OurTupelo

For decades, this haunted piece of history — the weapon allegedly used to kill Emmett Till — lay in a wooden drawer, gathering dust.

That changed in 2004 when FBI agent Dale Killinger began reinvestigating Till’s lynching.

The longtime owner of the weapon, who asked not to be named for fear of harassment or retribution, said the FBI kept the gun “for a year almost to the day.”

On Thursday, the .45-caliber pistol that J.W. Milam is believed to have used to pistol-whip and shoot the Black Chicago teen became part of the Emmett Till Exhibit at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. 

In World War II, Milam served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Force and brought back the Ithaca Model M1911-A1 .45-caliber pistol.

Milam and his half-brother, Roy Bryant, abducted Till from his great uncle’s home in the wee hours of Aug. 28, 1955. The white men heard that Till had reportedly wolf-whistled at Bryant’s wife Carolyn.

They took Till to a barn, where Bryant, Milam and others brutally beat him. Witnesses heard Till’s screams.

Till was beaten so badly there was talk of dropping him off at a hospital, but Milam killed him with a single bullet.

An all-white jury acquitted the half-brothers of Till’s murder. They later admitted to Look magazine they had indeed killed Till, who had just celebrated his 14th birthday.

During the FBI’s investigation of the Till murder, authorities exhumed his body. X-rays revealed extensive skull fractures and metallic fragments in the skull. There were also fractures to the left femur and the left and right wrist bones. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Illinois concluded that Till died of a gunshot wound to the head.

During the autopsy, doctors found four lead fragments that experts determined were consistent with lead shot pellets. The FBI learned that the size of those pellets matched the size of the lead shot manufactured for the Army Air Force.

The longtime owner said his father was a gun collector and a friend of one of the lawyers who defended the half-brothers. He said his father got the gun from one of those lawyers around 1959 or 1960.

Years after his father died, he said his mother announced that she wanted the gun out of the house. She gave it to his sister, and from that moment on, the siblings became the gun’s owners.

The longtime gun owner said the family knew they had something of historical value, but “none of our children cared about or wanted the gun.”

In recent years, they had offers from private collectors to sell the gun, but “we didn’t want to go that route,” he said.

Instead, they decided to make the gun available to the foundation for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which in turn has added the weapon to the Civil Rights Museum.

The gun makes a lighted appearance during a 6-minute film about the case, narrated by Oprah Winfrey.

It’s the second such weapon in the department’s possession. The first is the .30-06 rifle used in 1963 to kill Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, which can also be seen at the museum.

The FBI’s borrowing of the gun proved fortuitous. During the year the FBI had the weapon, the longtime owner said his sister suffered a break-in during which guns were stolen.

The thief never got a shot at the .45 that changed the course of history.

From that moment forward, the gun spent its days in a safety deposit box in a bank in Greenwood, the longtime owner recalled. “It could have been lost, but the truth is, it was never hidden.”

U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Thursday launched her reelection campaign for a second full term by highlighting her advocacy for Mississippi farmers, fighting to overturn abortion rights and having a strong relationship with President Donald Trump. 

The state’s junior U.S. senator was greeted by about 150 supporters at the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum in Jackson. They cheered when she promoted the passage of the “one big beautiful bill,” President Donald Trump-backed legislation that expanded some tax cuts and spending and slashed social safety net programs. 

“The past eight months, we have delivered for the American people,” Hyde-Smith said. 

The senator was flanked by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who spoke in support of her. The pair visited Mississippi State University earlier in the day to announce new policy addressing the state’s veterinarian shortage. 

Rollins said Hyde-Smith fights daily on Capitol Hill for farmers and the agriculture industry by ensuring federal agency leaders understand how federal regulations impact Mississippi farmers. 

“She is a warrior’s warrior,” Rollins said of the senator. “She will never rest until she serves this state and this country to the very best of her ability.” 

Hyde-Smith also praised the Trump administration’s stance on tax policy, heralded its efforts to increase oil drilling, and promoted her own efforts to fight for conservative social policies in Congress. 

A key message she delivered on Thursday is her close relationship with Trump, who has already endorsed her reelection bid. 

“I can send a text to President Trump, and he responds,” she said. 

But at the event, Hyde-Smith touted some policies that likely don’t align with Trump’s agenda, most notably her disagreements with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

“Bobby Kennedy is going to do some really good things,” she said. “I think that he’s going to do some things that are beneficial. But when he crossed over into the line of production agriculture, we had a little dustup. I’ll be honest with you, we had a pretty big dustup over it. I told him in the beginning that when you come after the American farmer and the products that we have depended on for 50-something years, and you think you’re going to take them off the market, I’m going to be the first one through your door.” 

While the senator was not specific about the disagreement with Kennedy, she seemed to be referring to a back-and-forth she had with Kennedy in an Appropriations Committee meeting about the Cabinet secretary’s fight against certain pesticides. 

According to the New York Times, Hyde-Smith told Kennedy not to interfere with the livelihood of American farmers by suggesting certain pesticides are unsafe. 

Hyde-Smith also stated that the state’s agriculture sector needs to be bolstered by migrant farmworkers, as the country would “starve to death” without them. However, she emphasized that the workers should enter the country legally. 

The senator also joked about riding in a truck with a member of the audience and “spotlighting” deer along a trail, something that is illegal in Mississippi.  

“We didn’t spotlight that night, did we? Oh, we didn’t shoot anything. That’s it,” Hyde-Smith said. 

