics following sewage problem appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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How well did Mississippi respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? The health department is hiring an outside contractor to answer that question. 

The contractor, who should start work in early November, will conduct interviews with people involved in a wide range of pandemic response efforts, from contact tracing and COVID testing to hospital operations and public information. They’ll prepare an “after-action report” that will reconstruct and analyze Mississippi’s response – including how well state and local agencies followed emergency response plans – and offer suggestions for improvement. 

Department staff typically prepare after-action reports following disasters or public health emergencies. But because of the scope of the pandemic response, which lasted more than 800 days, the department is hiring a contractor this time, Jim Craig, senior deputy and director of health protection, said in a statement to Mississippi Today.

Craig said the report will be used to improve pandemic planning and preparedness. The department will use federal funds to pay the contractor.

Just shy of 13,000 Mississippians have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to health department data. Nearly 900,000 cases have been reported in the state. 

During the first year of the pandemic, Mississippi was frequently one of the first states to loosen restrictions on masking and crowds in public places. Months after Gov. Tate Reeves lifted the state’s mask mandate, as cases surged during the delta wave, he called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation for indoor masking “foolish.”

Mississippi had the highest per capita number of deaths of any state in the country, with 427 deaths for every 100,000 people, according to the New York Times. The national average was 311. 

A report by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund released in June ranked Mississippi’s pandemic response last among 50 states and the District of Columbia. Mississippi scored particularly poorly in premature deaths from treatable causes – ranking 51st – and out-of-pocket medical costs for employees. 

Mississippi also saw the country’s highest percentage increase in the drug overdose death rate from 2019 to 2020, according to the Commonwealth Fund. 

The report produced for the health department will take a closer look at the nuts and bolts of the agency’s pandemic response. The analysis will answer questions including:

• “What happened? What was supposed to happen based on current plans, policies and procedures?
• Was there a difference? What was the impact?
• Do plans, policies, and procedures support activities and associated tasks? 
• Are MSDH responders familiar with these documents?”

According to the request for proposals, the state recently conducted feedback sessions with regional health department team members. The results of those sessions will be shared with the contractor chosen to write the report. 

The 59-page request offers a sense of the scope of the state’s pandemic response, which involved thousands of people working at the health department, Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), Mississippi Department of Human Services, the Mississippi State University Extension Service, the Board of Animal Health, the National Guard and the Department of Environmental Quality, as well as private contractors. 

The state had operated 916 testing sites as of April 7, 2022 and processed over 3,200,000 PCR tests as of late April. 

The contract will last until early November 2023 but may be renewed by the health department for an additional year.

The department also hired an outside contractor to evaluate its response to Hurricane Katrina.

“The lessons learned from the Katrina after-action report furthered the health and medical response to hurricanes in Mississippi,” Craig said.

The post ‘What happened?’ Health department will hire an outsider to evaluate Mississippi COVID-19 response appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Rapper Rick Ross’ family, which operates several Wingstop franchises, owns the five Mississippi locations the labor department found to be illegally deducting money from workers’ wages, leaving some with take-home pay less than $7.25 an hour. 

The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division says the Mississippi stores – under Boss Wing Enterprises – made their employees illegally pay for uniforms, safety training, background checks, and even cash register shortages. 

“Restaurant industry employees work hard, often for low wages, and many depend on every dollar earned to make ends meet,” Jackson’s Wage and Hour Division director, Audrey Hall, said in a statement. “The law prevents Boss Wing Enterprises LLC from shifting operating costs to workers … or to allow a worker’s pay to fall below the minimum wage rate.”

The rapper and Clarksdale native’s older sister and assistant, Tawanda Roberts, is listed as the registered agent and manager of Boss Wings Enterprises LLC in Mississippi, according to business records filed with the state. His mother, Tommie Roberts, is also listed. Ross’ family has been growing its number of Wingstop locations for the last decade. 

