Not even a month after it was first reported that Dexter Wade, a Black man, was killed after being hit by a Jackson, MS police vehicle and buried without his family’s knowledge, another victim has been revealed: Marrio Terrell Moore.
Moore’s family only learned about the 40-year-old’s death from an NBC News investigation, which reported “that Jackson police had failed to notify the public about dozens of homicides this year.”
It wasn’t until October that Moore’s sister Marquita read the article after her aunt texted one night. Even though it was after 8:00pm, Marquita went down to the Jackson Police Department headquarters downtown, demanding that someone explain what happened. But the officer on site said that there was no one available.
Over the next few days, Moore’s family members would slowly learn what happened. Per NBC, “Marrio had been bludgeoned to death, wrapped in a tarp and left on the street. For months, his body had lain in the Hinds County morgue, unclaimed.”
And “on July 14, inmates at the county penal farm had buried his remains in a pauper’s field.” In an eerie peculiarity, this was the same exact day and place that Wade was buried.
In a report, an investigator for the Hinds County coroner’s office said “she called Marrio’s brother, but the phone number didn’t work. A police commander told the family that a detective left a card at Marrio’s mother’s house. But neither his mother, brother nor two sisters recall being contacted by anyone responsible for reaching his next of kin.”
Moore led a nomadic lifestyle, oftentimes going months without contacting relatives, so his family didn’t see cause for reporting him missing in the months after his death. But his family is insistent that was no excuse for the police—“they were not hard to find.”
“They just [thought], ‘Oh, well, he ain’t got nobody,’” Marquita said. “And they just threw him away.”
It was not a case of unknown identity either. When officers came across Moore’s body on Gunda Street, in his pockets they recovered “wet envelopes addressed to ‘Mario Moore’ and a debit card with the name ‘Mario Moore,’ a deputy medical examiner investigator, Stephanie Horn, reported.”
For the past 20 years, Moore’s family, has lived in close proximity. This includes nuclear family members like his mother Mary, who’s house is “2 miles from where his body was found and where he received child support bills and other mail.”
Since learning the news about her son, Mary had to pay $250 in order “to reclaim the rights” to her son’s remains. “A coroner’s office staffer told her it would cost another $500 to have Marrio exhumed.”
In lieu of exhuming the body, the Moore family decided on having a memorial without the body on October 20. They still do not know the exact location or grave number where Moore is buried.
But Mary is not giving up and will continue trying to learn the truth about her son’s death, saying “It hurts bad that he’s gone. But nobody thought that I was important enough to let me know about my child.”
“Nobody thought that my family was important enough,” Mary lamented.