Spotlighting is an illegal hunting technique where a hunter shines a high-powered light at a deer, causing the animal to freeze and making it easier to kill. If someone is caught shining a light at the deer at night, it can result in a hefty fine and the loss of hunting privileges. It is also illegal to intentionally shine lights at deer without shooting them.

Hyde-Smith said the audience member had a large flashlight with a “spinner” on it.  

“I said, ‘I probably need to get out of this truck right now,’” Hyde-Smith said. 

Even though the U.S. Senate race won’t occur until 2026, it appears Hyde-Smith’s Thursday event is a signal that she’s taking a likely competitive reelection campaign seriously.

Scott Colom, a district attorney in north Mississippi, is widely rumored to be considering a run for the Democratic nomination. U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has said he’s looking for ways to break the GOP’s grip on Mississippi in 2026. 

Ty Pinkins, a 2023 unsuccessful candidate for Mississippi Secretary of State and a 2024 unsuccessful Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, is running as an independent. 

Before she faces Colom and Pinkins, though, Hyde-Smith will have to capture the GOP nomination. 

Hyde-Smith has attracted two Republican primary challengers, neither of whom has held elected office before. One of the challengers entered the race at a press conference hours before Hyde-Smith announced her reelection bid.

Andrew Scott Smith, who has a pork rinds business, calls himself the “Pigskin Politician.” The 29-year-old Florence resident announced his bid for the U.S. Senate on Thursday behind a podium set up between the William F. Winter Archives and History Building and the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson.

Smith said he was challenging Hyde-Smith because she has become disconnected from her constituents.

Smith, who considers himself a monopoly-busting conservative in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, said he hopes to address consolidation in the American economy through index funds. He also wants to focus on the “fiscal future” of the country by phasing out social security and federalizing the national debt.

Smith took a swipe at Hyde-Smith’s other Republican challenger: Sarah Adlakha “or however you pronounce her last name,” as Smith said in his speech.

Adlakha had already entered the race before Thursday. A physician, Adlakha says on her campaign website that she is running “to protect the values that raised her—faith, family, freedom, and hard work — by securing the border, stopping reckless spending, improving healthcare, and putting Mississippi first.”

Hyde-Smith, a Brookhaven resident, previously served in the Mississippi Senate before being elected to the statewide post of commissioner of agriculture and commerce. In 2018, former Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her to the U.S. Senate to replace Thad Cochran, who opted to retire. She has since been elected to the U.S. Senate twice. 

In 2018 and 2020, Hyde-Smith defeated Democrat Mike Espy, an attorney, a former congressman and former U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. 

Mississippi Today reporter Michael Goldberg contributed to this report.

A high-ranking lawmaker is asking Mississippi to use $5 million of opioid settlement money to explore the medical potential of ibogaine, a drug with mixed evidence of its ability to safely treat addiction. 

At a meeting Thursday of the House and Senate committees that deal with public health, Republican Rep. Sam Creekmore of New Albany invited testimony from speakers who support the use of the chemical for treating post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and opioid addiction. Creekmore, who chairs the House Public Health and Human Services Committee, said Mississippi could prevent suicides and drug overdoses by investing in clinical trials that study the drug.

“We cannot keep using the same conventional methods for these ailments and expect different results,” he said. 

Some studies suggest ibogaine, a molecule found in a shrub native to West Africa, can help treat substance use disorder. But analyses of these research papers have pointed out that most of the evidence comes from studies with few people and no comparison group. 

A review conducted by researchers across North American universities in March found that most examinations into psychedelics, including ibogaine, and their ability to treat opioid addiction were “found to have high risk of bias” because of their study designs. It said there were possible ibogaine deaths in two of the studies. 

While many mental health conditions do not have clear treatments, the FDA has approved medications that effectively treat opioid use disorder. Addiction researchers across the country call two of them, buprenorphine and methadone, the “gold standard” for treating opioid addiction.

Ibogaine has been linked to dangerous heart problems, particularly cardiac arrhythmias. Brian Shoichet, the University of California San Francisco Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry chair and a psychedelic researcher, told Mississippi Today in an email that while making access to ibogaine easier may help a lot of people with mental illness, it could also lead to more deaths.

“There are alternatives to ibogaine, often having the same mechanism of action but without the arrhythmias, that will be safer and perhaps just as efficacious,” he said. 

It’s uncommon for any state to fund clinical trials. Studies for many treatments for mental illness are funded by private investors or branches of the National Institutes of Health. But over the past few years, some states have proposed using public dollars to fund experiments on the drug. Last spring, Texas set aside $50 million and Arizona allocated $5 million for ibogaine clinical trials.

Five speakers, including three Mississippi military veterans, shared personal stories about traveling outside the U.S. to receive ibogaine treatments for mental disorders. All praised the drug’s impact on their lives and encouraged lawmakers to fund ibogaine clinical trials.

“My migraines vanished, my chronic depression was dramatically alleviated,” Myles Grantham, a Mississippian who served in the Army, told the committee. “For the first time in years, I felt a shift.” 

Bryan Hubbard, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Americans for Ibogaine and a speaker at the hearing, has traveled to states across the country encouraging lawmakers to invest in Ibogaine research. He told Mississippi Today the drug’s dangerous side effects can be mitigated under proper medical administration, and some Mississippians with mental health disorders could join the experiments as participants if the state provides money for the trials.

