By Steph Quinn and Mukta Joshi, Mississippi Today, Mississippi Today

At Thursday’s standing-room-only Board of Supervisors’ meeting, several Rankin County citizens called for Supervisor Steve Gaines to resign because of remarks that some have called racist.

The Rev. Ava Harvey, pastor for the Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church in Brandon, called for “an honest apology and an honorable resignation” by Gaines, saying, “It is time for our county to heal.”

In 2023, five of Sheriff Bryan Bailey’s deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad,” beat, tased and sexually assaulted Eddie Parker and his friend, Michael Jenkins, before shooting Jenkins in the mouth during a mock execution. The deputies tried to plant a BB gun and drugs on the men to cover up their crimes, but they were ultimately convicted and sent to federal prison for decades.

On May 1, the sheriff’s department’s lawyer, Jason Dare, announced that Rankin County had negotiated a $2.5 million settlement with Parker and Jenkins. Two days later, Gaines praised the settlement and Dare.

“He beat the pants off of those guys—the dopers, the people that raped and doped your daughters,” Gaines told the nearly all-white crowd of 100 gathered at the sheriff’s breakfast. “He beat their pants off.”

Malik Shabazz, a lawyer for Parker and Jenkins, called Gaines’ remarks racist and said his clients are considering a defamation lawsuit.

On May 13, Gaines released a statement saying that his comments were “not aimed at anyone personally.”

The Rev. Ava Harvey addresses Supervisor Steve Gaines and the Board of Supervisors on Thursday, May 15, 2025.

At the Thursday meeting, Harvey said it’s obvious that Gaines was speaking of the two men. “If you were not referring to Mr. Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins, who were you referring to?” he asked Gaines. “If you’re not speaking specifically to the case that the lawyer was involved in, then exactly who is it? Is there another case out here that no one knows about?”

After Rankin County residents experienced the initial shock of what happened to Jenkins and Parker, there was “utter disgust, complete dismay” and “frayed trust” between the community and the sheriff, he said. “Goon Squad is now a household name.”

Some power brokers in Rankin County have urged Gaines to resign, but he gave no indication Thursday he would do so.

An investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times exposed a decades-long reign of terror that involved at least 20 Rankin County deputies, several of whom routinely tortured suspected drug users to elicit information and confessions.

Many people have filed lawsuits alleging abuses by deputies, or say they filed complaints with the department or reported these incidents directly to Bailey, but the sheriff has denied any knowledge of these alleged abuses.

Last September, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the sheriff’s department’s practices, but in January, the current administration’s department ordered the Civil Rights Division to halt any litigation or new cases. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Jackson did not respond to requests for comment on whether the probe would continue.

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey looks on as citizens address the Board of Supervisors in their meeting Thursday, May 15, 2025.

The state auditor’s office launched an investigation after Mississippi Today reported on Bailey’s alleged misuse of taxpayer money equipment and supplies used at his mother’s commercial chicken farm.

Outside the meeting, one protester, John Osborne of Jackson, whose son frequents Rankin County, held a sign criticizing Gaines. “Steve Gaines claimed that Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker raped and doped your daughters,” the sign read. “Steve Gaines lied.”

“It isn’t just about the racist trope,” Osborne said. “Gaines’ comments were a celebration of what happened to those two men.”

He said when Gaines made those comments at the May 3 breakfast meeting, “Bryan Bailey did not stand up and say those comments were wrong.”

Addressing the supervisors, Fred Chambliss, a federal correctional officer who became a whistleblower, questioned why Gaines had bragged about a $2.5 million settlement of a case in which “somebody got shot in the mouth, sexually assaulted, basically raped, waterboarded.”

“If you are bold enough to say that in a meeting, what else are y’all talking about behind closed doors?” he asked.

Leon Seals, who has complained about being tased by Pearl police and is now running for alderman, said if citizens are held accountable, “police officers should be held accountable, or the supervisor members should be held accountable.”

In 2023, Harvey ran against Gaines for supervisor for District Four, the largest district in the county, stretching from east of Brandon to the northeast corner. Gaines, a Republican, won three-fourths of the vote over Harvey, who ran as an independent.

Harvey called the supervisor’s remarks disheartening. “I just do not believe the majority of people in District Four agree with his statement,” he said. “Mr. Gaines has now again brought national attention to our county unnecessarily.”

In an interview with Mississippi Today, Harvey said Gaines’ remarks still make it more difficult for Black Mississippians to navigate life in Rankin County.

