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The Jackson Police Department arrested a 51-year-old man on Friday in the killing of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman who in August was found hanging from a tree next to a vacant home in west Jackson. 

Jarques Ratliff was arrested after the medical examiner’s office classified Fortune’s death as a homicide on Thursday night and police then secured two search warrants, Chief RaShall Brackney said during a news conference Friday.

Fortune’s family was immediately notified of Ratliff’s arrest, Brackney said. She said additional arrests are coming. The case has garnered national attention because the manner in which Fortune was discovered evoked memories of the South’s history of lynching. 

“This is not closure,” Brackney said. “This is just one step as we continue to investigate this case.” 

Brackney said that Fortune knew Ratliff but she would not elaborate on the nature of their relationship. She said officers arrested him on Friday afternoon after they saw him walking along Capitol Street, a road in west Jackson close to the 500 block of Road of Remembrance, where Fortune was found. 

“We understand the questions and desires for answers given Mississippi’s history,” Brackney said. “We understand this case is being viewed through a broader lens, a global lens, and we do not dismiss those concerns. We are taking them seriously. At the same time, we do have a responsibility to make sure that what we say publicly is supported by our evidence and facts.”

The police chief urged people to be patient while the investigation remains active. Brackney touted the department’s work. She said investigators interviewed nearly 15 people but couldn’t execute any warrants until the medical examiner’s office ruled Fortune’s death a homicide. 

As of Friday afternoon, Ratliff’s name did not appear in the Hinds County jail log. JPD Public Information Officer Tommie Brown said Ratliff had a Jackson address. It was not immediately clear whether Ratliff is represented by an attorney.

Earlier this week, Brackney told the Jackson City Council that Fortune’s autopsy was completed four weeks ago but JPD had not received it. Her comments came in response to Ward 3 Councilmember Kenneth Stokes and a letter from Fortune’s mother. 

In August, Hinds County Coroner Jeremiah Howard identified Fortune as the victim. She was a Kentucky native who ran away from home at 16 with someone she had met in foster care, her family told Mississippi Today. 

Fortune’s family said they didn’t know much about her life in Jackson but understood Fortune was struggling with addiction and was often destitute. 

A makeshift memorial has risen at the house where Fortune was found – a small mound of flowers, balloons, teddy bears and pinwheels surrounding a framed picture of her.

Fortune was the mother of four children.

WASHINGTON — Twenty-five years later, the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, are still remembered as among the most important historic events in many Americans’ lives, according to a new poll.

A new Ipsos poll finds that about half of U.S. adults name the 9/11 attacks in an open-ended question about the most important historic occurrences in their lifetimes. That’s despite other momentous events that have happened since then, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the elections of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

The polling points to the enduring legacy of 9/11, even as many Americans today are too young to have experienced or comprehended the event a quarter century ago. Ipsos found that the vast majority of Americans remember where they were when they heard about the attacks, and about two-thirds of Americans say it impacted the country “a great deal.” Separate polling from Gallup finds about 3 in 10 U.S. adults say they permanently changed the way they live their lives because of the attacks.

Despite the widespread impact, the Ipsos poll finds relatively few Americans will be marking the anniversary in some way. Only about 1 in 10 U.S. adults plans to do something to commemorate Friday’s 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Kevin Noel, 51, remembers watching the catastrophe unfold after he got out of a subway station to head to work near the World Trade Center that morning. To this day, the smell of the deadly inferno comes back to him whenever he’s in the area. He views 9/11 as the most historic event he’s lived through and believes “we’re going to be remembering this for the rest of history.” He plans to reflect on it privately on Friday.

“Every Sept. 11, I just — it’s a traumatic day for me where I just go silent,” Noel said.

The 9/11 attacks top the list of historic events in many Americans’ lifetime

For Americans who can remember the Sept. 11 attacks, they were a defining moment.

When U.S. adults were asked to list up to five of the most important historic events in their lifetime in the open-ended question — where respondents answered in their own words — the Sept. 11 attacks overshadowed the much more recent COVID-19 pandemic, which 31% of U.S. adults mentioned.

Other events, including the elections of Trump and Obama, space expeditions and the fall of the Berlin Wall, were cited by many Americans as defining moments. For Americans 65 and older, the most frequently mentioned events were the Sept. 11 attacks, followed by President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, space expeditions and the Vietnam War.

Clara Kiel, 88, says World War II had more impact on her life personally, as it hung over her childhood and she knew people who served. But she recalls the shock of watching 9/11 happen on TV from her living room. She also plans to take a moment to reflect privately on the 25th anniversary.

“It always seems like there’s something in history that changes the way people think,” said Kiel, a retired secretary in Onamia, Minnesota. “9/11 did it for the generation that grew up through that.”

For younger Americans under 35, COVID-19 is more prominent. About half of U.S. adults under 35 say the pandemic was among the most impactful events of their lifetime, while about one-third mention 9/11. A significant share of younger adults were not born when the attacks happened, or were too young to remember where they were at the time.

About 6 in 10 adults who were born after the attacks say they first learned about 9/11 in a class or through schoolwork, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in August.

Californian Kainoa Ilac, 18, who’s heading to college in Los Angeles, learned about the attacks from his parents, who are history teachers.

“I think that I and a lot of my peers in my generation still feel the effects of that day,” from airport security to awareness of the government’s ability to monitor communications, he said.

Americans overwhelmingly say the 9/11 attacks impacted the country

About 9 in 10 Americans say the attacks on Sept. 11 impacted the United States “a great deal” or “quite a bit,” according to Ipsos. Roughly 7 in 10 say it had at least “quite a bit” of impact on the world, and about 6 in 10 say it had a significant impact on their generation. Closer to 3 in 10 say it impacted their family or them personally.

Americans ages 50 and older are especially likely to say the attacks affected them personally.

Among the roughly 1 in 10 Americans who plan to mark the day, about 7 in 10 say they will participate in a moment of silence, and most, 56%, will display an American flag.

