Goon Squad: ‘The Devil Come to Me’ ...Middle East

Eddie Parker stood in a courtroom facing the former Mississippi law enforcement officers who were convicted of torturing him and one of his friends. Some of the ex-officers wore red-striped outfits that identified them as the most dangerous inmates behind bars.

Parker, a 33-year-old Black man, had survived the abuse of these white officers, most of whom were part of a self-styled group called the “Goon Squad.” 

On the fateful night of Jan. 24, 2023, he heard officers kick in the door.

“I saw the devil come to me,” he told the judge in the sentencing hearing, “in my home, where I was supposed to have been safe.”

They had handcuffed him and his friend, Michael Jenkins, before they shocked them with Tasers, shoved a dildo into their mouths and poured liquids over their nostrils. 

Parker feared he would suffer the fate of his father, whose lung disease caused him to die gasping for air, he said. “I felt like I was dying and drowning at the same time.”

Not long after, a deputy jammed his gun inside Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet missed Jenkins’ spine and shattered his jaw.

In the courtroom, Parker stared at another deputy, the one he called a “devil” because he said he had overseen the violence that night. Parker told the judge, “He shouldn’t be let loose.”

That 29-year-old former deputy sat there, numb, wondering what the judge’s words would be.

In a series of exclusive interviews through phone calls and hundreds of emails with Mississippi Today over the past year, Christian Dedmon talked about the fraternity he found in law enforcement and his descent into cruelty. “I see Michael Jenkins bleeding in my sleep sometimes,” he said. “It is a nightmare I will spend the rest of my life paying for.”

‘Mindless murderers and sadistic torturers’

As early as he can remember, Dedmon hated drugs.

He hated what they did to his parents. He hated what they did to his friends. He even refused to take pain medication after being injured.

Born in 1994, he grew up as an only child in the shadow of Mississippi’s capital in the suburban city of Pearl. He was 2 when his parents divorced, and he bounced between them, from rental home to apartment to trailer.

One night when he was 12, he helped his father repossess a car. When they began to hook the car to the tow truck, people rushed out, screaming. During the tumult, his father closed the hydraulic arm too fast, cutting off two fingers from Dedmon’s left hand.

Doctors managed to reattach his index finger but could only save half his thumb. Four other surgeries followed, and Dedmon missed most of sixth grade. A few years later, he moved out, dropped out of high school and drove tow trucks, just like his dad.

He was 16 when he heard of a horrific murder in Jackson, Mississippi. A Black man, James C. Anderson, had been beaten and run over with a truck.

Then he heard that his first cousin, Deryl Dedmon, was involved in the attack with other Rankin County residents, most of them in their early 20s.

He felt sick. How could anyone do such a thing?

To support his cousin, Christian Dedmon attended the sentencing hearing, where U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves talked about the lynchings of more than 4,700 Black Americans between 1882 and 1968.

The judge detailed how this white mob of teenagers, like marauders of the past, invaded the city of Jackson, which they called “Jafrica.” They beat Black homeless men. They beat a Black man at a service station. They beat a Black man at a golf course who begged for his life.

“Like a lynching, for these young folk going out to ‘Jafrica’ was like a carnival outing,” the judge said. “It was funny to them — an excursion which culminated in the death of innocent, African-American James Craig Anderson. On June 26, 2011, the fun ended.”

Reeves posed a question that could have been asked later of the Goon Squad officers: “How could hate, fear or whatever it was transform genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers?”

Deryl Dedmon, who ran over Anderson with his truck, received 50 years in prison.

Pam Lantrip, said her grandson, Christian Dedmon, was “really upset about his cousin going to prison for what was essentially a life sentence.”

She never dreamed this grandson, the one who never got into trouble, would be next.

Law enforcement became the ‘brotherhood’

While Dedmon was still a teen, a police officer he knew from deer camp invited him to ride along. Dedmon grew up cheering Chuck Norris as he beat up the bad guys on television, and now these rides lit “a fire within me,” he recalled.