“How am I being viewed by my neighbors?” he asked. “Am I being viewed as a rapist? Am I being viewed as a doper? Is this the type of behavior that my neighbor now endorses, and people that I go to church with?”

Over the past several years, Rankin County has been “trying to go through this healing process” after all of the abuses by the Goon Squad, only for Gaines to “pull the scab right back off,” he said. “We just can’t seem to get past this dark cloud that’s just hanging over our county.”

He said both Gaines and Bailey should step down. Harvey said he may run against Gaines in 2027, saying the county needs better representation and new leadership to restore trust and improve the county’s reputation.

“This is beyond bad judgment. This is beyond incompetence,” he said. “This is just reprehensible.”

State Auditor to Investigate Sheriff Who Used Inmate Labor on Family Farm

by Mukta Joshi and Steph Quinn, Mississippi Today
March 28, 2025

Reporters for Mississippi Today worked in partnership with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.

The Mississippi State Auditor’s office on Friday said it had launched an investigation into allegations that Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey had staffed his mother’s commercial chicken farm with jail inmates who were in his custody.

The investigation follows an article published Thursday by Mississippi Today and The New York Times in which former inmates and a former deputy described working on the farm and using equipment and supplies bought with taxpayer money.

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“We’re all aware of the reporting,” said Jacob Walters, communications director for State Auditor Shad White. “We read the article, and Auditor White has ordered an investigation to begin yesterday morning, when we became aware of the story.”

White’s office can investigate potential misuse of government resources and file lawsuits to recoup taxpayer money. It does not have the authority to file criminal charges, but Walters said the office had alerted federal prosecutors to the allegations.

Sheriff Bailey did not respond on Friday to requests for comment.

In a statement issued late Thursday to some local media outlets, officials at the sheriff’s department acknowledged that Sheriff Bailey had sent inmates from the Rankin County jail to work at his mother’s farm, but said the inmates were always paid.

The department did not share the statement with Mississippi Today or The Times. Several other news organizations published it, reporting that it had come from Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff’s department. The statement said that the article by The Times and Mississippi Today had “maliciously used unreliable sources and/or false allegations in an attempt to tarnish” Sheriff Bailey’s reputation.

Over six months, reporters from Mississippi Today interviewed more than 20 former inmates of the Rankin County jail and three former deputies. They also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county records. The reporting showed that for years, inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, had been brought to the farm to perform a variety of jobs, including cleaning tons of chicken feces and used bedding from chicken houses.

Dare’s statement did not directly address many of the details described by former trusties and by Christian Dedmon, a former Rankin County deputy who is serving a federal prison sentence for his part in torturing two Black men in 2023.

For example, Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey and others had used a $97,000 skid steer, bought in 2019 with department funds, to mulch, till soil and spread gravel at the farm. The statement did not address whether that was true.

Instead, the statement noted that the sheriff “owns a skid steer that is all-but identical to and commonly confused for the one owned by Rankin County.” In interviews before the article’s publication, Dedmon said the sheriff had used the county’s skid steer on the farm for years before purchasing his own skid steer and attachments.

Dedmon also said that Sheriff Bailey had instructed him to take truckloads of gravel from a Rankin County government storage yard and deliver the gravel to Sheriff Bailey’s family farm to be spread on dirt roads. Dedmon and a former trusty said they would sneak into the yard at night, using magnets to cover the department seal on the vehicle they used.

Dare’s statement did not address those details. It said that Sheriff Bailey had covered roads on the farm with gravel and crushed concrete purchased or donated from local businesses.

“I’m sure he’s purchased gravel at some point in his life, but I also know we took a lot, too,” Dedmon wrote in an email to Mississippi Today on Friday.

Mississippi Today reported that the department had spent about $600 on a brooder house, chicken netting and heat lamps that are designed to keep chicks warm. Those purchases were for a chicken coop at the jail that is used by inmates to get fresh eggs, the statement said.

Dare did not respond to calls or emails from Mississippi Today reporters seeking clarification about the statement.

Over the past few months, the reporters repeatedly asked department officials about work done by trusties, and about department purchases related to chicken farming; Dare declined to explain the purchases and said that Rankin County government officials would not provide comment for the article.

In recent days, local news outlets have been inundated with hundreds of comments about Sheriff Bailey, though elected officials in Rankin County have largely avoided comment.