Lakesha Crowell remembers 9/11 in detail, including where she was sitting in her sophomore world history class in Meridian, Mississippi, when the teacher disclosed that two planes had hit New York’s World Trade Center. She recalls the security changes, the economic fallout, the way some people around her began looking differently upon foreigners, and the sense of vigilance at both individual and national levels.

“It affected us a lot, because it changed our way of living, and it changed our way of thinking,” said Crowell, 40.

Confidence in government’s ability to protect Americans from terrorism is down

Americans are divided on whether the country has become safer from foreign attacks since 9/11.

The Ipsos poll found about one-third of U.S. adults say the country is “more safe,” and a similar share say it is “less safe.” The remaining one-third, roughly, say the U.S. is about as safe as it was before the attacks.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the country has become safer.

Recent Gallup polling found most U.S. adults, 55%, have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the U.S. government to protect its citizens from future acts of terrorism. That faith was at its highest, 88%, in polling conducted in the days after the 9/11 attack. It has ticked down over the 25-year trend, but the most recent measure is among the lowest recorded, similar to a poll conducted just after a deadly 2015 mass shooting in southern California.

Additionally, about one-third say they are “very” or “somewhat” worried that they or someone in their family will become a victim of terrorism. That’s down from about 6 in 10 who said that in the days following Sept. 11, 2001.

David Bronkhurst, a 49-year-old in Bloomingdale, New Jersey, recalls that after the attacks, his then-partner volunteered at the World Trade Center disaster site, handing out supplies to rescue and recovery workers, and some friends changed career paths to join the fire department. Other friends on the city’s police force died from cancers after they were exposed to toxins from the ash and dust at ground zero, he said.

He plans to attend an annual candlelight procession from a neighboring town to his own.

Bronkhurst doesn’t consider the country safer now than it was before the attacks — but he doesn’t worry too much that terrorism might strike him or his family. “You can’t go through life being scared,” he said.

___

Peltz reported from New York.

___

The Ipsos poll of 1,013 adults was conducted Aug. 21-23 using a sample drawn from Ipsos’s probability-based KnowledgePanel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The Jackson City Council adopted a budget Friday that is nearly 20% smaller than last year’s after confronting the reality that the city lacks the money to fully fund some public safety services. 

The council voted 5-1 in favor of the $337-million budget for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, including a $113 million general fund that will mostly be spent on services such as police, firefighting and public works. 

The budget includes no tax increases. The final day of the council’s deliberations featured intense discussion about funding for firefighting 

“We are scraping every couch cushion for every extra nickel for public safety,” said Pieter Teeuwissen, the city’s chief administrative officer. 

Ward 2 Councilmember Tina Clay, who described herself as a “lone ranger,” was the sole no vote. Clay said she disagreed with the council’s attempts to fund the public safety departments at the expense of other initiatives such as planning and development.  

“I know you budgeted $113 million, but in my eyes it’s zero because it’s not covering what we need to make us functional,” she said. 

The council allocated roughly $33 million to the Jackson Police Department and about $25 million to the Jackson Fire Department. Public works, which is responsible for infrastructure, was allotted $19 million. 

The remainder of the budget is dedicated for specific uses – the council cannot repurpose the dollars. Under Jackson’s form of government, the mayor’s administration writes a budget and the council approves it. 

When this year’s budget talks began, some council members believed the new spending plan would represent steep cuts to city services, particularly public works, said Kevin Parkinson, the Ward 7 Councilmember and finance committee chairman. 

While that’s true on paper, Parkinson said the city’s chief administrative officer and the finance department drafted the proposed budget by what departments actually spent. In part because the administration did not use such a process last year, Parkinson said the fiscal year 2026 budget was not an accurate estimate of the city’s revenue and expenditures. 

“We are passing a genuinely balanced budget,” he told Mississippi Today. “We really are a more efficient government. We’re getting more done with less.” 

The final day of budget hearings came down to whether the city’s tightened belt could be loosened for the fire department. Chief RaSean Thomas had asked the council for an additional $1.5 million to hire 25 more officers – an effort to improve the city’s fire rating that was downgraded earlier this summer due to lower-than-ideal staffing. 

After taking a brief break to talk to the finance department, Teeuwissen found $750,000 by giving up a position in his office and shifting money between multiple accounts. This will allow Thomas to hire 12 more officers. 

In prior years, Ward 3 Councilmember Kenneth Stokes said the council would have simply used the city’s reserves — consisting of unassigned general funds — to hire more firefighters.

But that move wouldn’t be possible this year, Teeuwissen told the council. Due to a lack of up-to-date audits, the city doesn’t know how much it currently has in reserves. Teeuwissen suspected the number might be alarmingly low. 

A call to the city’s auditor confirmed this concern. In 2023, the city had $29 million in unassigned reserves, Jillian Caldwell, the chief financial officer, told the council. In 2024, the auditor estimated the city had about $7 million. 

“It may be down to zero,” Clay said. Her solution for hiring more firefighters – to reduce the police budget and rely more on Capitol Police to patrol downtown Jackson – garnered no support. 

The deadline to adopt the budget is Sept. 15. Mayor John Horhn did not attend the final day of budget talks. Ward 4 Council Member Brian Grizzell was also absent.

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.

Mississippi knows how to change clothes. We just have a habit of keeping the same problems underneath them. 

Poll taxes and literacy tests are forms of voter suppression we recognize immediately because history has taught us what they look like. They were blatant. But barriers to political power do not always announce themselves so clearly. Policies change. Language changes. Sometimes the struggle underneath them does not. 

But the fight underneath these tools was always bigger than the tools themselves. It was about access. Who gets political power? Who gets to exercise it easily? And who has to work harder just to reach what supposedly belongs to everyone? 

That question followed me recently while trying to navigate Mississippi’s voter-registration system. 

I am 21 years old, study political science and have done civic engagement work. I have reliable internet access and spend more time thinking about elections than the average person. Yet even I found Mississippi’s voter information difficult to navigate. I moved between different state resources looking for answers and eventually called the Mississippi Secretary of State’s hotline.