Hubbard said ibogaine drug development is expected to cost $300 million to $350 million, and he hopes trials could lead to a Food and Drug Administration approval of ibogaine as a medication within six years. He criticized existing addiction medications like buprenorphine and methadone, saying the crisis has persisted even with these treatments available. 

“We are here to introduce an additional therapeutic option through a fractional amount of money that is used on what we have just for a potential breakthrough,” Hubbard said. 

Dr. Benjamin Howell, a faculty member of the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine, said in May that while buprenorphine and methadone aren’t perfect, they’ve been proven over decades to treat opioid addiction well. 

He said one of the biggest reasons tens of thousands of Americans continue to die of overdoses is because they can’t get these treatments. 

“I’m open minded that there might be future treatments that could be developed that are superior,” he said. “And yet, we also don’t have systems that are allowing everyone to get access to the medications that we know work.”

Most of the money Mississippi has received from the opioid lawsuits – cases that accused pharmaceutical companies of marketing and distributing prescription painkillers in a way that led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths – is controlled by state lawmakers. 

Unlike most states, the Legislature and Attorney General Lynn Fitch have set aside some funds to be spent on purposes other than addressing addiction and have yet to spend any of the state government’s share on curtailing the public crisis.

Creekmore told Mississippi Today he would like the Legislature to use millions of dollars from the general purposes settlement pot to financially support pharmaceutical companies that could run ibogaine clinical trials. 

“We could pave a road with it,” he said. “But I think it needs to go toward opioid abatement.”

Nine out of 10 drug clinical trials fail to receive FDA approval, but Creekmore said he believes the risk of not funding ibogaine research outweighs the risk of Mississippi’s settlement money not leading to a new medication.

He pointed to some of the public speakers’ stories of ibogaine treatment as evidence that the experiments are worth pursuing.

“It’s obviously working or they wouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Ibogaine is a Schedule 1 drug on the U.S. list of controlled substances, meaning the federal government believes the compound is dangerous and has no medical use. The scheduling system has been criticized by many public health researchers who say it can prevent research into potential medications. 

Mississippi Department of Mental Health Medical Director Dr. Thomas Recore gave the health committees an overview of the potential of psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, to treat mental health conditions. He told lawmakers that as they think about whether to invest in ibogaine trials, they should consider whether it has enough potential to merit further study rather than whether it’s a cure-all for all mental afflictions. 

“The answer for me is a clear yes,” he said. 

Creekmore has been writing opinion pieces promoting ibogaine’s potential therapeutic uses throughout the summer. He frequently cites a 2024 Stanford University study in which researchers reported that among 30 veterans with mild traumatic brain injuries, many had decreased PTSD, depression and anxiety treatments a month after receiving ibogaine treatment. 

The scientists did not report any adverse cardiac effects in the study, which they said could be because the veterans received magnesium simultaneously. 

Creekmore and Recore were two attendees of dozens for a conference Hubbard organized last spring called the Aspen Ibogaine Meeting. Its website says the group hosted lawmakers from as many as 17 different states. 

Robert Gulock, the meeting’s coordinator and a private medical consultant, told Mississippi Today in May that Creekmore and the other legislators paid for their flights and lodging themselves. Creekmore and Hubbard said they do not have financial ties to the development of ibogaine as a medication.

Howell, the Yale physician, said he believes the public health priority for preventing more overdose deaths should be connecting people who need it with tools already proven to be effective, rather than a compound that could take years to move through the FDA approval process and may not lead to any new medication. 

“The history of medicine is littered with things that didn’t work out,” he said.

A three-judge panel of the Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled that court records in a politically charged business dispute will remain confidential, even though courts are supposed to be open to the public. 

The panel, comprised of Justice Josiah Coleman, Justice James Maxwell and Justice Robert Chamberlin, denied a request from Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald that sought to force Chancery Judge Neil Harris to unseal court records in a Jackson County Chancery Court case or conduct a hearing on unsealing the court records. 

The Supreme Court panel did not address whether Harris erred by sealing court records and it has not forced the judge to comply with the court’s prior landmark decisions detailing how judges are allowed to seal court records in  extraordinary circumstances. 

The case in question has drawn a great deal of public interest. The lawsuit seeks to dissolve a company called Securix Mississippi LLC that used traffic cameras to ticket uninsured motorists in numerous cities in the state.

The uninsured motorist venture has since been disbanded and is the subject of two federal lawsuits, neither of which are under seal. In one federal case, an attorney said the chancery court file was sealed to protect the political reputations of the people involved. 

READ MORE: Private business ticketed uninsured Mississippi vehicle owners. Then the program blew up.

Quinton Dickerson and Josh Gregory, two of the leaders of QJR, are the owners of Frontier Strategies. Frontier is a consulting firm that has advised numerous elected officials, including four sitting Supreme Court justices. The three justices who considered the media’s motion for relief were not clients of Frontier. 

The two news outlets on Thursday filed a motion asking the Supreme Court for a rehearing. 

Courts are open to public

In their motion for a rehearing, the media companies are asking that the Supreme Court send the case back to chancery court, where Harris should be required to give notice and hold a hearing to discuss unsealing the remaining court files.

Courts and court files are supposed to be open and accessible to the public. The Supreme Court has, since 1990, followed a ruling that lays out a procedure judges are supposed to follow before closing any part of a court file. The judge is supposed to give 24 hours notice, then hold a hearing that gives the public, including the media, an opportunity to object.