Some local residents remained supportive of the sheriff, despite a series of revelations over the past two years that have clouded his time in office. In 2024, five Rankin deputies, including Dedmon, were sentenced to decades in federal prison for their role in the torture of two Black men. An investigation by Mississippi Today and The Times revealed a decades long reign of terror by sheriff’s deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad.

Grant Callen, the founder and chief executive of Empower Mississippi, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group that works on criminal justice issues, said the allegations were “just the latest in a string of appalling and inexcusable behavior.”

“Individuals are innocent until proven guilty,” Callen said, “but leadership matters.”

Steph Quinn is a Roy Howard Fellow at Mississippi Today.

This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

by Steph Quinn and Mukta Joshi, Mississippi Today

February 28, 2025

Sheldon Bray of Blue Springs said he took his wife and two sons to the “March to Save America” rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, because he wanted to show his boys the importance of making their voices heard.

“I don’t like people that complain about what’s going on, but you don’t participate and let your representative know,” Bray told Mississippi Today. Instead of “sending somebody up there to read your mind,” Bray said, people should “get involved.”

He said that in months before Jan. 6, he had worriedly watched the imposition of mask mandates and the rapid expansion of absentee voting since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Politicians on both sides of the aisle had told us for years that our elections are being messed with and our elections aren’t secure,” he said. “And then we get to 2020, and all of a sudden, this election was perfect.” But he “just kept getting the feeling like an investigation was off the table.”

Four years after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Bray and others among the 13 Mississippians charged in connection with the events of that day – even those who pleaded guilty – defend their actions, which they maintain were misconstrued by the media and misunderstood by a broad swath of the public. As some Mississippians served sentences over the past three years, a community emerged around them, hailing them as patriots and political prisoners. That community now considers the pardons a sign of victory.

In all, Trump granted sweeping clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack on the Capitol.

State Rep. Daryl Porter, Jr., D-Summit, called the pardons “a slap in the face to law enforcement.”

“I think it is a slap in the face to the Constitution. I think it’s a slap in the face to this country,” Porter said. “It sends a really poor message, that if something cannot go your way, you can thus break the law and then be let go, and not face any consequences for what you’ve done.”

A Hero’s Welcome in Oxford

Bray and five other Jan. 6 defendants spoke to about 50 people in a Lafayette County chancery courtroom in Oxford on Feb. 21.

Bray told the group there had been many times when he had to tell the stories of incarcerated Jan. 6 participants on their behalf, “but through the grace of God, I don’t have to do that tonight.”

The meeting was hosted by the Union County Republican Women’s Club, the Mississippi Conservative Coalition and My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, a group founded in 2022 to organize letters and donations for Mississippians charged in connection with the Capitol breach. The Oxford-based group is unrelated to a nonprofit of the same name that works to reduce health disparities, as well as an Obama Foundation program that supports boys and young men of color.

Lori Richmond Cyree, the founder of My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford and lead organizer of the event, described the community that formed around Jan. 6 defendants as “the heart and soul of this country.”

Cyree said she hoped the event would foster understanding by allowing people to hear from Jan. 6 defendants in person. “I just believe that if you get people together and they can have honest conversations, wonderful things can happen,” Cyree said.

Several speakers described their actions on Jan. 6 as part of a sea change that had shifted the country off a path they said was corrupt and authoritarian.

Mike Brock of Walls told the audience he never intended to partake in an insurrection – just to pressure Pence to delay lawmakers’ certification of the electoral vote count. Brock said he told federal agents that he felt he had no choice but to travel to Washington in January 2021.

“It’s disgraceful to all the people that have shed their blood for this country to not do nothing, not stand up and even raise a hand, to say, ‘Hey, I’m against this,’” Brock remembered telling the agents.

Brock, who was charged with obstructing and attacking law enforcement, violence on Capitol grounds and disorderly conduct, said he was pushed into a police line by “a whole football team” of running protesters after making his way from the rally to the Capitol. He was awaiting the announcement of his trial date when Trump pardoned him.

Thomas Webster of Oxford suggested that “deep state actors” used the public’s fear of the COVID-19 virus to make way for fraudulent election practices.

“Do you believe COVID was an accident?” Thomas Webster asked the attendees, some of whom responded, “No!”

“The timing of that was just unbelievable. And I believe it was intentional, designed to create that atmosphere to make everybody so afraid.”

Webster, a retired New York City police officer and Marine Corps veteran, was convicted of charges including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, a flagpole bearing the Marine Corps flag. He said that law enforcement officers outside the Capitol failed to use proper de-escalation methods and that he acted in self-defense after an officer provoked him. He was serving a 10-year prison sentence at the time of his pardon.