When I asked about transportation assistance, the representative had to search the state’s website while I waited and ultimately told me she would need to call me back with an answer. 

That made me think less about inconvenience and more about equity. If both the person seeking information and the person responsible for providing it have to search for the answer, how accessible is that information in the first place? 

And if exercising a right requires navigating multiple resources, making phone calls, printing and mailing paperwork or finding transportation to complete a process in person, who pays the price for those extra steps? 

What about an older Mississippian unfamiliar with navigating multiple websites, someone in the Delta without reliable transportation, a first-time voter who does not even know the first step to becoming registered, a student away from home, a working parent who cannot easily make it to an office during business hours?

These people may have completely different lives, but an additional step costs each of them something: time, transportation, technology, information or assistance. 

I am a college student with reliable internet access and a laptop, and I still struggled to navigate it. The ballot may be free, but accessing Mississippi’s democracy can be remarkably cumbersome.

Maybe I noticed the difference because I came to Mississippi for college from Georgia, where eligible residents with state-issued identification can register to vote online. Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee also offer online voter-registration options. Crossing one of Mississippi’s borders, and accessing the same fundamental right can suddenly look remarkably different. 

And once I started thinking about the cost of access, it became difficult to look at online voter registration as an isolated issue. 

Mississippi lawmakers already had an opportunity to remove one of those costs. House Bill 593 was introduced during the 2026 legislative session to authorize online registration for eligible first-time voters. It included state-issued identification requirements, identity verification and county registrar review. 

It died in committee. 

Why? 

One bill dying would not tell us much. Mississippi bills die every year. But HB 593 does not exist in a political vacuum. When a proposal designed to remove an administrative barrier dies before reaching the floor, it is worth examining it alongside Mississippi’s other unresolved fights over access to political power. 

Mississippians have been without a functioning statewide ballot-initiative process since 2021. Our state has prohibited ranked-choice voting in state and local elections. And in 2024, a three-judge federal panel found that portions of Mississippi’s legislative maps unlawfully diluted Black voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring the state to redraw districts. 

Legislation capable of expanding access dies before reaching the floor. A ballot-initiative process that once gave citizens direct political power remains unavailable year after year. Even redistricting intended to remedy the dilution of Black voting strength has become the subject of continued political and legal fights. 

At some point, resistance to change stops being a sufficient explanation. 

When voter access is repeatedly caught in another committee, another lawsuit, another delay, the cumulative effect can stymie political participation itself. 

At some point, we have to stop examining these decisions individually and start examining the pattern. 

Different policies. Different circumstances. But the same underlying question: Who gets access to political power, and how easily do they get to exercise it? 

And I have a hard time accepting that the answer is simply to wait. 

Change in Mississippi did not arrive because institutions suddenly became generous. Black Mississippians, students, churches and communities organized until maintaining the old system became more difficult than changing it.

Maybe we have spent too much time waiting for political power to come down from the Capitol instead of bringing our collective power to its steps. Mississippi’s history has already shown us what happens when ordinary people make their voices impossible to ignore. 

So where do we start? With each other. 

Mississippi already has the infrastructure for collective power within our communities. What if we built a statewide coalition around a simple demand: accessing democracy in Mississippi should not be harder than it has to be? 

The system already knows how to tell us no. 

Maybe it is time we organize enough people that it can no longer afford to.

Jakari Holland is a senior political science student at Jackson State University and a native of Atlanta. He has described his work as centering on political access, economic disinvestment and a simple question: when opportunity is promised, can the people it is meant to serve actually access it? He is particularly drawn to grassroots movements that transform local communities into sources of collective political power and turn that power into tangible change. 

SR1 College Preparatory and STEM Academy seemed poised to close four months ago. At a hearing in May, an attorney for the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board had built a case detailing severe fiscal mismanagement by school executives. 

Discussions at several previous board meetings had also exposed serious problems, such as overprojecting enrollment and other questionable business practices. The issues could cost the school its charter.

But the board couldn’t just act on that information. First, it needs a recommendation from the hearing officer. The officer has not acted, and the school remains open.

Under the leadership of a new provost, SR1 CPSA students attend classes in what was once a daycare facility in Canton. Tamu Green, the school’s founder and chief executive officer, said he plans to enroll 200 students by next school year. He reported 98 students at the end of the last school year.

Lisa Karmacharya, the charter board’s executive director, said Thursday she had anticipated making a decision in time for the current school year if the recommendation was to revoke the school’s charter so parents could find another option that fits their children’s needs.

At the May 14 hearing, hearing officer Kim Turner asked Dillon Pitts, an attorney who represents the charter board, and Jamie Travis, an attorney who represents SR1 CPSA, to submit additional findings of fact and conclusion of law within 30 days of completing the transcript. Then Turner would begin work on her recommendation to the charter board. She said the bulk of the work would be analyzing hundreds of documents submitted by the attorneys.

“I will, within a reasonable time, provide a written report and recommendations to the board,” Turner said at the hearing. She later said the parties “could be several months out” from the board voting on her recommendation.

Turner is also director of the state agencies division at the attorney general’s office. The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request from Mississippi Today for a status update on the transcript or on Turner’s work toward making a recommendation.

At the hearing, Travis suggested he might appeal the recommendation, which could delay the process further. Turner said she would include an appeal deadline within her recommendation.

Mississippi Today asked Karmacharya if the board received evidence of whether the mismanagement that put the school’s charter at risk is still happening. She said she can’t comment because of the charter board’s active investigation into the school. 

Depending on the vote, SR1 CPSA would be the first school in the state to have its charter revoked by the authorizer board. 

Management concerns abounded at the school, Pitts said during the hearing. He described conditions that could affect students’ safety, such as subpar health standards and a lack of documented support for students with disabilities. 

The Canton charter school was out of compliance with federal guidelines that ensure healthy and safe food for students, according to Pitts, who referred to a 2026 inspection of the school cafeteria. Pitts presented evidence that seven out of 11 individualized learning plans, or IEPs, were also missing signatures from parents or guardians. These plans ensure school officials accommodate a student’s disability.