Last year, the rapper posted to Instagram he gifted his 16-year-old son his first Wingstop franchise.

The DOL says it recovered $51,674 in wages owed to 244 workers and fined the franchise company $62,753 in civil penalties. 

Tawanda Roberts did not respond to a request for comment to her business email regarding the DOL’s investigation. A Boss Wing representative reached by phone told a reporter to contact Wingstop’s corporate public relations department for comment, even though they operate independently. In a statement, Wingstop distanced itself from Boss Wings. 

“The restaurants investigated by the DOL are owned and operated by a franchisee, not Wingstop Restaurants Inc. Our franchise agreement requires all of our franchisees to operate under our operating standards, which requires compliance with all laws and regulations,” the company said in a statement. “We were not previously aware of the DOL action against Boss Wings LLC.” 

During its investigation, the Wage and Hour Division found minimum wage violations because of improper paycheck deductions; overtime violations when the employer deducted wages for safety training and background checks during weeks workers took extra shifts; and violations for failing to maintain proper records of hours workers logged. 

Investigators also found a 15-year-old who illegally worked past 10 p.m. last June. Federal law says young teens cannot work past 7 p.m.

The DOL says it has uncovered more than $34.7 million for more than 29,000 workers in the food service industry during the last fiscal year. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to report record job openings in the service industry as an influx of service workers begin efforts to organize unions. 

READ MORE: Starbucks employees and others trying to unionize in Mississippi face decades-old hardships

“Employers who do not respect their workers’ rights will likely struggle to retain and recruit the people they need to remain competitive, as workers look for opportunities with employers that do,” Hall said.

Ross and his sister have spoken publicly about their entry into the wing business. The rapper – whose 2006 song “Hustlin” launched him to fame – told Forbes in 2014 that he first thought about opening a franchise of his favorite wing spot shortly after his music career took off. 

Tawanda Roberts is an alum of Mississippi Valley State. Boss Wing lists its offices based in Southaven in state records. The DOL named the Wingstop locations in Clarksdale, Tupelo, Starkville, Olive Branch, and Oxford as part of its investigation.

Ross cut the ribbon to open the downtown Clarksdale location in 2020. 

“This is an opportunity for jobs in Clarksdale and an opportunity for the Black community,” Ross told local media during the opening ceremony. “This will bring people downtown and Clarksdale needs that.”

The rapper had a cluster of locations in Memphis, but Wingstop’s corporate office said Boss Wings has transferred those locations to a new operator. Most of the family’s locations are throughout the southeast and Miami, where Ross lives.

It’s unclear how many Wingstop locations the family now runs, but a Wingstop blog said Ross owned 28 as of 2019.

The post Feds fine Mississippi Wingstop stores run by family of rapper Rick Ross appeared first on Mississippi Today.

“Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker” – the almost 500 page anthropology of diary entries by the acclaimed writer – starts with a poem inspired by Walker’s time living in Jackson. 

“While love is dangerous / let us walk bareheaded / beside the Great River,” she writes in the poem’s second and final stanza. “Let us gather blossoms / under fire.” 

The final lines are a metaphor for the impulse that moved a young Walker to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the summer of 1966; it also nods at her decision to leave about 10 years later. Walker wanted to prove to her family that it was possible for a Black woman to freely live in a place as dangerously racist as Jackson was at that time. 

“That summer marked the beginning of the realization that I could never live happily in Africa–or anywhere else–until I could live freely in Mississippi,” Walker wrote. 

But after several years of depression, loneliness and trauma – the result of watching civil rights activists face repeated abuse – Walker was burnt out, like a fire left unattended. 

“I was starting to fray, my spirit was in tatters,” Walker told Mississippi Today. “It’s incredibly difficult to live in a place where people you care about deeply are being so abused – bombed, shot and banged, drowned, and assistanted and their houses blown up – it wears on you, and I felt all of that.” 

“It wasn’t so much that I gave up on being there, it was that I simply wore out,” she added.
I couldn’t really endure.” 

