A poll commissioned by the ACLU of Mississippi reports 51% of Mississippians oppose the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Mississippi case that overturned the longstanding Roe v. Wade right to abortion.
The survey reported that only 18% of those polled believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, with 81% believing it should be legal with some restrictions and 32% saying it should be legal in all cases.
The poll also delved into state politics, including the favorability/unfavorability of the governor, lieutenant governor, House speaker and the Legislature.
The live poll was conducted from June 28 to July 6 of 872 likely Mississippi voters by Blueprint Polling, sister company to Mississippi-based Chism Strategies, which often does work for Democratic politicians. Results were weighted by age, race and gender of a likely general election turnout with a margin of error of +/- 3.3%. Those polled included 402 Republicans, 285 Democrats and 170 independents.
The poll also reported:
46% said women in Mississippi should have the choice to have an abortion up to 16 weeks of pregnancy, with 43% saying no.
49% said they oppose women being able to access online pharmacies to order an FDA approved “abortion pill,” while 47% said they should have access. But 86% said they oppose any law allowing state or police officials to monitor or review a woman’s internet history to see if they’ve ordered such medication. And 48% said doctors should be able to prescribe the medication through telehealth services, with 46% opposed.
83% said women should not be criminally investigated or prosecuted for possibly having an abortion, with only 6% saying they should.
71% said they do not view emergency contraception such as IUDs and Plan B as methods of abortion.
76% of respondents support expanding postpartum Medicaid coverage for mothers — a measure that died in the Legislature this year — and the same percent support overall expansion of Medicaid, including 59% of Republicans surveyed.
In 2011, Mississippians voted 58%-42% against a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have defined a fertilized egg as a person in an effort to ban abortions. In the new survey, 54% said they would oppose lawmakers passing a similar law now, with 38% saying they would support it.
The poll showed Gov. Tate Reeves with a net favorability of -12.3. For Reeves, the breakdown of respondents to the poll includes:
Very favorable: 12.5%
Somewhat favorable: 19.2%
Neutral: 14.2%
Somewhat unfavorable: 12.1%
Very unfavorable: 31.9%
He remains generally favorable among Republicans, according to the poll, with 55% finding him favorable and 21% finding him unfavorable. Among white voters polled, 42% found him favorable and 32% found him unfavorable.
The survey reported Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann with a net favorability of +10 and House Speaker Philip Gunn at -3.7. But 35% said they didn’t know enough about Hosemann to rate him, and 45% said the same for Gunn.
The state Legislature, according to the poll, was also underwater with voters, with a net favorability of -12.6.
Mississippi’s foster care agency is failing to prevent abuse and neglect of children in state custody despite its commitments to do so as part of a long-running federal lawsuit, documents obtained by Mississippi Today show.
And Gov. Tate Reeves, who oversees the agency and has recently vowed to make the state safer for children, has downplayed the agency’s problems and failed to propose concrete solutions.
A Mississippi toddler named Olivia Y. weighed only 22 pounds when she entered state custody in 2003. Though she was obviously malnourished, she was not given a medical exam. Over the next three months, she was shuffled across five different foster homes.
The lawsuit that bears her name was filed in 2004, when she was 3-and-a-half years old, on behalf of the thousands of children in the state foster care system. The state first agreed to a settlement requiring it to make systemic reforms in 2008, but has never fully complied with the terms of that and later settlement agreements.
An independent monitor evaluated the department’s progress toward meeting its commitments in reports released in 2020 and 2021 that were never publicized. The reports documented major systemic failures and gut-wrenching stories. About 2% of all children in department custody were subjected to abuse or neglect by their caregivers in 2020, the monitor found – and advocates believe many more incidents of abuse are never reported.
The department acknowledged in June 2021 that it was not capable of achieving its targets and instead agreed to a “rebuilding period.” It is working toward reaching a smaller number of less stringent standards in areas such as worker caseloads and child safety by early 2023. The next monitoring report will not be filed until April 2023.
Yet Reeves has already determined the department is up to par.
In a statement to Mississippi Today, Reeves spokeswoman Shelby Wilcher said the most recent monitoring report, which evaluated the department’s work in calendar year 2020, does not reflect its “current efficacy.”
“Governor Reeves believes current child protection services in Mississippi meet and exceed constitutional standards,” she said.
It’s not clear what he meant by “constitutional standards.”
Marcia Robinson Lowry, the lead plaintiffs’ attorney in the federal case against the state, has met regularly with CPS Commissioner Andrea Sanders, whom Reeves appointed, during the last two years. Lowry disagrees with Reeves’ claim.
“That’s appalling,” Lowry said of Reeves’ statement. “I don’t know what he means by that. I hope that we are all paying attention to the wellbeing of Mississippi’s children, both the advocates and the governor, because the reports that the monitor has issued show that there are big, big problems in the Mississippi system. And they need to be addressed. And they haven’t been. So I’m sort of appalled at that.”
Lowry said she believes Sanders has been making strong efforts to achieve the department’s rebuilding period targets, but it’s still unclear whether they will succeed. Lowry said the details of her meetings with Sanders are confidential.
The department told Mississippi Today it cannot comment on the ongoing litigation.
Wilcher did not respond to follow-up questions about how Reeves reached his conclusion and whether he has seen more recent data showing rates of abuse and neglect.
Among the problems documented in the most recent reports:
High rates of abuse and neglect of children in department custody. In 2019, 87 kids were abused or neglected. In 2020, the figure was 117, nearly six times the agreed-upon rate. During the rebuilding period, the independent monitor is conducting an analysis to determine why these cases occurred.
Four teenagers in department custody ran away from the group home where they were living and became involved in sex trafficking in 2019. When the department investigated, one of the girls who had run away reported that they “were not really being supervised.” But the CPS investigator never interviewed facility staff to find out whether that might have played a role in their escape – even though they also knew that incidents of kids running away from the facility had triggered at least 28 previous investigations. By the time the investigation wrapped up, one of the four teenagers was still missing.