Read more: Mississippi may shut down a Canton charter school for severe fiscal mismanagement

Pitts claimed school officials didn’t disclose the use of credit cards to pay for school supplies they bought from Amazon. Backup documentation such as receipts and invoices were not always provided, he said.

The charter board began the process of revoking the school’s charter in December after determining the school had one day’s cash on hand, or $24,000. The charter board had also discussed revoking its charter in December 2023 because school leaders requested money to serve 150 students but enrolled 12. The school overestimated its enrollment each subsequent year.

Travis argued the school never missed payments and had a bank account balance that exceeded the required reserve amount mandated by the authorizer board. Green also claimed that charter authorizer board staff offered little technical support to the school business manager.

Green made the same claim in May at a town hall meeting he hosted in Canton for parents, staff and community members. He asked parents to advocate for the school ahead of the critical vote to revoke its charter.

Renee Truss, whose grandson is a first grader at SR1 CPSA, attended the charter board’s June meeting and asked the group to keep the school open. She said it offered her grandson the kind of attention he would not get in nearby public schools.

“Understand that there are students that are affected,” she said. “As a parent, we don’t know about the finances and the monies that the school has. But we’ve been recently made aware of the financial challenges of the school. And being made aware of those challenges, we have rallied behind SR1 in our community because we know the difference that it has made.

“At SR1 it appears that the students’ needs are being met.”

On Thursday, Truss told Mississippi Today she still feels the same way. She said she believes the school can endure with community support.

One woman in Hattiesburg and another in Louisiana have reported to law enforcement that former Mississippi counselor Wade Wicht sexually assaulted them, records show.

In July, Wicht’s former patient, Kimberly Cuellar, filed her complaint with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, accusing him of raping her at her family’s home in Louisiana in 2023. She previously told Mississippi Today about the alleged assault.

On Tuesday, one of Wicht’s former co-workers filed a sworn statement with the Hattiesburg Police Department, accusing him of sexual battery. Mississippi Today does not identify victims of alleged sexual assault without their permission.

Cuellar and two other women reported alleged assaults to Mississippi authorities, but no indictments came. The complaint filed Tuesday is a fourth woman.

Wicht did not respond to email, text and phone call requests for comments. He is no longer being represented by his former attorney, and that attorney said he does not know whether Wicht has new representation. Wicht has previously declined to comment on the women’s allegations.

Cuellar told Mississippi Today she still suffers from flashbacks and trauma.

“He’s living free while his victims are paying for everything he did,” she said. “He’s living out his dream while we’re probably going to have therapy the rest of our lives. It’s just not fair he’s getting away with all this crap he put us through.”

She is one of three former patients who have accused Wicht of manipulating them and sexually abusing them. 

In the time since those allegations became public, these women have pushed for legislation that would make it a crime in Mississippi for mental health professionals to have sexual contact with their patients. 

More than half the states have already done that. The American Counseling Association has long banned sexual or romantic counselor-client relationships.

In 2023, the Mississippi House passed a bill that would have made it a crime for therapists, clergy, doctors and nurses to have sexual contact with those they treat or counsel. But the bill died in the Senate Judiciary B Committee after some senators questioned the need for a law.

This year, lawmakers introduced bills that would have made psychotherapists’ “sexual misconduct with a client” a crime, but both died in committee.

“Each year, if it can make more progress, that’s something,” said Jenny Green, another former patient who has accused Wicht of abuse.

“Without consequences, the behaviors aren’t going to change,” she said. “We see it with the Jeffrey Epstein case. We see it when teachers are allowed to sleep with their students or bosses with their employees. In the end, everybody’s going to get hurt, including the perpetrators, who are often suffering from a deeper wound that hasn’t healed.

The Mississippi Board of Examiners for Licensed Professional Counselors, which oversees and licenses counselors, bars sexual contact between a counselor and a former patient for five years.

In 2022, after Wicht admitted he had sex with Cuellar and another former patient, he surrendered his license to the board.

“What I did was wrong, and I disclosed this behavior to my wife just two weeks ago,” he wrote in a letter to the board. “I have also disclosed (this) to my family, church, and counseling staff.”

In an April 2022 letter, he admitted to “moral failures and ethical violations in my personal and professional life.”

***

In 2019, Cuellar, then 26, said she went to see the 44-year-old Wicht for help because of the trauma she had suffered in a cult and an abusive relationship.

Instead of helping her, she said he used his power to groom her, touch her sexually and begin a sexual relationship with her — all while continuing to serve as her therapist.

“When you … started touching me, molesting me, I couldn’t believe it,” she wrote to him in text exchanges she shared with Mississippi Today. “It went on for so long. I could barely breathe.”

For the next several months, he continued to conduct therapy sessions with her, and he continued to have sex with her, she said.

After this, he stopped counseling her, she said, but the relationship continued because she said she remained under his spell.

By March 2023, she said she had repaired her family relationships, moved in with her mother and cut off her sexual relationship with Wicht, telling him that the only way they could have sex again would be if they were married.

Months later, he visited. That night at her mother’s home, she said she told him she was exhausted and going straight to sleep, only to wake up to “him on top of me.”

In text message exchanges, she told him she felt “very violated” and “if I was awake, you know I would have not said yes to that.”

He responded, “Omgoodness, what??!! That is horrific!!! I am so incredibly sorry that’s how you experienced it. … What you’re accusing me of is criminal, Kimberly!”

“You moved my shorts, and you absolutely tried to get inside me,” she texted him.

“I touched you with my fingers, and I was touching myself,” he responded. “That’s what went on. I was NOT trying to have sex with you while you were sleeping.”

She told him “no” multiple times and, when he refused to stop, she grabbed him, she wrote. “Did you really stop? Not really. You then touched me without consent while you ejaculated on my body after all the no’s I had given.”

***

On July 2, Cuellar went to the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office and accused Wicht of third-degree rape on July 11, 2023. Deputies are investigating.