Walker’s journals, released earlier this year, document her development as a writer. The journals also show Walker coming to realize the kind of community she wanted to live in, one where creativity was not stifled by segregation. Walker and her editor, Valerie Boyd, who passed away earlier this year, hope can serve as a “workbook” – or put another way, as a form of therapy. 

“I want the journals to be used so that people can see this working through of disappointment, anger, sorrow, regret,” Walker said in an interview with the New York Times. “So in that sense, it’s a medicine book.”

The first section – titled “Movement, Marriage and Mississippi” – records Walker’s time in Jackson in the 1960s while she was partners with Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish lawyer for the NAACP, in the first legal interracial marriage in Mississippi. Many of the entries were written in the large backyard of a house in north Jackson and show Walker working through states-of-mind that will be familiar to any artist. – confidence, self-consciousness, and ambition. 

“How odd it is – I am having trouble writing honestly or well,” Walker writes at one point. “Could it be because I dared mention to Mel that I might one day publish this journal?” 

The section begins in 1965 with the 32nd anniversary of Walker’s parents – a time, she remarks, “that seems so long to live with someone and still enjoy being with them occasionally.” 

In the next entry, Walker is on an airplane, flying south from New York to Atlanta for an orientation for student members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It’s the first time Walker – who grew up in rural Georgia, the eighth child of sharecroppers and valedictorian of her segregated high school – returned South since she left to attend Sarah Lawrence College. 

The time away was fortifying. She mocks the whiteness of the clouds – one looks like a king, “whiter among his subjects and with pigs’ ears and a snout.” She’s less disgusted by the syrupy accents of the white flight attendants. Then she’s on the ground, on a bus driving past Morris Brown College, a historically Black liberal arts college, to meet fellow foot-soldiers, whose solidarity imbues her journal entries with a sense of community. 

Throughout the first section, before Walker marries her husband in Mississippi in 1967, she talks about dating men who fall into archetypes – the ones who want to date their mothers or think it’s bourgeois to want to be a writer. She also contemplates creating her own philosophy – “not Philosophy of the Absurd, etc, but a Philosophy based on Curiosity.” 

Walker later does this, coining the term “womanist” to describe what it means to be a feminist of color. 

In Jackson, Walker is initially “afraid” to say she likes it, but she admires the people who “are mainly doing what they want or what they feel has to be done.” Isolated in her house with her dog, unable to freely go to the grocery store with her husband, Walker starts to have nightmares in which she tells her family about “the beauty of Mississippi Negro Bravery” but is then arrested outside a gas station. 

“How odd, after so much travel, to land in Mississippi,” she writes. “Definitely not the route Wright and Baldwin took. Mel would like to stay here a long time. So would I if only we could get away two or three times a year. Soon we will have been here a year and a half. I begin to feel like a colonizer.”

She teaches at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University and, as she gains more acclaim, she knows people wonder why she stays in Mississippi. Her husband wants to stay, though, so she oscillates between familial and personal responsibility. She feels like she should live in Mississippi because of the political premise of it: “Imagine being afraid of being in your own country!” She writes. “Simply to live anywhere with freedom requires a willingness to become an immovable force, except by death.”

 An incident, not described in the journal, brings clarity born out of anger.

“I looked at the back of the cracker bus-driver’s head and I hated him and everybody that looks like him,” she writes. “I am not going to stay here much longer – and all the placating, explaining, courageous talk in the world is not going to make me stay here and be destroyed.” 

Once she leaves Mississippi, it lingers. Walker has lived in northern California, but her first stop after she left was Brooklyn. She gets a divorce and lives with her daughter. She notes that Brooklyn is “remarkably” similar to Mississippi, but she’s decided that ideology does not always equate to endurance. 

 “We must go wherever we are not destroyed in the image of those who hate us,” she writes. “Home is wherever we can live human lives.” 

Walker is a featured panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on Aug. 20.

