Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard.
The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said.
It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.
Now it was early October, and Bettersten had finally been told where she could find her son.
She pulled up to the gates of the Hinds County penal farm, her sister in the passenger seat. A sheriff’s deputy and two jumpsuited inmates in a pickup told her to follow them.
They bounced down the road and curved into the woods, crawling past clearings where rows of small signs jutted from the earth, each marked with a number.
Hellbound and Down 