Under that law, rape occurs when the sexual act takes place without the consent of the victim or “when the victim is incapable of resisting” and “the offender knew or should have known of the victim’s incapacity.”

Anyone convicted “shall be imprisoned at hard labor, without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence, for not more than 25 years,” according to the statute, which allows victims a decade to seek charges.

On Tuesday, Wicht’s former co-worker wrote in her sworn statement to Hattiesburg police that despite repeatedly telling him she never wanted anal sex, he “penetrated me anally on at least eight occasions” between 2017 and 2021. “Wade characterized the anal penetration as accidental,” she wrote. “I tried to believe him.”

Another of Wicht’s former patients, Jennie Cade, worked for him at his Hattiesburg business, Alley Cats Axe Throwing Co. She said after Cuellar told her that Wicht had raped her, she confronted Wicht. 

Cade said she asked him if Cuellar was lying, and Wicht replied no. Cade said he corroborated Cuellar’s story, including that he had touched her sexually while she slept.

When he downplayed all of what happened, saying he was “overcome with love,” Cade said she replied, “You need to call this what it is — rape.”

After those words, “he shut down hard,” she said. “I quit after that. I had to get out of there.”

On Thursday, Cade said a detective for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office questioned her about her conversation with Wicht.

Cuellar, Cade and Green have previously accused Wicht of sexually abusing them in Mississippi, but grand juries didn’t indict him.

Green recently ran into one of the grand jury members, she said. “With tears in his eyes, he told me he believed me.”

He expressed sorrow that the two-year statute of limitations on sexual assault had expired. What made the situation frustrating for Green is she had filed her criminal complaint with Hattiesburg police a month before the time ran out, records show.

Green said she can’t understand why the timeline to report sexual assault is so short when it takes so long for victims to deal with such trauma. “This legal loophole helps predators and hurts victims.”

The timeline makes even less sense, she said, when one realizes that rape has no statute of limitations in Mississippi.

Victims preyed on by these monsters typically get peppered with questions by authorities, she said.

“If I called 911 about a burglary at my house, the police wouldn’t say, ‘Well, your door was unlocked. Don’t you think you were inviting them in?’ Or if I called, saying my house was on fire, the firemen wouldn’t enter and say, ‘You were cooking on your stove. You asked for it,’” she said. “I don’t understand why we are the one victim who is questioned.”

The Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid is temporarily unable to process student applications and payments after a cyberattack on Monday. It’s unclear when that issue will be resolved. 

The cyberattack struck the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning offices, which include the student financial aid office. The attack affected the student financial office the most, agency spokesman John Sewell confirmed Thursday, but he did not provide details about the broader impact. 

It is still possible to apply for aid online through the Mississippi Aid Application dashboard, or MAAPP,  because that operates separately from IHL’s affected system, Sewell said. There have been no reports of the cyberattack affecting individual colleges or universities.

IHL officials are working with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals to determine what happened and whether confidential or sensitive data were accessed or compromised, according to Sewell and a news release from IHL.

Sewell also declined to provide additional details about what happened, what type of cyberattack occurred and why the agency announced the incident days later on Thursday.

The attack against IHL is the latest example of cybersecurity disruptions at state institutions so far this year. 

In May, the criminal extortion group ShinyHunters attacked Canvas, a learning management system used by Mississippi State University and thousands of other educational institutions globally. The incident disrupted finals week at MSU, blocking access to coursework, classes and grades — and leaving students scrambling. 

A Feb.19 cyberattack forced the University of Mississippi Medical Center to cancel appointments and elective surgeries for nine days. Medical staff had to care for patients without access to Wi-Fi or phone lines. Roughly 650 surgeries were delayed. A month later, the ransomware group Medusa claimed credit for the cyberattack and demanded payment to prevent the publication of stolen data.

When it comes to data centers, Vayujeet Gokhale has but one ask.

“If you are going to have lights on at night, then let’s do it in a responsible way,” he said.

Gokhale is a physics professor at Truman State University and a board member for DarkSky Missouri — the state chapter for an international nonprofit aimed at reducing artificial lighting at night. The broader organization has taken a similar stance.

Gokhale acknowledges his cause might not be the first or second priority for most communities. It might not even be third, he said. Yet, he argues that it may be the easiest of environmental problems to solve.

“You don’t need to light up the place for these computers and memory banks to work. They’ll still work even if it’s completely dark,” Gokhale said. “You need light for certain other things, but you can minimize the pollution without affecting the quality of the data center product. You can’t make that same case with water and energy.”

Rather than allowing data centers and the companies running them to operate their lighting on an individual basis, Gokhale said he wants to see his organization’s principles for responsible outdoor lighting get adopted. This would include installing lighting that is pointed downwards, motion detectors so that light is only in use when needed, and warm-colored lights to reduce unnecessary brightness. 

These kinds of deliberate choices might benefit the data center companies by reducing their spending on lighting while improving safety and security at their facilities, according to Gokhale.

“Many times, in these environmental issues, pollution-related issues, it’s a zero-sum game. You have to give up something in order to gain something. Not so with light pollution. It’s a win-win,” Gokhale said.

Dark skies for humans, birds and insects

The United States has the most data centers in the world. More than 3,000 are already up and running, as demand for infrastructure that can power artificial intelligence and store digital information continues to grow. Three-quarters of the data centers planned are in the South or Midwest, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. In Mississippi, has seven with more proposed.

Missouri has 95 active data centers, according to Data Center Map, the company that supplied data for the Pew report. 

New projects in the state include a $15 billion investment in Montgomery County from Google that was announced back in May. At the time, Gov. Mike Kehoe touted the move as an economic win for the state. “This project represents more than infrastructure — it’s an investment in Missouri families, communities, and long-term opportunity,” said Kehoe in a press release at the time.

With regulations in place, Gokhale believes the U.S will be better equipped to preserve the night skies for human observers and wildlife — such as migrating birds or insect species that work as night time pollinators. While many people might first think of butterflies and hummingbirds as pollinators, nocturnal insects play a key role for both local ecosystems and agriculture. 