The monitor found: “A foster child, age ten, and adoptive child, age 11, were left home to care for a foster child, age one. He was not changed regularly and had diaper rash. The older children changed his diaper, gave him a bath, and cleaned him with baby wipes because he was always filthy. MDCPS substantiated physical neglect of the one-year-old, but neglect was unsubstantiated for the other two children, who were caregivers for him. In interviews, the children also alleged that the foster mother called them names, cursed at them, ‘whooped’’ them with belts, shoes, and other objects, and smoked around them in the home and the car. As a result of this investigation, the 10-year-old was removed from the home. However, the one-year-old remained in the home for two months, and the 11- year-old adopted child and an older adopted youth still remain in the home.”
The department placed a 17-year-old girl in a motel for a month and a half and hired a rotating group of sitters from a sitter service to watch her. It conducted two maltreatment investigations. In the first, “it was alleged that the child had taken a beer from a man staying at the motel, that she had ‘found’ $400 and split it with one of the sitters, and that she was sending inappropriate pictures of herself through social media.” The department removed her phone and did not substantiate allegations of physical neglect. It then removed her from the motel and placed her in a group home. The child then reported that while she was in the motel, one of the sitters regularly took her to their home, where “she had sexual relations with the sitter’s 47-year-old uncle ‘three to four times weekly’ and that it was consensual.” The department found that physical neglect and sexual abuse had occurred, and the investigator noted that the report was forwarded to local police but that they could not bring charges because Mississippi’s age of consent is 16. “However, the investigating worker also noted that if an exchange occurred for sex, the age of consent is then 18 years of age. It appears the Department did not follow up on this.”
“A 19-year-old was placed and re-placed in a hotel repeatedly, including three times after being hospitalized for ingesting harmful objects such as a razor, broken glass, and a large quantity of pills, and once after running away from the hotel and being returned there by the police.”
Higher-than-allowable worker caseloads. The department is supposed to ensure 90% of all caseworkers have a caseload that meets standards allowing them to provide adequate care and oversight. In 2019 and 2020, this figure ranged from 48% to 68%.
The department failed to consistently provide older teens with assistance planning for independent life after leaving state custody, including help lining up housing, even when they specifically asked for it. In the case of one Mississippian who left state custody on their 21st birthday, “Case narrative notes documented the youth’s desire for an apartment for several months prior to emancipation. There was no documentation that the youth ever received assistance from MDCPS in finding housing.”
At a press event on Wednesday where the Governor and First Lady announced the theme of this year’s “Christmas at the Mansion,” Mississippi Today attempted to ask Reeves in person about how he reached his conclusion that MDCPS is meeting and exceeding “constitutional standards” to protect the kids in its care.
“I’m not going to take any questions on that today,” he said. “I’m going to be out and about tomorrow. We’ll talk politics at the appropriate time.”
(This year’s theme is “Mississippi Hometown Christmas.”)
In 2020, the department met only 32 of 123 targets. It failed to meet 75, and the monitor couldn’t evaluate the remaining areas because of data issues.
In 2019, the department met 39 of 126 commitments. It did not meet 54 areas and failed to provide data or complete data for 32.
In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the end of nearly all abortion in Mississippi, Reeves has touted a “new pro-life agenda.” But his proposals for the state’s foster care system so far have largely amounted to a pledge to “strengthen adoption services.”
Earlier this year, the Legislature approved nearly $60 million in federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act for the department, which will in part be used to hire about 200 new employees to work through a “backlog” of cases.
A spokesperson for the department did not answer questions regarding plans for the ARPA spending, saying the person best equipped to answer them is out of the office this week. Lawmakers did not respond to requests for comment or did not recall the specifics of the department’s plans for its ARPA funding.
When Mississippi Today asked Reeves’ office for information about his work on foster care issues, they pointed to a press conference he held in April where they said the department was discussed “in detail.” During the press conference, he announced an expanded “public-private partnership” with a nonprofit program called Wendy’s Wonderful Kids to help find adoptive homes for special needs children and older kids in foster care. With a $1.7 million donation from the Dave Thomas Foundation, the program will expand from one recruiter in the state to 10.
At the same event, Reeves signed into law a bill that will provide college scholarships for young people who spent at least part of their teenage years in foster care. Thirty-eight states already had such programs.
But the problems documented in the monitoring reports go far beyond barriers to adoption and college access.
According to the reports, adoption is the long-term goal for 39% of kids in state custody; only 22% who left department care in 2020 were adopted.
For half of kids in state custody, the long-term goal is reunification with their families. Caseworkers are supposed to meet monthly with the families of kids in that category to discuss progress and the child’s well-being. But the monitors found this happened less than half of the time.
When CPS Commissioner Andrea Sanders presented her request for ARPA funding to legislators in December, she noted that a very small amount of resources can sometimes allow a child to avoid state custody altogether.
“We do want to start with where the child is and look for ways that we might prevent removal of that child,” she said. “What would it take to get a child to stay in their home safely? Sometimes it’s just a bed. Sometimes it’s a safe place to sleep. Sometimes it’s a mitigation of a heating system in the house that’s unsafe for the child to be around.”
The number of children in state custody has fallen 33% since 2017, from 5,872 to 3,888 in June 2022, according to data the department shared with Mississippi Today. The monitoring report showed that at the end of 2020, there were 3,738 kids in department custody.
The reports also document the department’s progress in several areas, including:
The department licensed 357 new non-relative foster homes in 2020, exceeding the target of 351. “This is a significant accomplishment made during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a significant impact on child welfare operations throughout the nation,” the report noted.
