Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.
This behavior is cowardly and disgusting. There’s no excuse.
Also, I didn’t realize we still had “pauper’s fields.” The repeated use of the word “pauper” in this article makes me really uncomfortable. I’m not from the south, so maybe it’s a regional thing? But that term strikes me as antiquated and dehumanizing.
Just curious what word would you use? Those without wealth or status have always been dehumanized regardless of the terms used for them.
As for right or wrong, pauper’s fields will always be a thing as long as there are poor and indigent people. Have you ever wondered what happens to the homeless when they die? Many end up unified in death. So there is no way to inform family if they ever have any.
I believe that it is much more common to cremate unclaimed deceased then bury them these days. Even still the ashes are not carefully interred, but just spread out on a common site.
That makes sense, and I totally understand the utility of having municipal graves for unclaimed remains. I guess I would just call them that: unclaimed or unrepresented remains. I’m not saying “pauper” is inherently bigoted or anything, it just took me by surprise and struck me as a dehumanizing label that fits better in Medieval England. I don’t think we would call someone a pauper to their face in 2023, so I’m not sure why we’d use it to refer to their remains.
I don’t disagree with you but honestly I much more have a problem with the need for a place like this than whatever people feel comfortable calling it. Part of me would much prefer an uncomfortable term. It is an uncomfortable practice, a nicer name will not change that.
I don’t think their issue is with the practice, just the term used. It’s like saying “poor people cemetery”, kinda distasteful sounding. They could just call it something else with less stigma attached than the term “pauper”, like calling it a public graveyard. Or just use the older term “potter’s field”.
I actually disagree with the practice not the name. There is a long history of giving nice names to distasteful practices to hide their true nature. In a way distasteful names are at least honest.
I’m not sure what alternatives you think we should have for burying unidentified people. I could see an argument to be made about how poor people shouldn’t have to be relegated to certain types of cemeteries or graves just because they can’t afford “proper” ones. But generally even if you took away cost people usually choose where they want to be buried based on various factors if possible, or their families do for them if they haven’t, so you need to have a system for people whose choice and affiliations are otherwise unknown. The original intent of potter’s fields was for burying strangers and unknown people, and that’s ideally what the practice should be more about rather than a class thing imo. And in that case, it’s more of a necessary practice than anything else, and the dead deserve to be referred to with dignity. It’s not like they’re the ones who chose to be buried there, yet they bear the brunt of the term “pauper”, giving an “uncomfortable name to an uncomfortable practice” is a nice idea and all but the only people who suffer for it are the people being buried there, not the ones doing the burying. So it just seems rather mean and unnecessary. The term isn’t a commentary on the practice, it’s a commentary on the people it’s being practiced on, who arguably deserve to be treated better than that.
That’s not really how it works in every case. Take slurs for example, the stigma is very much in the word, and referring to people by the terms they prefer to be referred by instead of a slur definitely does more than nothing. There’s a reason why many groups and companies like to rebrand after a particularly devastating scandal, or why certain communities 9r ideologies use alternative terms for themselves, like fascists calling themselves identitarians, and so on. Words can have more influence on how we perceive something than you think.
The decision to call the police was difficult for Bettersten. She did not trust them. In 2019, her 62-year-old brother died after a Jackson officer slammed him to the ground. The officer was convicted of manslaughter but is appealing.
Two of her family, wow. Now, I don’t know what the environment is like there, but the son was crossing a highway at night on meth. This one could be… I’m not sure of the word… no bad behavior? Accident? But the lack of identification and contact is absolutely absurd.
Darnella Frazier is the woman who recorded George Floyd’s murder. Her uncle was also killed by police. Recently a man was released and awarded several hundred thousand dollars after spending over a decade in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. After release, he was shot and killed by police. The police are a street gang, legitimized by capital in exchange for capital’s occasionally being allowed to direct the police’s constant stream of violence.
Every time I hear about (more) police violence, I just get stuck thinking about the number of times I’ve been assaulted by patients as a healthcare worker and how I was still required to put their safety above my own if at all possible…including the one that was twice my weight and tried to strangle me.