“A lot of the pollinators are actually active at night,” Gokhale said. “If you have too much artificial light, they get confused or disoriented.”

The job of a pollinator is an important one, said Nicole Flowers-Kimmerle, a horticulture educator for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Extension. About one out of every three bites of food produced in the U.S. is dependent on insect or animal pollinators, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Artificial light at night not only disrupts a nighttime pollinator’s ability to navigate, it also changes their feeding and mating behaviors, she said. “So if we see that we’re having a declining number of moths, then that’s going to affect pollination, but it also affects the food web,” she said.

A decline in moths and other nighttime pollinators could impact the bird species that rely on them as a source for food. That’s a problem that is further compounded since many migrating birds are themselves affected by artificial light pollution at night, according to Murry Burgess, an assistant professor at Mississippi State University who specializes in ornithology and urban ecology. In recent decades, scientists have found that some migratory birds use the stars as a compass that helps orient their travel paths.

“So with light pollution, it’s really obscuring the stars and throwing them off course, making them expend more energy kind of circling around trying to find where they’re supposed to go,” said Burgess. “That’s when you start to see a lot of window collisions and increased mortality as well.”

The Mississippi River Basin, in particular, is a key flyway for approximately half of all North American bird species, which need to travel as far as South America and back each year. Those include song birds, waterfowl and even raptor species.

“It’s really important to preserve dark sky areas, the same way that you would have a wildlife refuge, like the sky is part of the environment, part of their habitat,” she said.

Like other environmental advocates, Burgess agrees that the harm from artificial lighting at night should be mitigated in a responsible way. She said that unlike the larger issues surrounding data center developments, such as land usage and environmental pollution, lighting could be less complicated to solve.

“With light pollution, it really can be as simple as just turning off the lights or changing the types of lights that you use,” Burgess said.

Regulations along the river?

Throughout the Mississippi River Basin, local communities are picking sides in the battle over data centers.

In January, elected officials for the city of Warrenton, Missouri, voted unanimously to approve a data center plan that would include two buildings — each of them four times larger than a Costco warehouse or Walmart supercenter — along Interstate 70. Yet, not all Missouri communities are eager to see these high-profile projects in their town and counties. Earlier this summer, the St. Charles County Council passed a six-month moratorium on large-scale data center development. On the other end of the state, voters in the city of Independence have recalled a number of city council members for approving a data center’s construction with tax breaks. 

With both approval and pushback for data centers growing across the state, legislators have tried to address key issues for their constituents. Like Rep. Colin Wellenkamp — a Republican for St. Charles County — who introduced House Bill 3362 in the previous legislative session. The bill sought to regulate data center electricity usage by making them pay for costs, as well as any necessary power grid upgrades. It also would have created a permit requirement for high water usage from the state Department of Natural Resources, which does not regulate data centers or even have a standard definition for such businesses. 

“The AI economy is growing in Missouri which is a good thing as long as Missouri communities are protected and empowered to lead the way,” said Wellenkamp in a late-June Facebook post.

Ultimately, none of the legislation aimed at regulating Missouri’s data center advanced, nor did they address environmental advocates’ concerns for light pollution and how it could affect local wildlife.

Gokhale, the Truman State professor, said he’s not in favor of data centers, but he’s not exactly opposed to them, either. He just has a lot of questions.

“At the most fundamental level, we need to define what these things are, what their purpose is,” Gokhale said.

Gokhale said a first step toward regulations would be to categorize data centers beyond the vagueness of artificial intelligence and cloud storage. To him, the need is urgent. More and more data centers will spring up around the country — and with them, an increased concern for limited land and water resources from local communities.

“This has to be done by the people, by council members, by politicians, and effectively enacted into some sort of policy,” he said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Deonte Shaw remembers the late October day he arrived at the Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond. He remembers working in the kitchen, spending time with his cell mate and the white sheet that separated their cell from the crowded jail pod. 

What Shaw doesn’t remember is the beating. 

On the night of Nov. 12, inmates attacked Shaw in his cell, according to hospital medical records Shaw provided Mississippi Today. Guards discovered Shaw the next morning, barely conscious and with bruises on his face. Hours passed before the infirmary sent Shaw to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and put on a ventilator.

His girlfriend, Ife Myles, didn’t know about the beating, and she wondered why he had stopped calling. She sought answers from the jail, but weeks went by before a friend told her in late December that Shaw had been severely injured.

On New Year’s Eve, after a week of frequent trips to Raymond, Myles got a call. “Bring a wheelchair,” a jailer told her. Shaw could go home. 

This summer, Shaw, 31, became the latest in dozens of people to sue Hinds County since 2015 when U.S. Justice Department officials declared conditions at the jail unconstitutional, including the failure to protect inmates from violence. His attorneys filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Jackson – five days after inmates in Raymond stomped to death an 18-year-old, whose killing and last breaths were caught on video and shared on social media.

Lawsuit alleges widespread jail violence

The lawsuit alleges that Shaw’s rights were violated by the county’s failure to run a jail free from widespread violence and is demanding the county pay damages, including Shaw’s medical expenses. 

The couple wants accountability. But so far, Hinds County and the sheriff’s department have ignored public records requests from Shaw’s attorney that might explain Shaw’s injuries, including security videos.

In court filings, Jessica Malone, an attorney hired by the county, denies Shaw was beaten, instead alleging that he “suffered a medical emergency, was found unresponsive, administered Narcan and then provided with medical treatment.” Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones won’t comment on litigation, and Wendell France, the Maryland-based court-appointed receiver currently overseeing the detention center, is barred by the federal court from making statements to the media.

Medical records reviewed by Mississippi Today mention that Shaw had ingested drugs – something Shaw denies – but describe his “mechanism of injury” as assault. According to the medical report, the only drug in Shaw’s system was benzodiazepine, which paramedics gave him before he was admitted to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Myles, 35, cried when she recounted the moment she finally laid eyes on Shaw. Shaw cried, too.

