After recently admitting guilt in the federal civil rights case against them, six white ex-police officers in Mississippi pled guilty to state charges on Monday “for torturing two Black men in a racist assault.”
According to prosecutors, some of the officers had given themselves the moniker of the “Goon Squad,” due to “their willingness to use excessive force and cover up attacks including the assault that ended with a deputy shooting one victim in the mouth.”
The “Goon Squad’s” latest attack occurred this past January in Braxton, Mississippi, which is just outside of Jackson, Mississippi. A “white neighbor phoned Rankin County Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman inside a Braxton home. McAlpin told Deputy Christian Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies,” the Associated Press reports.
What happened next is horrifying. The six white officers in question who included “Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department and Joshua Hartfield, a Richland police officer,” illegally entered the house, although they did not have a warrant, and then proceeded to handcuff the two Black men, Michael Corey Jenkins and his friend Eddie Terrell Parker.
The officers then proceeded to assault Jenkins and Parker, pouring “milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess. They mocked the victims with racial slurs. They shocked them with stun guns.” While they did intend to torture the two men, they were trying to avoid leaving any physical scarring as evidence. That failed when Jenkins was shot in the mouth, but somehow miraculously survived.
Up next came the cover up, which involved planting drugs as well as a gun on the premises. This led to Jenkins and Parker receiving false charges, which would be held against them, the true victims, for months after the fact.
This wasn’t the first instance of a racially motivated attack by some of these officers either. The Associated Press conducted an investigation, which resulted in linking some of the accused “deputies to at least four violent encounters with Black men since 2019 that left two dead and another with lasting injuries.”
On Monday in court, the officers agreed to serve sentences, which range from five to thirty years, per the recommendations of the state prosecutors. The judge will take those under advisement, but is not bound to adhere to those sentences, and “[t]ime served for the state convictions will run concurrently with the potentially longer federal sentences they’ll receive in November.”
After seeing the officers being led away in chains, Parker said, “I enjoyed the view of seeing the walk of shame. Head down, the disgust everybody felt for them and that they feel for themselves,” adding, “I hope this is a lesson to everybody out there: Justice will be served.”
Jenkins echoed his friend’s sentiments, stating “We finally got justice knowing what we went through…They got what they deserved.”