At the end of the event, the pardoned speakers gave Cyree and Marie Thomas, who also works with My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, plaques engraved with Mississippi Jan. 6 defendants’ signatures. “For Love of the Forgotten,” the plaques read.

Nancy Frohn, of the Union County Republican Women’s Club, cast Trump’s second term as a new beginning for the country.

“I think God let Joe Biden go into office to let us see how bad things could really get,” said Nancy Frohn of that group.

“We have to thank God every day that he has given our country a second chance.”

‘Every background you can think of’

The Jan. 6 defendants interviewed by Mississippi Today had a wide range of reasons why they were supporters of Trump and part of the broader “Trump community,” as Bray put it.

Thomas Harlen Smith of Mathiston said he never voted in a presidential election until 2020, and he didn’t like Trump until he ran for president. “I thought, he’s a rich guy, you know? I’m just a poor Mississippi guy.”

But Trump “stuck to what he said,” said Smith, and put the country’s economy first.

Smith said Trump’s policies before the COVID pandemic benefited small businesses like his excavation and construction company. “We owe it all to Trump, whether people like that or not,” he said.

“Even during COVID,” said Smith, “I still did fine.”

Smith was convicted of 11 charges in 2023, including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon and obstructing an official proceeding. Smith said he accidentally grabbed a police officer as he tried to pull protesters out of a clash with law enforcement on the West Terrace of the Capitol. He was serving a nine-month prison sentence when Trump issued the pardons.

James McGrew of Biloxi, who served in Iraq and suffered injuries and substance dependency as a result, said he began supporting Trump because of his positions on veterans affairs and in particular, the Veteran’s Choice program, which allowed veterans to choose their healthcare providers.

“All the VA did for me up until about 2016 was give me pills,” he said. It wasn’t until “the middle of 2016, 2017, that the VA started changing.”

The Trump administration expanded eligibility for the program in 2017, though it was first passed in 2014 during the Obama administration.

“I supported Donald Trump just for that reason alone – that he supported me.”

McGrew pleaded guilty in 2022 to “assaulting, resisting or impeding” law enforcement officers and was sentenced to 78 months in prison.

Some of the Jan. 6 defendants made it clear they did not consider themselves uncritical supporters of Trump. Brock said that he’s a Trump supporter at the end of the day. But “I got a lot of stuff that I could say against Trump,” he said, “that I wish he’d have done different, or would do different.”

Brock said that although Trump is “the man of the hour,” he thinks the president doesn’t “admit any of his mistakes” and pushed COVID restrictions and vaccines too hard during his first term.

As general principles, he believes in small government and worries about the role of money in politics.

“We don’t need the federal government to do nothing for us,” Brock said. “What we need, worse than anything, is somebody to get the federal government out of our business.”

And Brock said something needs to be done about corrupt politicians.

“They call bribing lobbying,” he said. “To me, that’s become the same thing.”

Bray said he had a distrust of billionaires, and Trump being a part of that club made him wonder whether one could really believe that he was for the people.

He also took issue with people seeing Trump as a savior. “There’s a lot of Trump voters that are like, ‘This will fix everything. We just gotta elect Trump, and everything’s fixed.’”

Bray was convicted in 2024 of obstructing law enforcement, and of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building. He said he used a police riot shield to part crowds in the Capitol rotunda as he and his son were trying to leave, but he denied interfering with law enforcement. He recalled complying with officers’ instructions and offering his first aid kit to an officer who appeared injured. Before the Justice Department dropped his case last month, his sentencing was scheduled for February.

Bray spoke about the importance of engaging with politics, learning about representatives, tracking how they vote, and speaking up. “You can’t just flip on the TV for one hour each day and watch whatever your favorite brand of news is, and just take that and say, ‘Okay, I’m informed’,” Bray said.

“All the nationwide media, the legacy media companies, they portrayed us as terrorists, extremists, conspiracy theorists,” McGrew said. To a lot of people, he said, “we were monsters.” But he wants people to know that the people who participated in Jan. 6 aren’t a monolith. “We’ve had every background you can think of as part of this movement.”

Cyree believes that the way to make progress is for individuals to talk to each other directly.

“We’ve got this groupthink that needs to stop,” Cyree said. “Groupthink sometimes goes to group hate and group misunderstanding. If you can get one person to talk to another person, they can find out they have a lot more in common that unites them, than separates them.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.