The department ran a system of post-adoption services statewide, providing adoptive families access to counseling, mental health treatment and crisis intervention, peer support and respite services.
At least 95% of children in custody were placed in the least restrictive setting (i.e., the one most similar to a family environment) that met their needs.
The department’s caseworkers met educational qualifications and received adequate training.
Mississippi advocates for children have witnessed other problems with the system beyond those discussed in the reports.
Polly Tribble leads Disability Rights Mississippi, the nonprofit advocacy organization with statutory authority to advocate for Mississippians with disabilities. In the last year, she said, her organization has contacted MDCPS roughly 10 times because a foster child – generally with a psychiatric diagnosis of some kind – has been languishing in an inpatient residential facility long past when they should be released.
“A few of them have been appropriately placed in a foster home or a therapeutic foster home, but more times than not they’re just transferred to another facility, or left,” she said. “… And of course the facility’s not going to turn them away.”
Tribble said kids can spend years in such facilities.
Joy Hogge, executive director of the nonprofit Families as Allies, which advocates for children with behavioral health challenges and their caregivers, said one of the biggest problems facing the foster care system in Mississippi is a deeply ingrained sense that people who lose custody of their kids don’t really deserve to be parents.
“There’s a lot of prejudice against the families, and assumptions made about them,” she said.
Hogge said that when reunification is possible – as it is in at least half of cases, according to the monitoring reports – it’s important to support children in seeing their families and siblings, and in helping biological families get what they need.
“There’s a philosophy that these are bad parents, we need to take these children from them,” she said. “It’s the same thing you’re seeing now: ‘We need to make adoption really easy.’”
Read the monitoring report completed in 2021:
Read the monitoring report completed in 2020:
Read the June 2021 order describing the rebuilding period:
The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for children six months and older are now available at all county health departments. Vaccination for that age group has been available in Mississippi since June 20, but the shots weren’t available at every health department office until this week.
The Mississippi State Department of Health recommends vaccination for everyone six months and older, but stresses the importance of vaccination for older individuals and people with weakened immune systems or underlying health problems. The Department estimates that there are 160,000 children aged six months to five years old in Mississippi.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccines for use in this age group under an emergency use authorization on June 18, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the move the following day.
Mississippi’s COVID-19 case load has been steadily increasing since May, and the state is currently averaging 1,213 new cases per day. There has been a less pronounced increase in hospitalizations over the same period, and the death rate has stayed about the same.
With cases on the rise and students returning to classrooms next month, some parents are relieved to finally be able to get their small children vaccinated. Jackson resident Ashley Rogers’ 3-year-old daughter Elizabeth will be starting pre-K at McWillie Elementary next month. She received her first dose on Monday.
“Knowing that she was going to be in a larger school setting with more children and more exposure and more movement made us even more excited for her to qualify for this vaccine,” Rogers said.
In its analyses of Pfizer and Moderna data released in June, the FDA said both vaccines are effective in preventing symptomatic infection from COVID-19. Pfizer’s vaccine appeared 80% effective at preventing a symptomatic COVID-19 infection in children under five. Moderna’s vaccine was around 40% to 50% effective for children under 6.
Both vaccines use the same messenger RNA technology as the adult formulations, but the dosage and regimens for young children differ. Moderna’s regimen will include two doses at one-quarter the strength of adult doses, while Pfizer’s requires three doses at one-tenth the strength of adult doses.
More than 30,000 children younger than 5 have been hospitalized with COVID-19 in the U.S., and nearly 500 coronavirus deaths have been reported in that age group, according to United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy.
In Mississippi, children under 5 have comprised less than 5% of the state’s monthly COVID-19 cases for the majority of the pandemic.
Vaccines for infants are also available at Children’s of Mississippi’s Batson Kids Clinic. Dr. April Palmer, professor and chief of the pediatric infectious diseases division at UMMC, said COVID-19 vaccinations are effective and safe.
A study co-authored by Palmer’s colleague Dr. Charlotte Hobbs, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at UMMC, showed the primary series of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccinations reduced the risk of hospitalization by 68% during the Omicron wave.
“COVID-19 vaccines have been proven to be safe for children, as millions of doses have been given to adults and children during the past 15 months,” Palmer said. “Many children have mild symptoms or no symptoms with COVID-19, but some children have become seriously ill and needed hospitalization for COVID symptoms and complications, and some children have died. COVID-19 vaccination protects children and can prevent them from spreading the virus to others in their family.”
Dr. Anita Henderson, president of the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said her clinic has been providing the Moderna vaccine to children six months and up since June 24 with no problems. Parents have even reported that their children experienced fewer side effects than with other routine shots.
“We are seeing a significant surge of COVID-19 right now with the latest Omicron BA.5 variant,” Henderson said. “It is the most contagious and the most immune evasive, meaning previous infections with pre-Omicron variants offer little protection. Now is the time to get yourself and your family vaccinated and boosted if eligible.”
Attorneys are wrangling Mississippi’s former governor into the welfare department’s massive civil lawsuit, which one attorney called a “no-holds-barred death match.”
The attorney for the state agency is subpoenaing the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation for any of its communication with former Gov. Phil Bryant and his wife Deborah Bryant.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services filed a civil lawsuit in May accusing dozens of people — including retired NFL quarterback and famed USM alumnus Brett Favre — of misspending or wrongly receiving welfare funds.
But the complaint did not name the athletic foundation, even though it received $5 million in welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at USM — one of the more egregious revelations in a sprawling $77 million welfare scandal that broke in 2020. The complaint doesn’t mention the volleyball building at all.
A subpoena filed Monday may signal the state’s intent to add the USM scheme to the civil complaint and explore whether the Bryants are culpable. The subpoena also asks for any communication between USM athletic foundation board members or employees and Favre, nonprofit founder Nancy New, her sons Zach New and Jess New, former welfare department director John Davis and retired wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr.