What a shitty investigator. It took the new one less than a week to figure it out. I can’t see how this could have possibly happened for any reason other than malice or gross incompetence. Either way both the original investigator and the rest of the department need to be looked into.
I can understand how “fascist” has become popular but I’m curious how you see fascism here. It’s fucked up and shitty and the officer and those involved should face charges, but fascism?
Yeah it kind of does. Literally the police’s only job is to protect wealth and the wealthy who own it. They have no duty to serve or protect the people in general. The guy they killed and buried was not wealth, nor was he wealthy. Worse still he was part of the demographic that our police forces were literally created to capture round up and return to their owners.
Just because they haven’t managed to completely dismantle, our democracy doesn’t mean they aren’t fascists. And that police don’t serve them. Because I’ll tell you for sure who they don’t serve. The community or anyone that looks like that man or his mother. That’s just unacceptable. But totally normal for fascist groups. Lots of potter’s fields out in Germany the United States and even Canada. It’s a shame people still defend these groups so much.
I only have the information in the article, but from that it seems like the investigator originally assigned to the case was lazy, incompetent, or perhaps biased against this family because of their history with the police. That last thing seems like it is (or should be) illegal but the first two aren’t, and the investigator is retired so it’s too late for him to be penalized by the department (although I suspect that they wouldn’t have). Other than that, the behavior of the police appears to have been appropriate - any driver could have hit a man crossing a six-lane highway at night, it isn’t the coroner’s job to track down a dead person’s next of kin, and the new investigator assigned to the case appears to have been diligent.
IMO the behavior of the first investigator justifies an internal investigation and I would be quite cynical about the impartiality of that investigation, but I don’t see strong evidence that a crime took place.
satan! People need to stop insulting people due to their laziness in accessing both the article being disucssed and a persons comment in relation to it. Name calling should not be happening but especially so if someone has not read and understood the article. The person you responded to obviously did so he knows not only were people told it was reported and documented. This is the salient point from the article you did not read. It really was the original investigator not doing shit.
"This account has been pieced together with interviews with his family and a coroner’s investigator, along with court records and documents provided in response to public records requests: a crash report, incident reports and coroner’s office records. Bettersten also shared personal notes, emails, Dexter’s death certificate, a coroner’s report and case information cards provided to her by police. "
Hitting a man crossing a six lane highway in the dark is not automatically vehicular homicide. Sometimes the pedestrian is at fault when a car hits a pedestrian, and this appears to be one of those times. It isn’t literally impossible that the driver was drunk or going twice the speed limit and the cops covered it up, but assuming that something like that happened without any evidence is unreasonable even when the driver was a cop.
They literally think anything they don’t like is fascism. And anything that can tangentially be connected in any way to their holy list of fascism as literally fascism with logic no less esoteric and convoluted than horoscopes and tea readings.
Not to excuse those fascists, but a simpler explanation is just lack of communication. Some incompetent somewhere didn’t bother with part of their job, and everyone else assumed it was done
The decision to call the police was difficult for Bettersten. She did not trust them. In 2019, her 62-year-old brother died after a Jackson officer slammed him to the ground. The officer was convicted of manslaughter but is appealing.
Odd coincidence that this happened to a family that’s put a cop behind bars. How often does stuff like this happen anyway?
Our firm took a civil case (wrongful death. the cop ran a stoplight, no lights no sirens, not responding to a call. killed a mom and two kids.) against a police department a few decades ago. Every employee of the firm had to pay about 10 grand in bribes to the cops in the towns where they lived before they stopped getting pulled over for nothing. Yeah, it’s a real honorable profession.
Look, not even getting into the cause of his death, it’s extremely fucked up that they didn’t attempt to contact family of the deceased after he died, and even covered it up and had it from his mother after she approached them for information.
You can say it was his own fault all you want, but that changes nothing about how atrocious they handled the whole thing.
I agree with you. I hate cops as much as the next person. Just pointing out that this guy could be nominated for a Darwin Award. It’s hard to blame any driver in this situation.
And if the article were about that, you might have a point. But it’s not. It’s about how the police gave this poor woman the runaround instead of letting her know what happened to her son. And you know that. But you wanted attention and to be edgy. Well, congrats. You got the attention you wanted.
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