Civil rights leaders are calling for a federal investigation into the case of Dexter Wade, a 37-year-old Black man from Mississippi who was struck and killed by police and buried without his family's knowledge, according to Reuters. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, representing Wade's family, and Rev. Al Sharpton are asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Wade's death and the Jackson police's handling of it, saying the police failed to notify the family. The last time Wade's mother saw her son was on March 5, when he left her home in the evening, NBC News reported. He died that same night when he attempted to walk across an interstate highway in Jackson and was struck by an off-duty police car.
An investigator from the Hinds County Coroner's office responded at the scene and identified Wade by a bottle of prescription medication. The investigator said he called Wade's mother and could not get through, and then passed the information to the Jackson Police Department so it could notify Wade's next of kin. A spokesperson for Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told NBC News that this was a case of miscommunication but the police had "no malicious intent." Wade's mother filed a missing person report on March 14 and said she nagged the department and begged for help finding her son on Facebook for months. After a new investigator took over the case in August, she was notified that he had died, his body had eventually been released from the morgue and was buried in an unmarked grave at Hinds County jail's penal farm.