The private attorney the welfare agency contracted to bring the civil suit, former U.S. attorney Brad Pigott, also filed a notice Monday with an initial list of people he’s calling to testify, which does not include Bryant.
In order by date, the deposition schedule includes: Zach New, Jesse New, Nicholas Coughlin, Adam Such, Nancy New, Christi Webb, Paul LaCoste, Jacob VanLandingham, Brett Favre, Teddy DiBiase Jr., Brian Smith, Ted DiBiase Sr. and Heart of David Ministries, and Austin Smith.
Nancy and Zach New have pleaded guilty to several criminal charges, including bribery and fraud. In his plea, Zach New admitted to defrauding the government by disguising payments to the athletic foundation, which were used to construct the volleyball facility, as a “lease.” The News received a favorable plea deal that may keep them out of state prison, as long as they cooperate with the ongoing investigation. Davis is also still facing several charges.
Favre was the fiercest proponent of the project at USM, his alma mater and where his daughter played on the volleyball team. He connected with Nancy New, Deborah Bryant’s friend, who was receiving tens of millions in no-bid grants from the welfare department to provide services to needy families.
“She has strong connections and gave me 5 million for Vball facility via grant money,” he later told his business partner, according to text messages Mississippi Today obtained and published in its investigative series “The Backchannel.”
New and her nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, perpetuated this scheme within the state’s view and with its support. To get away with using block grant funds to build a volleyball stadium, the News entered a $5 million lease agreement with the athletic foundation to use the university’s athletic facilities for welfare programming. The money would be used to build the volleyball stadium, which they called a “Wellness Center.” The plan was for the nonprofit to set up offices in the campus building, where it claimed it would educate needy families.
The Institutes of Higher Learning and the attorney general’s office signed off on the project, IHL board meeting minutes reflect.
The New nonprofit made two $2.5 million payments to the foundation, one in November and another in December of 2017, according to the state auditor’s office.
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Also in December of 2017, the nonprofit paid Favre’s company Favre Enterprises $500,000, the auditor found. New said in a recent court filing that Gov. Bryant directed her to make those payments to Favre for “speaking at events, keynote speaking, radio and promotional events, and business partner development.”
The nonprofit paid Favre another $600,000 in June of 2018 for a total of $1.1 million.
About a year later, Favre began telling the welfare officials that he “owed” the same amount, $1.1 million, that he had apparently committed to the USM volleyball facility.
“Hey brother Deanna and still owe 1.1 million on Vball,” Favre texted Davis, the welfare director, in March of 2019, referring to his wife, Deanna Favre. “Any chance you and Nancy can help with that? They don’t need it at the moment.”
Three months later, the state auditor’s investigation into Davis and the welfare department’s spending would begin, and the grant money for Favre’s volleyball stadium never came.
Around the same time, Favre was also working with welfare officials to move grant funds to a pharmaceutical startup called Prevacus, a company at the center of the initial criminal charges against the News. Favre was investing in Prevacus himself — around $1 million of his own money, he told Men’s Health magazine in 2019 — and expected to strike it rich.
“You and Nancy stuck your neck out for me with jake and Prevacus,” he texted Davis, referring to Prevacus founder Jake Vanlandingham.
The former governor was also working with Favre on the Prevacus project. While Favre told Bryant by text that the company was working with Nancy New and Davis and receiving funds from Mississippi, Bryant denies knowing Prevacus had received public funds, saying he didn’t read his texts carefully enough.
Favre was desperate for funding on two fronts, according to his text messages. He was expecting for New to fund additional construction on the volleyball facility as well as another pharmaceutical product, a cream to prevent concussions, that Vanlandingham cooked up.
“Hey Governor we are in a little bit of a crunch,” Favre texted Bryant in mid-July 2019. “Nancy New who is wonderful and has helped me many times was gonna fund this pregame cream that we can be selling really soon. Well she can only do a small portion now. Jake can explain more but bottom line we need investors and need your direction.”
“Will get with Jake..” the governor responded, “will help all I can.”
Bryant then agreed to accept stock in Prevacus and lobby on its behalf after he left office, before the 2020 arrests derailed his arrangement, Mississippi Today first uncovered in “The Backchannel” series.
Bryant’s involvement in the volleyball project has not been officially scrutinized, until now.
Bryant told Mississippi Today in April that he was aware of Favre’s USM volleyball vision.
“That volleyball thing kept coming up, and popping up, and then it’d go away,” he said.
In the fall of 2019, after the auditor’s investigation had begun, Bryant hosted a meeting at his office with Favre, Nancy New and Bryant’s newly appointed welfare director Christopher Freeze.
“I remember Brett coming one time,” Bryant said. “I wanted to find out where this project was. ‘What is going on with that volleyball project at Southern Miss?’ So I said, ‘Look, Brett wanted to meet. Let’s call him in. Let’s get Chris in there. Tell me about this.’”
Bryant told Mississippi Today that New asked for more funding to put into the volleyball project and he denied her request.
Today, the building is finished and USM volleyball matches are happening there. Services for needy families, however, are not.
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The Mississippi Public Service Commission on Tuesday added a new rebate and low-income credits in its updated rule on compensating homeowners for generating renewable power.
With hopes of growing the number of Mississippians self-generating renewable power, the PSC announced a $3,500 rebate for home and small business owners purchasing a system such as rooftop solar panels, as well as higher payments to households earning up to 250% of the federal poverty level.
“These new rules will make Mississippi open to business to clean energy technology developers, manufacturers, and installers, and will help boost low-income opportunities allowing Mississippians to experience the cost-saving benefits of solar energy,” Central District Public Service Commissioner Brent Bailey said.
Net metering works by customers selling any extra renewable power they generate back to their utility company.