At the hearing, the judge must consider alternatives to closure and state any reasons for sealing records. 

Instead, Harris closed the court record without explanation the same day the case was filed in September 2024. In June, Harris denied a motion from Mississippi Today to unseal the file.

The case, he wrote in his order, is between two private companies. “There are no public entities included as parties,” he wrote, “and there are no public funds at issue. Other than curiosity regarding issues between private parties, there is no public interest involved.”

But that is at least partially incorrect. The case involves Securix Mississippi working with city police departments to ticket uninsured motorists. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety had signed off on the program and was supposed to be receiving a share of the revenue.

Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald then filed for relief with the state Supreme Court, arguing that Harris improperly closed the court file without notice and did not conduct a hearing to consider alternatives. 

After the media outlets’ appeal to the Supreme Court, Harris ordered some of the records in the case to be unsealed.

But he left an unknown number of exhibits under seal, saying they contain “financial information” and are being held in a folder in the Chancery Clerk’s Office.

File improperly sealed, media argues

The three-judge Supreme Court panel determined the media appeal was no longer relevant because Harris had partially unsealed the court file. 

In the news outlets’ appeal for rehearing, they argue that if the Supreme Court does not grant the motion, the state’s highest court would virtually give the press and public no recourse to push back on judges when they question whether court records were improperly sealed. 

“The original … sealing of the entire file violated several rights of the public and press … which if not overruled will be capable of repetition yet, evading review,” the motion reads. 

The media companies also argue that Harris’ order partially unsealing the chancery court case was not part of the record on appeal and should not have been considered by the Supreme Court. His order to partially unseal the case came 10 days after Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald filed their appeal to the Supreme Court.

READ MORE: Judge holds secret hearing in business fight over uninsured motorist enforcement

Charlie Mitchell, a lawyer and former newspaper editor who has taught media law at the University of Mississippi for years, called Judge Harris’ initial order keeping the case sealed “illogical.” He said the judge’s second order partially unsealing the case appears “much closer” to meeting the court’s standard for keeping records sealed, but the judge could still be more specific and transparent in his orders. 

Instead of simply labeling the sealed records as “financial information,” Mitchell said the Supreme Court could promote transparency in the judiciary by ordering Harris to conduct a hearing — something he should have done from the outset — or redact portions of the exhibits.  

“Closing a record or court matter as the preference of the parties is never — repeat never — appropriate,” Mitchell said. “It sounds harsh, but if parties don’t want the public to know about their disputes, they should resolve their differences, as most do, without filing anything in a state or federal court.” 

A gun used during the killing of Emmett Till is now on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. It’s a grim artifact from the 1955 lynching of a Black teenager at the hands of angry white men – a crime that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

“One of the reasons why this civil rights museum was created is to tell the unvarnished truth about what happened in terms of the Civil Rights Movement here in Mississippi,” Michael Morris, director of the Two Mississippi Museums, said during a news conference Thursday. “That’s our mission, and I think the acquisition of this artifact is a part of our mission.”

The Foundation for Mississippi History acquired the .45-caliber pistol and holster for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The items came from “a Mississippi family that is not connected to the case,” the department said in a press release Thursday, the 70th anniversary of Till’s lynching.

The gun was once owned by J.W. Milam, one of the two white men charged with murder in Till’s death and acquitted by an all-white jury weeks after the killing. The weapon was later owned by someone else.

Acquisition of the gun happened under the condition that those who most recently had the weapon would remain anonymous, said Morris, who oversees the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History. Morris did not disclose other terms.

“We thought we had a moral obligation to go out and try to acquire it,” Morris said. “Once we got acquisition of it, the question became: Should we put it on display? And we didn’t think that this was the kind of artifact that we wanted to just put away in a drawer somewhere.”

The gun and holster were added to an exhibit that tells the story of Till’s lynching.

Nan Prince, the department’s director of collections, said the gun is “a very hard thing to see.”

“This weapon has affected me moreso than any other artifact that I’ve encountered in my 30-year museum career,” Prince said. “The emotions that are centered around it are hard, and a hard thing to see and a hard thing to convey.”

In August 1955, 14-year-old Till traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to visit his cousins. Till and other young Black people went to buy snacks one day at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the tiny community of Money. Till’s cousin Simeon Wright later said he heard Till whistle at the white storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant, as they left.

Days later, a group that included Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother Milam kidnapped Till from the home of Till’s great uncle, Moses Wright. They took Till to a barn, where they beat, tortured and shot him. Milam is believed to have used the .45 to pistol-whip and fatally shoot Till.

The group dumped Till in the Tallahatchie River, using barbed wire to attach a 75-pound cotton gin fan to him. Till’s body was discovered three days later, decomposed beyond recognition except for his father’s ring on one of his fingers.

Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so people could see what had been done to her son, and Jet magazine published a photo of his brutalized body.

An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted Milam and Bryant of Till’s murder in September 1955. Months later, Milam and Bryant admitted their involvement to Look magazine.

In World War II, Milam served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Force and brought back the Ithaca Model M1911-A1 .45-caliber pistol, which has the serial number 2102279.

Morris said the department notified Till’s relatives about the Department of Archives and History’s acquisition of the gun. The department’s press release said Wheeler Parker, a cousin who was in the home when Till was kidnapped, thanked the department for acquiring and displaying the artifacts.

“I think it’s good because it brings closure,” Parker said. “I hope you guys can find the ring and cotton gin.”

Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp discovered the existence of the .45 pistol while working on his 2005 documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.” He shared the email with FBI agent Dale Killinger, who investigated the Till case. 

The owner of the weapon had kept it in a safety deposit box in a Greenwood bank, according to Wright Thompson’s book, “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.”

During the FBI’s 2005 investigation into the case, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Illinois did an autopsy that found Till’s cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.

This announcement about the department’s acquisition of the gun comes a week after the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released more than 6,500 pages of documents on Till’s case.

It’s the second murder weapon in possession of the Department of Archives and History. The first is the .30-06 rifle used in 1963 to kill Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, which can be seen at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

Mississippi Today’s Jerry Mitchell contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Ideas is publishing guest essays from people impacted by Hurricane Katrina during the week of the 20th anniversary of the storm that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

I don’t have any really good Katrina stories to tell.

Thinking about Katrina, even 20 years later, still freaks me right the hell out.

Many people will be remembering the storm on Aug. 29. I promise you, I will be doing my best not to think about it. Katrina in one way or another consumed years of my adult life, personally and professionally.

Honestly, I wish I had not volunteered a few months back to write this column. But I did my job after Katrina, and I’ll do it now.

I was a reporter/editor for the Sun Herald in 2005, basically Capitol bureau chief covering the Legislature and state government, splitting time between Jackson, the Coast and Hattiesburg. I had recently moved from the Coast to Hattiesburg — for reasons I’ll get to later — and I spent much time burning up U.S. 49 going to and fro.

One of the clearest early recollections I still have of Katrina is being at the Sun Herald the day before, getting ready to head back to Hattiesburg with a couple of newspaper staffers who planned to ride it out at my house (Hattiesburg, as we and the National Guard soon discovered, wasn’t far enough away). Someone was going through the newsroom saying, “Hey, y’all, look at this.”

They had a copy of “The Bulletin,” as it’s now known. They said something like, “I think the National Weather Service is telling us to kiss our butts goodbye.”

The NWS bulletin, in all caps, said in part: “URGENT … DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED … MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS PERHAPS LONGER … PERSONS PETS AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK … POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS … WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS … DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!”

Well, most of us had covered hurricanes before. Some longer-time staffers had been through many. And while we knew Katrina was going to be bad, we thought that NWS communique was downright weird, perhaps a bit too alarmist.

But it was prophetic.

Even 70 miles inland, Katrina was terrifying. But my memories of the actual storm have grown fuzzy. I do remember heading out well before dawn the next morning, trying to make it to Jackson in time for a helicopter sortie of state officials and media Gov. Haley Barbour had arranged to view the damage on the Coast. It took me forever to maneuver around trees across the highway or wait as crews cut paths. Early on, the radio news loop kept saying New Orleans had been spared major destruction.

But as the sun came up and I got closer to Jackson, new reports started coming in that Louisiana and New Orleans were hit hard, levees had been breached and New Orleans was seeing massive flooding.

My heart sank. At the time, I was as worried about the fate of New Orleans — particularly Ochsner Medical Center — as I was Mississippi.

My first wife, Jennifer, had at the time recently been placed on the heart transplant list at Ochsner. We were living in Hattiesburg to be near family who were helping and still be close enough to Ochsner to rush there when a donor heart became available.

The helicopter flight over the Coast that morning was surreal and horrifying. It looked like, as Gov. Barbour said that day, an atomic bomb had gone off, or the hand of God had wiped large swaths of the Coast away.

Communications after Katrina were crap. Cellphone service was worse than spotty, and I hadn’t been able to reach anyone or have a photographer on the flight with me. I shot photos with a point-and-shoot while white knuckled and leaning out the door of a Huey.

And not having talked with anyone at the Sun Herald, as we flew over the destruction, my mind raced: How many of my colleagues and friends died in this storm? How will the Coast ever recover from this? Did Ochsner hospital survive?

Back on the ground at an Air Guard base in Gulfport, I managed to borrow a satellite phone and talk with my boss at the Sun Herald. Most, but not all, employees had been accounted for, but they were still unable to get in touch with some in Bay St. Louis and Hancock County. It would be a few days before we learned that, miraculously, no newspaper employees had died in the storm, although at least one had family members who perished.

The first few months after the storm are kind of a blur to me now, other than we were very busy. I spent much of my time following Gov. Barbour from Jackson to the Coast to Washington, and at times following President George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran and others as they tried to figure out a recovery plan and funding.

There were special legislative sessions. Big political fights. I had to spend about a month in D.C. watching Congress dicker over Katrina relief spending.

Ochsner wasn’t destroyed by Katrina, but it went into triage mode, and a lot of staff left. Its transplant unit technically kept running, but … not like normal. We had been assured pre-Katrina that the wait for a donor heart should be six months, tops.

One can’t just jump from one hospital’s transplant list to another. It doesn’t work that way. And you have to be within about two hours of a hospital. At the time, they weren’t doing heart transplants in Mississippi.

It took well over a year for Jennifer to get a heart, and she got sicker and sicker in the meantime, amidst Katrina’s aftermath.

She passed away, from an infection, about a month shy of a year after Katrina.

The official death count for Katrina was 1,833, including 238 in Mississippi. It caused $108 billion in damage, destroyed 104,000 housing units in Mississippi including 51,000 houses.

But those numbers don’t cover collateral damage, or all the anguish that storm caused. Those National Weather Service folks were right. The human suffering was incredible by modern standards.