The post Alice Walker’s journals offer a ‘workbook’ for artists appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Activist and author James Meredith relaxes in the back yard of his Jackson home, looking dapper in an off-white suit and Panama-style straw hat.

In his hand, he holds a copy of ‘Man on a Mission: James Meredith and the Battle of Ole Miss,’ a graphic novel as told by Meredith, written by Aram Goudsouzian and illustrated by Bill Murray.

The book tells Meredith’s dramatic story as the first Black American to attend the University of Mississippi and his fight against white supremacy in 1962, rife with the terrors of being Black in the Jim Crow era South.

There were riots and deaths on campus, protection from the National Guard and a deal struck between then U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Gov. Ross Barnett, allowing Meredith to register. Meredith’s determination and courage never faltered because he was on a mission. He graduated in 1963 with a political science degree.

In a hand-written statement, Meredith asks, “Who is James Meredith? I may not know yet! But I do know who I always thought I was… a man on a mission from God.”

His mission continues, the last he admits, with plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his entering Ole Miss by visiting every county in the state. Meredith wants to, “uplift moral character through the word of the Lord.”

That’s 82 counties, by a man born in 1933 … still determined, still fearless, still a man on a mission.

The post James Meredith is still a man on a mission appeared first on Mississippi Today.

NATCHEZ – Shavondra Smalley wakes up on her living room couch and looks at her 8-year-old daughter Layla stretched out on a hospital bed beside her, BiPAP machine humming. The two start their day as they always do. 

Smalley pulls out a stethoscope and listens to Layla’s labored breathing, checking to see how much mucus has built up in her trachea in the four hours since she last performed this sacred task. She grabs a chest percussion therapy cup, shaped like the bottom of a toilet plunger, and taps her daughter’s chest with it for around five minutes. Having broken up any secretions that could obstruct Layla’s airflow, she then inserts a suction catheter into her tracheostomy tube and removes the debris. 

It’s a Wednesday, but Smalley can’t go to her job of seven years. Layla, who is bedridden, requires the care of a registered nurse when her mother is away. For over a month, the nursing staffing agency she uses has been unable to find enough nurses willing to take a job that only pays up to $35 per hour.

The current reimbursement levels from Medicaid were set in 2009, amidst a recession, and have not changed since, according to Kate Taylor, the owner of Faith and Friends Healthcare Staffing. Smalley uses her agency to find Layla’s nurses.

The hourly wages travel nurses can earn has decreased dramatically since their pandemic-fueled peak, when they could make up to $10,000 per week in New York. But they’re still much higher than the wages private-duty nurses can make serving patients like Layla who are on Medicaid. 

Smalley said she’s called the Mississippi Division of Medicaid multiple times to plead for help, but hasn’t received any response. Officials with the Division did not respond to emails or calls from Mississippi Today about reimbursement levels for private-duty nursing. When a reporter went to the Division building to try and speak with someone, he was told he must make an appointment. 

Taylor has also been reaching out to Medicaid.

“We have asked them (Medicaid) for reimbursement increases, and they say it’s in the works, but in the meantime, we can’t compete,” Taylor said.

Layla requires 20 hours of nursing care a day due to a litany of complex medical conditions. She was born with lissencephaly, which literally means “smooth brain,” a rare brain malformation characterized by the absence of normal folds in the cerebral cortex. She also suffers from scoliosis, chronic respiratory failure and pyruvate dehydrogenase complex deficiency, among other conditions. 

Over the past three weeks alone, Layla has only received 180 of the 420 hours of nursing care she needs, Smalley said. As a result, Smalley has missed work and is becoming increasingly exhausted.

“If they’re (Medicaid) not willing to try to increase the pay, then we’re still going to be going without the care that she needs,” she said. 

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Smalley, a single mother of three children, is currently on unpaid family leave from her job. She gets up to 12 weeks of leave each year and is quickly running out. She’s worried about paying her bills and putting food on the table for her three children. She wants to work and loathes the idea of taking “handouts” from others or getting on welfare.