Mississippi has the second-lowest number of participants – roughly 300, as of February – among states with a net metering law. It also was one of the last states to adopt net metering, starting the program in 2015.
Clean energy advocates were critical of the original rule because, unlike in most states, net metering customers in Mississippi aren’t reimbursed at the retail price for their generated power.
The PSC’s regulated utility companies – Entergy Mississippi and Mississippi Power – pushed back against expanding net metering, arguing that paying too much money in incentives puts an unfair cost burden on non-participating customers.
Although the new rule announced this week didn’t raise the reimbursement rate, Mississippi Sierra Club director Louie Miller called it a “win for the clean energy sector.”
“I applaud the commission on what they did, I think they really stepped up,” Miller said. “As we’ve seen with the price of natural gas and with how volatile fossil fuels are, this is going to give a lot of people the option to self-generate their electricity.”
Between the new $3,500 rebate and federal rebates available to self-generating customers, those homeowners are going to “see some real money,” he explained. Miller also pointed to long-term benefits of self-generation, such as during storms when customers lose connection to their utility’s power grid.
Among other changes, the new rule allows the PSC to go back and make changes once the threshold for net metering customers – which increased from 3% of a utility company’s peak demand to 4% – is met, giving the commission more flexibility. The changes also lock in whatever reimbursement rate a customer is receiving for the next 25 years.
The Clevelands welcome old friend Tim Floyd to the pod to talk about all the issues facing college sports. Turns out, there are so many issues that one podcast turned into two. Floyd is outspoken on where college sports is headed with NIL and transfer issues. To be succinct, he doesn’t like where it’s headed and is glad he is retired.
ECRU – John Adam Nowlin wants the world to know what killed his cows.
Nowlin, a farmer who has spent the last four years trying to connect the dots between his dead livestock and a neighboring farm supplies store, is tired. The 39-year-old Ecru native believes the store allowed chemicals from its fertilizer to escape into a stream of water that his animals drank from. He is suing the business over the deaths of five cows and two buffalo.
Having shopped at the store for years, Nowlin said he made the connection almost immediately, recalling a strong whiff of ammonia that hung over his family’s pasture the day of the incident in 2018.
While the business – Jimmy Sanders, Inc., now owned by J.R. Simplot – faced recent regulatory pressure from the state over water pollution, it denies liability for the deaths of Nowlin’s animals.
The farmer admits that his fixation on the case has consumed other facets of his life.
“Fighting is exhausting,” Nowlin said. “But it’ll be worth it. I believe that there’s always consequences for doing what I’m doing. I’m sure it took a piece of me when it happened, when I became passionate about it.
“There is a trade-off, that’s just the way it is. And I can understand it pushing people away.”
While seeking recourse, Nowlin along the way found something bigger than his own case: a gap in clean water enforcement.
Audio of John Adam Nowlin talking about his lawsuit.
In 2014, about four years before Nowlin found the animals dying on his farm, Pinnacle Agriculture – Jimmy Sanders’ former parent company – sent a letter to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, requesting the state to terminate its permit status. At the time, most of the Jimmy Sanders facilities in Mississippi, including the one in Ecru, had a stormwater discharge permit.
Established under the federal Clean Water Act, such permits allow a facility to discharge limited pollutants into public bodies of water. For the Ecru facility, that body of water was the Lappatubby Creek, a stream on the other side of Nowlin’s farm.
Credit: Bethany Atkinson / Mississippi Today
But a permit also means the business has to regularly test what chemicals it releases – often by paying a private lab – and report those numbers to the regulatory agency, which, in this case, is MDEQ.
“No one wants to be subject to environmental regulations if they don’t have to be,” said MDEQ director Chris Wells.
Over the years, the Clean Water Act was amended to include certain industries with “stormwater discharge,” such as when rainfall collects and carries away chemicals left outside a facility.
Jimmy Sanders fell into that criteria until 2014, when Pinnacle wrote in its letter to MDEQ that the stores were misclassified as farm product “storage.” In reality, the letter stated, the stores should be considered farm product “distribution.” The Clean Water Act doesn’t require the latter of the two categories to have a permit.
Siding with the federal statute, MDEQ complied with Pinnacle’s request and agreed to terminate the permit coverage. As far as the state was concerned, the company would no longer be a source of pollution to public waters.
But not only did Jimmy Sanders already have a history of pollution before it received those permits, MDEQ records show, the company would go on to receive two violations for being a “possible source of pollution of state waters” after the state terminated the permits.
Wells of MDEQ told Mississippi Today that neither the state agency nor the EPA has the resources to regulate every business. If a business doesn’t have a permit, it wouldn’t be on the agency’s radar, he explained.
“If somebody is engaging in regulated activity without notifying us, there would be no reason for us to necessarily know that was going on, unless (an MDEQ) employee notices it or somebody lets us know about it,” he said.
With Jimmy Sanders, both violations were a result of citizen complaints, including one from Nowlin about his dead cattle.
Audio of John Adam Nowlin talking about his relationship with the environment.John Adam Nowlin of Ecru feeds buffalo he moved to another section of his land on Friday, May 20, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
One morning in January 2018, Nowlin was carrying a bag of feeding mix out to his family’s 300-acre farm.
The Nowlins have a large footprint in Ecru, a town of about 1,000 people. Ken, John Adam’s father, owns about a dozen different businesses, from the farm to a Shell gas station to an insurance company. John Adam helps out however he can, including feeding the livestock.
But after bringing the food out to the field where the cattle and buffalo had gathered – near a ditch that, he recalled, the animals were drinking out of – Nowlin panicked.
“When I get out there, I see them all convulsing, half of them at least,” he said. “Convulsing on the ground, dying in front of me. We had a bull that was sick. It was violent, acting angry.”