I really intended to have a different focus with this column — perhaps tell a few journalism war stories, talk about the years-long recovery efforts, heck, maybe even try to write something more uplifting about Mississippians’ famous resiliency, how people “hitched up their britches” and got to work on recovery.

I remember a woman on the Coast at a town hall meeting some time well after the storm opined that she was sick and damned tired of being so resilient.

But as I sat to write this, I couldn’t really dredge up any good Katrina stories.

And I damned sure can’t think of anything good to say about that storm, other than all storms end, the sun eventually comes out and life goes on.

I’m afraid I just told a bad Katrina story, and I told it poorly. It’s one I haven’t told very often and I don’t intend to any more if I can help it. But I guess it’s my main Katrina story.

I try to forget that storm as much as possible, when not required to think about it for work. I’m ready for this “anniversary” to be over, and I hope my memories of it fade even more.

Katrina sucked.

GULFPORT — Rocking on his front porch overlooking the Mississippi Sound, former Gulfport Mayor Billy Hewes questions how anyone wouldn’t want to live there.

“People are always going to gravitate to the water,” he said. “And we have a beautiful waterfront.”

But it was far from certain that people would return after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which killed 238 people in Mississippi and left only concrete slabs in many areas. With beachfront rebuilding crawling along a decade later, Gulfport began offering property tax breaks to those who built near the water. Hewes said the goal was for people to “build back better, quicker, help kick-start the economy.”

Where to encourage building is a thorny decision for local governments in areas exposed to floods or wildfires. Despite risks including rising sea levels, places need residents and taxpayers. Like other Gulf Coast cities after Katrina, Gulfport required residents to build at higher elevations and enforced a stronger building code. But most residents near the water are in at least a moderate-risk flood zone. Nationwide, many more homes are being built in flood zones than are being removed.

“The local government was not necessarily thinking we need people to build in this flood-prone place,” Miyuki Hino, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who researches flooding, said of such decisions. “They were thinking we have this land that’s underutilized and we can increase our property tax revenue.”

Storm left a ‘postapocalyptic’ wasteland

Allen Baker lived through 1969’s Hurricane Camille in neighboring Long Beach and thought he knew what to expect after Katrina. But the 2005 storm was far worse. His historic beachfront home was blown to bits by what witnesses said was a tornado spun off by the hurricane.

“Coming back, there was no home,” Baker said.

All along the coast, neighborhoods between the beach and a railroad track just to the north were shredded by a battering storm tide and winds. Recovery was slow for years.

“It was kind of spooky down here,” Baker said. “I mean, it looked like one of your postapocalyptic movies.”

Baker and his wife waited. They didn’t move into a new home until 2016, after Gulfport began waiving city property taxes for seven years when owners invested certain amounts in building south of the railroad tracks. Property owners still had to pay county and school taxes.

Sixty properties received Gulfport’s tax break before the city stopped approving new applicants in 2021, tax records show. The savings weren’t huge, typically $500 to $1,000 a year, depending on property value. But Baker and others said it was a sign to stop hesitating and start building.

“In simple terms, it was a green light,” Baker said.

Steel rods and thick foundations

Not every area has recovered equally. In a lower-lying area on the west side of Gulfport, where rotting chicken and giant paper bales washed up from the port, many lots are still vacant. But one block inland on the east side, attractive new houses mix with structures that survived.

Hewes also benefited from the tax break, building a new home on a beachfront site owned by his family since 1904 — the second-most valuable house built under the program, according to tax records. Hewes said he and his wife used their tax savings to build stronger.

“We put a lot more money into actually hardening this home to a much higher standard,” Hewes said.

Baker’s current house also exceeds Gulfport’s building code, with steel rods inside walls that tie into a 3-foot-thick concrete foundation and fasten down the roof. That qualified the home for an insurance industry standard called “fortified,” which provides savings on expensive wind insurance. But only 1,500 homes in Mississippi have fortified status, according to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. That compares with 9,000 in Louisiana and 50,000 in nation-leading Alabama.

Baker, who became a civil engineer after flying airliners, argues beachfront areas need an extra-strict building code.

“Everything about this house is built to be punished,” he said. “If you seriously want to live in this environment, you have to plan for that.”

Some progress, but not enough?

Katherine Egland, a Gulfport resident who chairs the NAACP’s national Environmental and Climate Justice Committee, fears the community may not be prepared for the next big storm.

“I’m not saying we didn’t make some progress,” Egland said. “What I’m saying is we didn’t make nearly the amount of progress that we should have made.”

She still rejects how Mississippi prioritized business recovery and says some development farther inland has worsened rainwater flooding in historically Black neighborhoods. Areas targeted by the tax break are whiter and more affluent than the city overall.

“You’re giving incentives to residents south of the tracks, but at the same time, you are imperiling residents that live north of the tracks,” Egland said.

Most of the first block facing the beach in Gulfport is rated as having a 1% yearly chance of flooding, although what’s called the 100-year flood zone sometimes stretches farther back. The Federal Emergency Management Agency considers almost all of the rest of the area south of the railroad track to have between a 1% and a 0.2% risk of flooding annually. Flood insurance generally isn’t required in that moderate risk area.

Hino said it’s “absolutely true” that elevating a building reduces risk but said risk grows over time with rising sea levels, which could require someone to elevate a house multiple times over decades. And while a 1% yearly risk of flooding sounds low, those odds add up over time.

“Over the course of your 30-year mortgage, you have a 40% chance of flooding,” Hino said.

