Families of people who were buried in a pauper’s field next to the Hinds County Penal Farm near Jackson, Miss., are calling for a federal investigation into the burials, which took place without families being notified.
With their attorney now saying the field holds hundreds more graves, the families want a full accounting of the bodies buried there.
The issue became national news last fall, when several families said they had waited months to hear about a missing loved one — only to learn their relative had died months earlier, and were buried in a grassy field, their graves marked only by a metal tag bearing a number.
Their attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, says he believes many more people were buried under similar circumstances.
“We know, based on the records from the coroner’s office, that, since 2016, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that were buried behind that jail, and their families have not been notified,” Crump told PBS NewsHour this week.
When NPR contacted officials in Jackson to ask about Crump’s allegation, Melissa Faith Payne, the city’s director of communications, said the bodies were buried in a pauper’s graveyard managed by Hinds County.
“It is not a secret burial ground,” she said. “In those graves are the bodies of those who went unclaimed by family when they died. These persons are either homeless people, inmates from local jails who died but relatives never claimed their bodies, unidentified persons who officials were never able to connect with family, or even persons who died” whose families couldn’t afford a funeral.
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