“I work so hard to take care of my kids and to take care of my responsibilities,” Smalley said. “Anybody that knows me knows that I don’t like to owe anybody.”

She does not want to institutionalize Layla, believing she would receive lower quality care. She takes pride in the care she provides Layla at home, noting she has never had a bed sore.

“I took on the battle to fight for my child since day one, and I’m not stopping,” Smalley said

Though their life has never been “normal,” Smalley is proud of the life she has built for herself and her children. Not having the nursing care Layla needs not only keeps her from working, but also prevents her from doing simple things like going to church or attending her 13-year-old son, Jonathan’s, sports games. 

Jonathan helps out with Layla’s care when she can, though Smalley tries to prevent this as much as possible.

“I try not to put responsibility on my children, because they’re just kids,” Smalley said.

Federal dollars from coronavirus relief packages  subsidized increased nurse wages for hospitals, but not for private nursing staffing agencies like Taylor’s.

Taylor said in addition to Smalley, she has clients in Vicksburg, Collins and Greenwood who can’t get the level of nursing care they need. 

“Any place that’s a little bit more rural, it’s hard to staff,” Taylor said. “Even if I offer a little bit more pay, that doesn’t seem to help.”

Data from the health care management consulting firm Kaufman Hall & Associates showed the dramatic increase in the national average for contract nurse labor costs. Before the coronavirus pandemic, wage rates for contract nurses were almost double those for employed nurses. By March 2022, contract nurses were making $132 per hour while nurses employed by hospitals were making $39. 

Hospitals are competing with each other to hire nurses. Mississippi has lost more than 2,000 nurses over the course of the pandemic due to burnout or higher paying jobs in other states. This strain is being felt all across the country, and the national shortage is likely to get worse over time.

Smalley was told when she was five months pregnant with Layla that her child would have  lissencephaly and was given the option to terminate the pregnancy. She is against abortion, so she declined. 

After giving birth, Smalley received two weeks of tracheostomy and gastrostomy training at the hospital before being sent home with Layla. Through Medicaid’s Disabled Child Living At Home program, she was able to get a rotating group of nurses, each working 10-hour shifts, to take care of Layla. 

That has not been the case for over a month now. 

Medicaid is also experiencing a shortage of certain medical supplies, including tracheostomy tubes. Smalley has been forced to boil Layla’s tube in water to sanitize and reuse it, instead of replacing it each week as she should. 

The staffing problem Smalley is experiencing has been made worse by restrictions placed on who can provide Layla’s care. The nasopharyngeal suctioning Smalley performs on Layla every four hours is considered a “specialized skill” outside of the scope of practice of other health care workers like licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and vocational nurses. This restriction frustrates Smalley, as she’s able to perform it herself even though she’s not a medical professional.

Dr. Phyllis Johnson, executive director of the Mississippi Board of Nursing, said that while she understands Smalley’s frustration, nurses without the educational background of registered nurses do not have the skills needed to perform the kinds of emergency interventions that might be needed in a case as medically complex as Layla’s. 

“Our job is to make sure that the nurses perform safe, efficient and competent care the way they’ve been trained to, because when they don’t do that or step outside the scope of practice, that’s where the patients’ lives become endangered,” Johnson said. 

Smalley is doing the best she can in an exhausting and unsustainable situation. Her kids can’t help but notice the strain caring for Layla puts on their mom. Her 5-year-old daughter  Katelyn just started kindergarten and will often come and sleep next to Shavondra on the couch next to Layla’s hospital bed. 

Smalley has called multiple other staffing agencies across the state, none of which had the staffing available to help her.

“My daughter doesn’t have a voice so I have to be her voice and advocate for her … I just don’t know how long we can go on like this,” Smalley said. 

The post Nursing shortage, low reimbursement rates mean this 8-year-old can’t find care appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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