Two newly discovered videos taken inside the Rankin County jail show officers mocking and laughing at an intellectually disabled inmate, the same man guards had filmed days earlier being shocked in an electrified vest after he asked for a Coke.

Former department employees said the videos, recorded in 2018, were shared widely on an encrypted WhatsApp group chat. The footage provides a deeper look into the culture of the jail, where a recent investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times revealed that guards and jail administrators routinely beat inmates.

In one video, Larry Buckhalter stands before the camera in his prison jumpsuit and a party hat and sings “Happy Birthday” to “Barry,” an apparent reference to Barry Vaughn, the former head of the jail who is now undersheriff.

In the second video, someone off camera instructs Buckhalter to “tell him you love him.” 

“I love you, Barry!” he says, and gleefully announces it is his last day in jail. 

As he speaks, a man in uniform standing behind him slams a plastic sign to the floor. Startled, Buckhalter jumps and screams as people off camera laugh.

The videos were created days after Buckhalter had asked jail guards for a Coke in October 2018. Shortly after his request, the guards strapped him into an electrified vest, intended to keep violent inmates under control. Then they filmed him screaming and convulsing while they shocked him.  

“Now you get a Coke!” a female guard says at the end of the video. “It’s all over! I’m so proud of you, Larry!”

In an email, department attorney Jason Dare said that Buckhalter, who died in 2021, had a crack cocaine problem, but was “never found to be mentally incompetent by a court or health care professional.” 

“Larry celebrated countless birthdays and life achievements at the Rankin County Jail,” Dare wrote. “He never went hungry and was never brutalized, both of which he claimed were regular occurrences in the free world.”

Dare continued: “Although Larry could not give his side of the story for your article, these videos perfectly show his genuine affection for the RCSD. The fact you try to spin it as mockery is shameful.”

Laquanda Anderson and Derrick Shoto, Buckhalter’s niece and nephew, reviewed the videos and Dare’s response. They said their uncle lived with an obvious intellectual disability.

“Everybody knew he had a mental issue,” Anderson said. “And when people find that out, they take advantage of it.”

Buckhalter never mentioned these incidents, they said, but he told them he was afraid to return to the jail, saying that guards there called him “Crying Larry.” 

“He hated it at the jail,” Shoto said, adding that in the videos, “they’re clearly treating him like a puppet.”

Last week, Sean Tindell, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, called the video of Buckhalter being shocked “appalling and utterly unacceptable.”

Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agents have been assigned to investigate the incident, he said.

Last week, The New York Times and Mississippi Today revealed that for years, jail officials had beaten and whipped inmates who broke jail rules or inconvenienced guards. 

More than 70 former inmates, along with former deputies and jail guards, described experiencing, witnessing or participating in the violence. Their allegations were supported by medical records, photos of injuries and department reports along with the cellphone recording of guards shocking Buckhalter.

After seeing the video of Buckhalter that accompanied the original investigation, two former deputies told reporters that additional videos of guards mocking Buckhalter had circulated over encrypted group messages. 

“They made the rounds,” said one of the two former deputies, Christian Dedmon.

Dedmon was one of five former Rankin County deputies and a local police officer — some of whom were part of a patrol shift called the “Goon Squad”— who were sentenced to federal prison last year for torturing three men. 

A 2023 investigation by Mississippi Today and The Times revealed that nearly two dozen residents experienced similar brutality from deputies during drug raids over nearly two decades.

Last year, reporters also uncovered an encrypted WhatsApp group chat where members of the Goon Squad shift traded pictures of rotting corpses and joked about rape and shocking people with Tasers.

One former Rankin deputy, who requested to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from the department, shared the two new recordings of Buckhalter with reporters.

That former deputy, along with two former guards, said the video showing Buckhalter being shocked and the video of him singing Happy Birthday were both filmed in the office of Amanda Thompson, who was a jail lieutenant at the time and still works at the department. 

The former employees also said the third video was filmed in the office of Kristi Pennington, Sheriff Bailey’s wife, who also works at the department.

“ When you have authority over people, you have a responsibility to take care of them,” Derrek Shoto, Buckhalter’s nephew, said. “No matter who you’re over, you’ve got to treat them with respect.”