A video he took shows the animals lying on their sides, legs twitching in the air. The footage shows blood near the skin around their stomachs, which Nowlin believes was from intestinal bloating.
Scrambling for an explanation, he called a local veterinarian to take a look. Nowlin weighed whether to just shoot the cattle, but he thought that doing so would make it harder to discover what sickened them in the first place. Four cows and one buffalo died later that day, and another cow and buffalo died two days later.
The local vet connected Nowlin with a Mississippi State University doctor who could conduct a necropsy – an autopsy for animals. Nowlin knew the sooner he could get the bodies there, the better. But he needed a way to transport the carcasses, which weighed a few hundred pounds each.
So Nowlin and a couple of the other farm workers loaded two of the bodies onto a backhoe – a large, claw-shaped shovel used for excavation, like the ones attached to a Caterpillar – and dropped the carcasses onto a flatbed trailer.
They covered the trailer with a tarp, hooked it to the back of a red Dodge pickup truck, and drove the hour and a half to the MSU campus Starkville. As extra evidence, Nowlin scooped a water sample into a plastic water bottle and, for good measure, a dead frog he saw laying in the ditch.
At 9 p.m., they arrived at MSU’s veterinary school and left the bodies with Dr. Tim Morgan.
After a couple of months, Morgan recorded that there were high levels of ammonia in the rumens, one of the sections of a cow’s stomach. The findings, he wrote, were consistent with high levels of exposure to urea – a common ingredient in fertilizer – in a drinking source. Morgan’s official diagnosis was “urea toxicosis.”
John Adam Nowlin relocated his livestock because he believes chemicals from a nearby fertilizer plant caused the contamination of water on his property that sickened and killed many of them. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Having been a customer at Jimmy Sanders and knowing what other businesses were nearby, it didn’t take long for Nowlin to lay the blame for the incident on the farm shop.
“I knew they were responsible within a day for poisoning my cattle,” he said, explaining that there was nowhere else nearby he could think of that worked with chemicals.
In April 2018, Nowlin met with his lawyers and wrote a letter to Jimmy Sanders requesting $27,000 in payment for the damages incurred, including: $10,000 for two dead pregnant buffaloes, $10,000 for five dead pregnant cows, and costs for transportation and veterinary bills.
A lawyer from Baker Donelson representing Jimmy Sanders wrote back, saying they investigated the death of the cattle and “it is not mathematically possible that (the cattle) died from drinking storm water running off of the Sanders property.”
The letter explained that any urea at the facility in January – when the deaths occurred – would have been leftover and dried up from older supply, and that even if it did reach the stream where the cattle drank from, it would have been “far below any level sufficient to cause urea toxicosis.”
The lawyer also said the urea could have come from hay the cows ate. But the water sample Nowlin collected, which Morgan sent to another lab, revealed urea and ammonia at the location Nowlin says the cattle drank from. The amount of urea in the water, Morgan later told MDEQ investigators, was more than four times the concentration needed to poison cattle.
At the very least, chemicals from Jimmy Sanders clearly reached the stream where Nowlin’s animals were drinking from, a Mississippi State professor determined after visiting the farm.
Padmanava Dash, a geoscience professor at MSU, specializes in water quality and has spent years analyzing dangerous toxins, such as those in algae blooms.
Dash heard from a colleague about Nowlin’s situation, specifically that there were high levels of ammonia nitrogen found in the cows’ stomachs. The presence of nitrogen, a food source for algae, caught Dash’s attention.
He connected with Nowlin and agreed to visit the farm. Earlier, in June, Nowlin noticed a green layer of slime that blanketed a pond in the back of his property. When Dash visited a month later, he informed Nowlin that the slimy substance was an algae bloom.
An algae bloom that John Adam Nowlin took a picture of at his pond in Ecru. Credit: John Adam Nowlin
Specifically, they were looking at cyanobacteria, a substance familiar to coastal Mississippi. In 2019, the state had to close its beaches as a health precaution after spotting the algae near the shore. Research shows that agriculture runoff, specifically from fertilizer, is a direct cause of cyanobacteria.
Dash brought samples from the pond back to his lab in Starkville, and found surprising results: the level of microcystins – a toxin produced by cyanobacteria – was higher than five parts per billion, the limit of what his equipment could measure. In drinking water, he explained, any amount over one part per billion can kill a human.
The ditch where Nowlin found his animals dying, and where he says they were drinking water from, connects the algae-covered pond and where he alleges runoff from Jimmy Sanders reached his property.
Mississippi Today asked the professor about the source of the pond’s toxins. Dash, who reviewed satellite images of the area around the farm, said “we know what the source is.”
“The connection is there for sure,” he said. “The (Jimmy Sanders) parking lot directly drains to the ditch, and the ditch runs to the pond. So it’s a direct connection, there is no doubt about it.
“From what I have seen from the digital elevation models and satellite images, there is no point source in the area other than this for the high concentration of the nutrients.”
In August 2018, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality received a complaint from Nowlin about his dead cattle. Following an inspection, MDEQ gave Jimmy Sanders a violation after finding fertilizer residue outside and exposed on the business’ lot, a potential source for water pollution.
Nowlin filed a lawsuit against Jimmy Sanders a couple months later. He soon discovered that the state terminated the store’s discharge permit in 2014, and that regulators wouldn’t have known about the exposed fertilizer if it wasn’t for his complaint. He wondered whether, if the store still had its permit, his cattle would still be alive.
Ecru native John Adam Nowlin believes chemicals from this fertilizer plant caused the contamination of water on his property that sickened and killed his livestock, Friday, May 20, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Nowlin realized that most of the Jimmy Sanders stores in Mississippi also didn’t have permits, and thought maybe he wasn’t alone in his experience. After scouring satellite images on Google Maps, he found and contacted a family living next door to one of the stores in Slate Springs, a north Mississippi town of about 100 people. As it turned out, they had been complaining about Jimmy Sanders for nearly two decades.