At age 19, he became a 911 dispatcher for the Pearl Police Department, finished high school and got married. Months later, he learned his wife was pregnant. They listened to the baby’s heartbeat, and the obstetrician said everything looked fine.

Days later, she began to bleed, and he rushed her to the emergency room. A sonogram revealed there was no heartbeat. They wept at the awful news, the first of three miscarriages.

On the 15th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack, Dedmon enrolled at the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers Training Academy. He graduated weeks before Christmas in 2016. 

Two months later, he and his wife had a daughter, their miracle baby, and Dedmon vowed to be “the daddy that I did not have.”

He worked as a patrol officer for Pearl police, and law enforcement became the “brotherhood” he had never experienced.

Not long after he joined the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in 2017, his mother was arrested for selling meth. Inside her home, officers said they also found heroin, marijuana, fentanyl and a firearm.

“I spent his entire life trying to protect him from the world and from anyone who could hurt him,” recalled his mother, Jennifer Williams, “but at the end of the day I was the one who hurt him the worst.”

Dedmon said Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey asked him if he was going to have a problem with his mother being jailed there. Dedmon replied no, but the truth was, he was devastated. He said her arrest made him even more determined to get drugs off the street.

He spent extra time stopping cars and searching them. Through that work, he met narcotics investigator Brett McAlpin. All the meth users seemed to know McAlpin’s name.

Dedmon idolized McAlpin like a big brother. He said McAlpin convinced him they had to do more than arrest those using or selling drugs. They had to make these drug abusers pay. 

McAlpin taught him how to hit people so their injuries wouldn’t show up in their jail mugshots, and he didn’t use a Taser because it recorded every time it was used, Dedmon said. Instead, McAlpin “carried a huge piece of wire on his vest that would hurt if you were hit with it,” he said.

To get people to talk, McAlpin fired his gun in the air — a tactic that often worked, Dedmon said.

The pair didn’t stop there. Together, they destroyed the property of those they believed were using or selling drugs. They smashed food into people’s faces, berated them and told them to leave Rankin County. 

To get confessions, officers sometimes shoved guns into people’s mouths, and behind office doors, investigators would hit people “with phone books and whatever,” Dedmon said. “It’s daily operations up there.”

He came to believe this approach made their community safer for children, he said. “We made people scared to sell drugs, to use drugs or to steal.”

He realizes now how wrong that was. “My job was to clean up the streets while following the Constitution,” he said, “not to be the judge and jury in place of a failed justice system.”

Those who embraced McAlpin’s ways could go on “missions” with him, Dedmon recalled. Over the years, he said, more than a dozen different deputies joined in those missions.

Some deputies, however, steered clear of McAlpin and Dedmon. Two deputies from that time said they didn’t trust the pair because they had heard stories about those missions.

Some of them warned Dedmon about hanging out with McAlpin, who had a reputation for excessive force. “He wouldn’t listen,” recalled one former deputy, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. 

In January, Sheriff Bailey testified in a lawsuit that he knew nothing about the violence carried out by Dedmon, McAlpin and the others. 

Dedmon responded that “people being mistreated was no secret to anyone.” As long as he filled out a use-of-force report, the sheriff “didn’t give a shit what I did,” Dedmon said. “That took care of it.”

Mississippi Today and The New York Times corroborated at least 17 incidents involving 22 victims, based on witness interviews, medical records, photographs of injuries and other documents. Allegations in these incidents include everything from melting metal onto a bare leg to using a Taser to shock people in their genitals.

Dedmon estimates he arrested hundreds of people a year. Those included many cases where he said officers raided homes without warrants, beat people to get information and illegally seized evidence that helped convict people of drug crimes.

Despite this evidence of possible wrongful convictions, the state of Mississippi has yet to conduct a review of all the cases involving Dedmon and other officers now in prison.

Sheriff became the father he never had

In 2019, Dedmon was involved in three deadly shootings, firing the fatal shot in one of them. Each time, he saw a therapist, who signed the paper for him to return to work. Each time, he was back on the street in a few days.

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