“It’s not me, like how I used to be,” Shaw said. 

The couple met six years ago when Shaw worked as a cook at Waffle House. Shaw took Myles’ order – a cheesesteak melt and a bowl of grits, then asked for her phone number. He came over for her birthday, Myles said, “and he never left.” 

The alleged beating couldn’t break their bond. Myles took Shaw to physical therapy, bathed him and fed him. 

Now she’s helping Shaw prepare for the day he might have to testify in court. 

Traffic stop leads to jail

Shaw had just paid $1,000 for a used car when Capitol Police pulled him over on Oct. 24 on a traffic stop. Shaw knew he was going to jail. Months earlier, a Hinds County Circuit Court judge had issued a bench warrant after he skipped drug court. 

At Raymond, Shaw called Myles as often as he could. Myles tried to cheer him up by showing off her new red hair. That conversation was on the afternoon of Nov. 12, hours before Shaw says he was beaten.

Then Shaw went silent.

By Thanksgiving, Myles was concerned. She called an official with the Hinds County drug court who told her that Shaw might be at the state mental hospital, where a judge had ordered him to undergo rehab. But the hospital told Myles that Shaw wasn’t there. 

“I got depressed,” Myles said. “I was like, did he run away?” 

On Dec. 20, Myles heard from her legal husband, who she had separated from years earlier. He was also in jail. He knew Shaw, and the two men had chosen to be cell mates for safety reasons. Her estranged husband told her he saw Shaw being beaten. 

The next day, a friend whose boyfriend was also in jail gave her similar news. 

Using a friend’s phone, Myles began recording herself calling the jail. On recordings shared with Mississippi Today, voices from both sides of the conversation were audible.

On one phone call, Myles spoke to a man who introduced himself as a jail supervisor. Myles explained that she hadn’t heard from Shaw in over a month and was considering reporting him missing after learning he had been “severely beaten.”

“OK, I don’t know who told you all that,” the supervisor said on the recording. “Shaw is good.” 

But when Myles asked which zone Shaw was in, the supervisor responded that he couldn’t say. “That’s violating the HIPAA,” he said, referring to the federal law meant to protect sensitive health information. 

“Jail is public record!” Myles yelled into the phone. 

After days of driving to Raymond, Myles finally got confirmation of what she’d suspected. On Dec. 29, a jail captain told her Shaw was in the infirmary. But she was not allowed to see him.

On New Year’s Eve, a Hinds County judge signed Shaw’s release. Later that day, Myles received the call that she could get Shaw from jail.

She brought a wheelchair as instructed. She borrowed it from a neighbor. She wasn’t told why she’d need one.

As she was driving, Myles’ phone rang. A man identified himself as the jail administrator and told Myles that a “doctor report” showed Shaw had taken drugs, passed out, hit his head and had a stroke in the hospital, according to another recording reviewed by Mississippi Today. 

Myles said she knew it was a lie. The caller invited her to speak with an investigator.

Inside the waiting room, Myles’ heart raced. Then the door opened. 

“The first thing I saw was his feet,” she said. “He didn’t have his shoes on.” 

Shaw was slumped in a wheelchair, she recalled. He was drooling, his left arm curled on his chest. His hair was overgrown, and he smelled. 

Myles fell to her knees. Shaw opened his eyes. “He started to kiss my forehead,” Myles said. “And I said, ‘He knows it’s me.’” 

Regaining independence

Myles keeps videos and images in a folder she refers to as life after disaster. 

Unsettled by the jail’s assertion that Shaw wasn’t beaten, Myles knew she needed to document everything.

She has pictures of Shaw at rehab as he learned to walk again. She has videos of Shaw bedridden, struggling to eat and thrashing his skinny legs – signs, Myles said, that he was trying to get stronger. She has recordings of him using muffled, angry and urgent sounds while trying to communicate with her and his children.

“Leave me alone,” Shaw says in one video, slurring his words. 

By February, he had regained some independence. One day, Myles said he rolled out of bed, stood up and began to walk on his own. Soon, he was staying up all night listening to music, sounding out the words to his favorite songs from Memphis rappers like BEO Lil Kenny. 

Now the next grueling step: seeking justice.

Through connections she’d made years ago at a legal clinic, Myles found Shaw a pair of attorneys – Jad Khalaf and his law partner, Ammie Nguyen. 

Khalaf said he’s read reports from a federal monitor – dating back 10 years –  detailing conditions at the Hinds County jail and was struck by the sluggish progress in securing the safety of inmates. 

“All the while, more people are dying or being severely beaten,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.” 

Khalaf said he’s seen Shaw make a remarkable recovery since their first meeting earlier this year. 

“He didn’t say much,” Khalaf said. “He barely could walk.”

Because he has trouble speaking, Shaw is still a man of few words. He still has seizures. His kids still ask, “What’s wrong with Daddy?” 

Shaw worries he’ll never fully recover.

“I still can’t run,” he said, but then added he won’t stop trying.

The Trump administration wants to slash federal regulations for Head Start, an anti-poverty program that has long been considered a gold standard in early childhood education. Advocates say it could drastically impact about 18,000 children served by the program in Mississippi, while researchers say that Mississippi’s state-funded, high-quality early education programs protect some Head Start centers from the changes.

Among the biggest proposed changes are removing the regulatory requirements that govern class ratios, which means class sizes could double in Mississippi, and eliminating wraparound health services, such as medical and dental screenings, for children in poverty. Trump administration officials said the changes would cut red tape and serve more students while minimizing bureaucracy for Head Start providers across the country. 

Critics say the changes would undermine the mission of Head Start, which has historically served the nation’s most vulnerable children. They also say it’s not clear that the administration would reinvest into the program the $2.2 billion it estimates saving from the proposed changes. 

The federal proposals aren’t yet final. The public can leave comments about the changes until Oct. 6. Hundreds have already weighed in, and the Trump administration must review the feedback before finalizing the changes. 