In 1999, after the family alerted MDEQ, a state inspector found that Jimmy Sanders was allowing chemical fertilizer to leave its property when it stormed, and that it didn’t have a discharge permit. The report mentions no punishment, only that MDEQ requested that the store get a permit.
The family filed two more complaints about fertilizer runoff. After its last complaint in 2019, the family showed an MDEQ inspector patches of dead grass and the skeletons of two armadillos, all of which they said were killed by runoff. Afterwards, the state fined Jimmy Sanders $17,500, again citing the store as a possible source of water pollution.
MDEQ records show another incident from 2004 in Ecru, where Jimmy Sanders spilled 13,000 gallons of liquid fertilizer, all of which “escaped” after heavy rain, the report said. MDEQ agreed not to pursue enforcement as long as Jimmy Sanders added a new containment unit.
In each of the above incidents, Jimmy Sanders didn’t have a permit, and MDEQ only discovered the infractions after citizen complaints. Most of the company’s Mississippi stores first received permits in 2010, state records show. During inspections that year, MDEQ found deficiencies at almost every one of the facilities due to waste or chemicals being left exposed to stormwater.
Mississippi Today asked Wells, the MDEQ director, about the state terminating Jimmy Sanders’ permits, and whether the company receiving water pollution violations afterwards represented a flaw in the regulatory process. He said he wouldn’t go that far, instead calling it a small gap in an otherwise effective system.
“This is a narrow, specific scenario that may be a perfect storm situation, that I want to be careful that we don’t extrapolate that in a way that undermines the credibility of the entire program,” he said.
Stephanie Showalter-Otts, an environmental law specialist at the University of Mississippi, disagreed that this was a rare situation, saying “it’s not uncommon to find these gaps in the framework” of the Clean Water Act.
She was surprised, though, after being told that Jimmy Sanders no longer needed a permit after changing its industry from farm product “storage” to farm product “distribution.”
“That is a tiny distinction that I wouldn’t have thought would have really changed if they needed a permit or not,” she said, adding that “it can seem arbitrary sometimes” which businesses are required to have a permit.
When asked about a business switching its industry classification, Wells said MDEQ does require the company to submit documents as proof. But, to some extent, the agency has to rely on the company’s honesty, he said.
“If part of what you’re asking me is, did we just take these people at their word that they were this (industry) code instead of the other, to some degree the answer is yes,” Wells said.
Wells declined to comment on the Jimmy Sanders situation specifically, only saying that the agency employees who made the decision to terminate the company’s permits in 2014 no longer worked there. Wells did say that MDEQ can re-evaluate if a company needs a discharge permit.
The scope of what industries are required to have permits is part of the Clean Water Act’s limitations, Showalter-Otts said.
“I think that this just identifies … the flaw in the system, because the federal framework exempts a very large category of pollutants from the permitting system, then that creates loopholes,” she said.
A spokesperson for J.R. Simplot, the company that now owns Jimmy Sanders, said it couldn’t comment on the pending lawsuit with Nowlin, but gave Mississippi Today the following response:
“Since Simplot’s purchase of this facility in 2020, we have taken steps to ensure all of the processes meet or exceed the state and federal guidelines for safe water and other health and safety standards at this and all of our locations. This includes implementing a stormwater pollution prevention plan, and enhanced storage and containment of products at the location.”
Simplot added that it now conducts monthly inspections of the stormwater runoff from the Ecru facility.
John Adam Nowlin walks his property on Friday, May 20, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayAudio of John Adam Nowlin talking about the impact of the lawsuit on his life.
Nowlin describes himself as obsessed. Learning about the other complaints against Jimmy Sanders only raised the stakes. He sees himself as a catalyst for a battle bigger than just avenging his cattle.
“Whenever you do something, you’re going to sacrifice some other part of your life,” Nowlin said. “But I feel like people are dependent on me.”
His sacrifice, Nowlin described, was his mental health and close relationships. He says that people around him can’t understand why this is so important to him.
“I’ve just been swinging my fist, and I’ve not looked up to breathe,” Nowlin said.
In 2019, Nowlin and his wife, who knew each other since childhood, got divorced. He believes his time spent on the Sanders case had something to do with it.
“My stress level is really kind of high at times,” he said. “You spend time with something and you want it to work out and you don’t want it to affect your relationships but it does.”
Despite his lawsuit treading in uncertainty, and despite at times feeling isolated in his venture, he takes comfort in knowing his case is part of what’s recently become a national environmental priority.
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced in a memorandum that it was taking new action to reduce pollution from agricultural runoff. Clean water advocates have pointed to the issue for years, citing effects like the growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
The agency wrote that “nutrients are the most widespread stressor impacting rivers and streams,” adding that “about two-thirds of the nation’s coastal areas and more than one-third of the nation’s estuaries are impaired by nutrients.”
As part of the initiative, EPA said it plans to “deepen and expand” its partnership with the agricultural sector.
In Ecru, Nowlin still takes care of his family’s cattle and buffalo after moving them to a new part of the farm, away from the ditch where it all began in 2018. Weathered from the many hours trying to prove what feels obvious to him, he still has hope.
“I do think things will turn out okay and justice will come,” Nowlin said.
July marked the end of Pride month, but in Mississippi, Pride is just getting started. In this episode of MT Speaks, Mississippi Today talks to Jason McCarty, executive director of Capital City Pride, and Robin McGehee, a Mississippi expat who now lives in California. Jason tells the story of how the organization began, and Robin talks about why staying connected to her home state is important.
David Dennis Jr. grew up with two versions of David Dennis Sr.: one, an activist at the very center of the civil rights movement who skirted death countless times; the other, his father, the man whose approval and attention he desperately wanted.
