After six white Rankin County, Miss., sheriff's deputies held a man and his friend during an alleged drug raid, a man who was shot in the mouth during the encounter filed a $400 million federal lawsuit. Michael Corey Jenkins, 32, and Eddie Parker, 35, both Black, say their civil rights were violated on Jan. 24 when sheriff's deputies burst through the front door of Parker’s residence, handcuffed the men, and searched for drugs, Capital B News reports. When the officers didn’t find anything, they used “excessive interrogation methods to coerce a confession,” charged heir attorney, Malik Shabazz. Three of the officers, including Hunter Elward and Sheriff Bryan Bailey were named as codefendants in the lawsuit. Jenkins said Elward shot him in the mouth causing severe, almost fatal injuries to his jaw and tongue. “This is one of the worst and most bizarre incidents of police misconduct in the United States history, with the egregious conduct described,” Shabazz said.
For nearly two hours, the men were repeatedly punched, kicked, slapped, shocked with stun guns, and berated with racist comments. The officers allegedly attempted to use a sex toy to rape Jenkins and Parker, and when the officers weren’t able to commit the sexual assault against Jenkins because he defecated on himself, “in a very juvenile and bizarre manner,” the officers laughed, threw eggs at the men, and forced them to strip naked and shower together. The deputies intentionally deactivated their body cameras during the incident, stole surveillance computer equipment from Parker’s home, and turned their cameras back on when they left the scene in an attempt “to do their dirt and commit their torts and crime,” according to Shabazz. The incident was described as a “free-for-all intimidation and torture session” that included death threats by the deputies, false accusations of selling drugs, and “dating white women.” In illegal "waterboarding", the officers poured liquids from Parker’s refrigerator — beer, milk, water — over the faces of Parker and Jenkins, Shabazz said. “This is in the custom, in the practice of Rankin County… and Sheriff Bryan Bailey refuses to do anything about it,” said Shabazz. Elward, Christian Dedmon, Bailey, and other members of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department are a part of the county’s Special Response Team and have been named in other excessive force lawsuits.