It’s not unusual that houses were built in a flood zone in Gulfport. From 2001 to 2019, more than 840,000 homes were built in flood plains nationwide, according to a 2024 University of Miami study. That’s in part because the federally subsidized National Flood Insurance Program will repeatedly pay to rebuild, no matter how high the risk

“The incentive for local governments is to build, and in some ways the incentive for people is to stay where they are,” Hino said.

The buyout that didn’t happen

There was a plan to get more people out of Mississippi flood zones. Federal officials considered buying out 2,000 properties at highest risk of being damaged by hurricane storm tides. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projected that a $408 million buyout, in 2008 dollars, would lower potential yearly storm damage by $22 million to $33 million. But Congress never appropriated the money.

Hino said buyouts can create parkland that serves both as an environmental buffer and an amenity. But Hewes said he thinks Gulfport’s choices “may have done more for our recovery than any sort of federal buyout.” He said it took years for Gulfport to productively reuse land from a pre-Katrina buyout along a flood-prone bayou.

“Do you create an area that is blighted, that is abandoned, that is neglected after the fact?” Hewes asked.

Even without the tax break, construction is continuing in beachfront areas. But it may not be clear how successful recovery has been until those new buildings are tested by the next major hurricane.

“Some people have built out of concrete,” Baker said. “Some people have built out of better materials. Some people have not. And those people are going to be in for a shock.”

READ MORE: The home that became Bay Town Inn survived 100 years until Hurricane Katrina hit

READ MORE: Pass Christian family, like Gulf Coast, overcomes devastation of Hurricane Katrina

READ MORE: A conversation with Jim Barksdale, who led Mississippi’s post-Katrina recovery commission

Jackson faces many of the same issues it did 10 years ago, including youth crime, lack of economic development and failing infrastructure, according to testimony Mayor John Horhn and state officials gave Wednesday to a House committee.

The stuck-in-amber nature of Mississippi’s capital city was highlighted by a moment when Rep. Chris Bell, a Democratic lawmaker from Jackson who sits on the Capital City Revitalization Committee, asked Horhn about a state-funded study on gangs. 

The 2016 study, paid for with $500,000 in funding Horhn secured while senator, found in part that Jackson’s gangs were mainly neighborhood cliques of young adult men. 

“Are these some of the same issues that we’re seeing back then and we still have today?” Bell asked. 

“Absolutely,” Horhn responded. 

It was Horhn’s first time to publicly address his former colleagues through the select committee, formed by Republican House Speaker Jason White in 2024 to focus on issues in the capital city, since the former senator left the Legislature to become mayor in July.

For about an hour, Horhn gave the bipartisan committee a rundown of the issues on the top of his agenda, including reducing crime, rebuilding what he described as the “decimated” Public Works Department and eliminating blight in “parts of Jackson that look like a bomb has been set off.” 

Horhn also gave lawmakers suggestions for how they can help. By the end of the week, he said the city will have calculated the dollar figure – a basis for potential state or federal funding – it will take to reduce blight. If the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers approves a plan to reduce flooding on the Pearl River, Horhn said he hopes to see lawmakers vote to allow a casino in Jackson. And he’d like the state to expand tax incentives for developers, such as enterprise and opportunity zones, to make Jackson a more attractive place for warehousing. 

“We think Jackson ought to have a data center too,” he said, referencing similar projects in surrounding suburbs.

When Horhn finished speaking, Rep. Shanda Yates, an independent who co-chairs the committee, called him a “breath of fresh air.” 

Then Yates fired off a series of questions.

Does the city have a plan for a jail? 

“Right now the city depends on Hinds County,” Horhn said. 

What is his position on the Jackson Zoo? 

The zoo is rapidly losing money, Horhn said, but he believes relocating it is no longer an option after the previous administration chose not to pursue that deal. Since the zoo is on the National Register of Historic Places, Horhn said he is looking at potential state and federal historic tax credits. 

How many homeless centers are in the city and who is operating them? 

Horhn said he didn’t know but that the centers are not well coordinated despite scraping for resources. 

Yates responded that if Jackson is going to ask the state for more funding, the city needs to know what resources it already has. “Is that fair?” she asked. 

“More than fair,” Horhn said, adding that he thinks Yates’ request could be “the carrot on the stick to get these organizations working more cohesively together.” 

Finally, Yates asked Horhn about his goal for the city to eventually take back control of Jackson’s embattled water system. What does he envision? 

“A public-private partnership,” he said. 

Jackson-area representatives, including Democrats Stephanie Foster and Justis Gibbs, asked Horhn to consider striping the roads to help elderly citizens drive at night or if the city had a plan to enforce liens on blighted properties. 

“No m’am, we do not,” he said. 

Lastly, Rep. Jill Ford told Horhn that she had spoken to the mayors of Madison and Ridgeland and they were excited for Jackson. 

“We’re all rooting for you,” she said. 

Then much of the room cleared out. The committee heard from the Capitol Police Chief Bo Luckey and Tyree Jones, the soon to be combination interim police chief-sheriff of Jackson and Hinds County, who spoke in outgoing Jackson Police Chief Joseph Wade’s stead. 

Much of Jones’ discussion concerned the state of homelessness in Jackson. Since Yates’ bill requiring a permit for panhandling went into effect on July 1, the department has seen a reduction in the number of homeless people on thoroughfares such as Lakeland Drive or Ridgewood Road. 