He remembers wondering as a child how his father “could fight for strangers while the people you said you loved the most fell apart,” he described in a letter written to his dad.
David Dennis Sr. (left) and David Dennis Jr. Credit: Courtesy of the author
It was only through writing “The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride” that Dennis Jr. was able to fully reconcile the two.
“(Writing this book) really brought the two together and helped me understand how one informed the other, and how both created this complete person who led to me, and then to my kids, and all of that,” Dennis said in an interview with Mississippi Today.
“The Movement Made Us” is at once historical and intimately personal – the story is of a father and son, through whom the reader gets a glimpse into an entire lineage. It is also a deeply moving account of the civil rights movement in the South by a man who was in the eye of every storm: the Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, the murder of Medgar Evers and the Harlem riot of 1964.
The book begins with his father as a college student at Dillard University in New Orleans who was initially more interested in ensuring he got his degree and dating an attractive activist than protesting and being arrested. That changed at a meeting following attacks on Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham who were traveling the South in protest of segregation on buses. The meeting was to discuss whether the rides would continue and was attended by Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Andrew Young and other civil rights giants.
It was there that Dennis Sr. heard something that changed the trajectory of his life forever: “Okay, now make your choice, because there’s not enough space in this room for both God and fear.”
After that, all hesitation fell away: he was wholly and completely dedicated to the Movement.
Dennis Sr. went on to serve as field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Louisiana and Mississippi from 1961 through 1965 and as co-director with Bob Moses of the Voter Education Committee of the Council of Federated Organizations. He was part of organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and worked with Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and James Cheney.
He helped find Hamer safety and care after she, along with other activists, were brutally beaten in the Winona jail. He delivered Evers’ eulogy and, if not for a bout of bronchitis, would have been the fourth passenger in the car with Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner that fatal night in Neshoba County.
Dennis Jr. writes his father’s stories as if his father were telling them himself – he successfully uses in-depth interviews with his father and other civil rights workers, CORE files and correspondence and historical research to write an account that makes the readers feel as if they are Dennis Sr.’s very mind in the middle of these harrowing events.
He masterfully fills in gaps in his father’s memory in ways that are just as telling as if Dennis Sr. had remembered each detail. The two had planned to visit Bogalusa to revisit the stories of the Deacons for Defense and Justice and the site of Bloody Wednesday, but Dennis Sr. came down with a stomach ache before they left. Bloody Wednesday refers to the events of May 19, 1965, when a mob of white people joined by police officers attacked and brutalized Black men, women and children at whites-only Cassidy Park.
Dennis Jr. went without his dad and visited with the organizers and family members of the Deacons for Justice. Valeria Hicks, one of the Deacons, told him it was Dennis Sr. who had sent them to Cassidy Park to desegregate it, having no idea it would turn into a bloodbath.
“I know you’re reading this and laughing,” Dennis Jr. wrote in the letter to his dad in the book about his trip. “Because when I tried to tell you what Mrs. Hicks said, you said that calling for the people in Bogalusa to go to Cassidy Park was one of those memories that got closed away forever, and you still don’t remember doing it but ‘it sounds like something I would have done.’ You also swore your stomach ache came from something you ate or whatever. I believe you on both accounts.”
He goes on to write about the lesson he learned when writing the book: sometimes the forgotten parts of one’s past are just as important as the remembered.
“I’ve come to understand that your history is as much about what you don’t remember as it is about what you can recall with precise certainty,” Dennis Jr. writes in a letter to his father in the book. “… But you know that our bodies tell the stories our minds can’t.”
Credit: Courtesy of the author
Letters from Dennis Jr. to his father and children are peppered in between his father’s stories. They offer insights into his relationship with his father and show the unsettling parallels between what Dennis Sr. lived through in the 1960s and the events of 2018, 2019 and 2020, during which the father and son were writing the book, and Dennis Jr., a journalist, was covering the murders of Black men like Ahmaud Arbery and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement.
“It was the summer of 2020. The summer of reckoning. The summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks and the largest protest in American history. I was tearing myself apart trying to cover as much of the American terror as possible, traveling to Brunswick, Georgia, to get the story of Ahmaud Arbery and chronicling every police killing because I felt like it was my responsibility to save these lives that had already been taken from us. I was burning out, breaking down, and falling apart.”
At the same time, his father had gone off the grid. The killings of that year were too similar to the murders in the 1960s – it was more than he could take.
Dennis Sr. had seen the video of George Floyd, screaming that he couldn’t breathe and asking for his mother. He had spent years wondering how it was when Chaney and Evers and all the others had died. Now, he saw.
“I’m seeing how they died now, Davy. George Floyd cried for his damn momma. I can’t stop hearing him screaming … For the first time I watched what it was like for white folks to kill us slowly,” he told his son over the phone. “… I hadn’t even considered if Medgar or James screamed for their mommas. Now I can’t stop wondering if they did.”
Dennis Jr. said that was a very dark period for both him and his father.
“You can feel like nothing has changed – you can let that despair take over, and I was letting that happen,” he said.
The two “came out the other side,” though, he said. They finished the book, which has been met with well-deserved praise and described as incredibly timely and “one of the most important books about the Civil Rights Movement” by author Clint Smith.
Dennis Jr. and his father will return to Mississippi, the scene of so much of the book, to the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 20. The father and son will join Dr. Leslie-Burl McLemore, a fellow civil rights activist and director of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy at Jackson State University, for a panel moderated by Pamela Junior, director of the Two Mississippi Museums.
“It’s special because there’s so much that’s happened there, and so many of the people are still there,” he said. “… I’m hoping we can go back to Mississippi as often as possible. There’s so much soul and spirit in the book (and its characters), and you can feel it when you’re there.”