At the same time, the number of people incarcerated at the Hinds County Detention Center has increased, Jones said, placing a strain on county resources. As of this morning, the jail housed more than 900 people. 

“When they leave, they go two places: They go home or they go to prison,” Jones said, adding that the longer people stay at the center, the longer the county is “stuck with having to provide services to them.” 

Luckey added that the city needs more resources for homeless people who do not belong in jail. 

“I completely agree the criminal justice system in Hinds County is bogged down,” Luckey said. “I will say the CCID (Capitol Complex Improvement District) court has been running very well.” 

A brief testimony from the Secretary of State’s office concerned legislation passed earlier this year to use tax incentives to put Jackson’s state-owned, tax-forfeited properties back on the market and into private hands. 

Bill Cheney, the assistant secretary of public lands, noted that lawmakers still need to address the state’s tax sale loophole – the subject of a recent Mississippi Today report – that results in tax-forfeited falling into limbo when investors who buy the property at a tax sale do not request a deed. 

“Nobody really owns it because nobody has requested the deed,” he said. 

Kevin Felsher, the Republican representative from Biloxi, and Sam Creekmore, the Republican representative from Starkville, then addressed the committee about public health issues, including the opioid settlement fund that cities can use with “no restrictions.” 

“There should be substantial funds available for Jackson and Hinds County,” Creekmore said.

This alarmed some lawmakers. 

“When you say no restrictions on the funds, that terrifies me,” Yates said. “Can they use it, can they rehab the zoo?”

“That is my understanding,” Creekmore replied.

RIDGELAND, Miss — Janae Usner recalled how her former primary care doctor bullied her for her weight.

“She was implying, essentially, that I was letting my child down, probably because if I’m obese, he’ll probably be obese,” said Usner, 40, who is from Metairie, Louisiana. 

She also described how the doctor looked through her Apple Watch “to see if she could find a pedometer that would let her know how many steps I had made the day before.”

This was about a year and a half ago, and the experience made her so uncomfortable she switched doctors.

“I know I need to manage my weight better,” Usner said, “but bullying and shame is definitely not the way I want to be motivated.” 

The Florida-based nonprofit organization Obesity Action Coalition promotes a different approach to obesity. Its Your Weight Matters Regional events provide free information from experts about weight loss and health in cities around the country.

Usner drove three hours to attend the latest event Saturday in Ridgeland, Mississippi.

Michelle Vicari is the senior program manager at the Obesity Action Coalition. She said the ultimate goal of these events is to get people to talk to their doctors about their weight and health.

“Going to your doctor and saying, ‘I need help,’ is not a moral failing,” Vicari said. “It’s something that you deserve. You’re worthy of care.”

Speakers gave presentations on nutrition, mental health, obesity treatment options and more. Paul Davidson, an independent concierge consultant and health coach with a doctorate in clinical psychology, spoke about managing stress and stress’ relationship to weight.

“How many of you got stressed, your brain tells you to eat, and you reach for Brussels sprouts?” he asked the crowd, getting several laughs.

Between presentations, attendees opened up about struggles they face in trying to manage their weight and health.

Georgia Lewis, 52, is a child care provider from Yazoo City. She has multiple family members with obesity and noticed some weight problems of her own. 

“I started seeing some weight kind of sticking a little bit with me because I was at a certain size,” Lewis said. “And when I guess I passed menopause, the weight started sticking a little bit more.” 

She sought information about how to keep herself and the children in her care healthy. 

Chandra James, 48, lives in Jackson and is a single mother of two daughters. She has family members who are borderline obese, including herself.

“Well for me, I’m looking at the future of my kids, myself, my family, and I’m trying to learn, educate myself, to help keep us healthy,” James said. However, she said she finds it difficult to afford healthy foods.

Like Lewis and James, Usner has family members with obesity and other health problems. She also has trouble choosing healthy food options.

“I have a toddler, so it’s harder to get him to eat things that aren’t Spaghetti O’s and stuff like that,” Usner said. “So that’s the things you end up surrounding yourself with just out of necessity to get through the day.”

Obesity is a complex chronic disease defined by having too much body fat. Factors such as food insecurity, diet, certain medications and genetics can all lead to obesity. It is linked to several other chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

The Obesity Action Coalition, which advocates and supports those impacted by the disease, brought Your Weight Matters Regional to Mississippi specifically because of the state’s high obesity prevalence. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mississippi has the second-highest prevalence of obesity in the county, 40.1%. Nationwide, it’s estimated that three-quarters of American adults have obesity.

People with obesity also face problems accessing treatment. Many insurance companies don’t cover obesity management services. Many doctors outside of the speciality are underinformed about how to treat patients with the disease.

“Many people still are in the old-school thinking that if you just eat less and move more, the problem will go away. And we now know that is not true at all,” Davidson said.

Lisa Sudderth is clinic administrator for Premier Medical Weight Loss of Mississippi, which had a table at the event. In addition to doctors not being informed, patients may not have enough time or enough information, or may be too intimidated to ask questions, she said.

“Look for somebody who is trained in the field, and who is specialized in the field of bariatric medicine and make sure it’s being done right,” Sudderth advised.

Lewis said she learned more about the science behind obesity and the stigma surrounding it.

Usner said her most important takeaway was “not to blame myself for my weight because it’s defeatist and inaccurate.”

James said she learned that if someone is struggling with obesity, “You’re not out there alone, that there’s organizations out there that can help you out.”