It’s hard to say how the overhaul could take shape in Mississippi, one of the nation’s poorest states. Nearly a quarter of 4-year-olds are enrolled in the program, according to an analysis by Mississippi First, an education policy organization that advocates for expanding charter school options and pre-kindergarten programs. 

Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District has one of the nation’s highest numbers of funded Head Start slots, third only to districts covering Chicago and New York City. Democratic U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson, who represents that district, said the program needs strengthening, not weakening. 

“Head Start was created to give children from low-income families a fair shot at success. If we lower standards for things like teacher-to-student ratios, we risk giving children who already face the greatest challenges fewer resources and less support,” Thompson said in an email to Mississippi Today. 

Nita Norphlet-Thompson, executive director of the Mississippi Head Start Association, asks herself one guiding question about regulations: Are they good for children? 

The proposed regulations don’t pass her test, she said, especially when it comes to increasing the number of children teachers must be responsible for. 

“I don’t see how that’s going to improve outcomes and how that’s going to be good for children and families,” Norphlet-Thompson said. 

Bigger classes, less attention

Eloise McClinton, chair of the National Head Start Association board of directors, works in Holly Springs and oversees 21 childcare centers in 14 counties across north Mississippi. It’s already difficult to hire new teachers, she said, but if more students are put into classrooms, “everybody will be quitting.” 

It will be impossible to uphold the same standards under those conditions, she said. 

“If you take all of these things away from Head Start, then Head Start will not be Head Start as it was intended to be,” McClinton said. “It will affect the whole state of Mississippi.”

The proposed regulations default to state childcare standards for teacher-student ratios. In Mississippi, that would mean one Head Start caregiver would be responsible for nine toddlers instead of four. 

The Trump administration says the lower ratios can help Head Starts serve more students. But Micayla Tatum, a Mississippi First researcher who studies early education policy, said it would reduce education quality and safety.

Tatum worries that getting less individualized attention from teachers would hurt children’s development. 

“Those interactions are really important at that age,” she said. “The more interactions you have, it helps you develop speech.”

Head Start programs will also no longer be required to conduct certain screenings, such as ensuring a family has ongoing medical care or insurance, that children are vaccinated and that they’ve seen a pediatrician and dentist. These services are essential components of the Head Start program to Biz Harris, executive director of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance, which focuses on strengthening the state’s early childhood ecosystem.

With the proposed changes, centers could keep previous Head Start standards, said Alex Adams, assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “We trust these local programs to make good decisions.”

In theory, that might be true, said Elizabeth Pufall Jones, the director of preparation and work environment programs at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley. But it remains to be seen if centers will receive federal funding to provide more than the bare minimum once the higher standards are written out of the regulations, she said. 

Tatum shares Pufall Jones’ concerns. She said she believes there’s a good chance local grantees will follow the regulation shifts, especially if it leads to less paperwork. 

Head Start has long been an outlier within the climate of what many have called a childcare crisis. Childcare in the U.S. is unaffordable, according to standards from Health and Human Services, and is often subpar and sometimes dangerous. The Head Start program’s rules are stricter than those governing other childcare options, because the program was designed to give disadvantaged children “a head start in life,” Pufall Jones explained. 

More than 60 years after Head Start’s inception, that could all change. 

Expanding state early learning programs

Mississippi can push back against the proposed changes, researchers say. 

Mississippi’s state-funded early learning programs are highly rated by the National Institute for Early Education Research. One example is Mississippi’s early learning collaboratives, which create education partnerships between K-12 public schools, childcare centers and Head Start centers. The collaboratives, or ELCs, enroll 20% of the state’s 4-year-olds. 

Head Start centers that partner with the collaboratives will be insulated from the federal changes because they have to follow the state program’s rigorous standards. 

“Our state is very wedded to the thought of high quality pre-K programs,” Tatum said. “A good way to counter this deregulation happening at the federal level is to get more Head Starts into ELCs.”

Amid potentially wide-ranging changes, now may be the perfect time to expand those programs, said Steven Barnett, who leads NIEER. But that requires political will and resources. 

“I think the state has been moving in that direction, but you can’t just wave a magic wand and invent the teachers and the classrooms you need,” Barnett said. “Mississippi has been moving fast. Whether they can move faster, I don’t know.” 

Barnett said state leaders should consider how to supplement the ELC program and encourage Head Starts to join with the collaboratives.

Mississippi First, Tatum’s organization, found 14 school districts interested in joining the collaboratives this year — but there wasn’t state funding to expand the program. 

House Education Vice Chairman Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg, has long advocated for increased funding for ELCs. He plans to once again introduce a bill to boost funding next session.

“This is obviously a huge priority for me,” he said. “I’ve been pushing for the last few years for universal availability to every student. These changes establish an even greater need for that.”

A ripple effect

Childcare centers, schools and Head Start agencies comprise Mississippi’s early learning ecosystem. 

“There is always going to be a ripple effect because our systems are running parallel to each other,” she said. “Whatever happens with Head Start will ripple in some way through ELCs, childcare centers and our early childhood system as a whole.”

For example, she said, if Head Starts are able to serve more families, childcare centers could lose students and money.

Under the proposed regulations, Head Start programs can also have shorter days. That could make it difficult for working parents to find additional childcare, Harris of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance said. 

“If you only have to pay for three hours of childcare instead of five, think about the cost savings there,” Harris said. “It’s potentially the difference between keeping you in the workforce or not.”

Already, more than 6,000 Mississippi families remain on a waitlist for childcare vouchers, or coupons that make childcare more affordable. If families can’t get the childcare they need at Head Start centers, that waitlist might grow.

Harris said Mississippi needs Head Start. The program addresses children’s health and kindergarten readiness. It enables their parents to go to work. 

“I’m not sure we can overstate the ways this program is supporting some of our children most at risk of not thriving,” she said. 

At best, Harris said, the new regulations won’t tank the program, but they will drain an already burdened system.

McClinton in north Mississippi fears the worst-case scenario.

“Just because you have written it on paper that you’re gonna have that billions of dollars in savings and get to serve more children doesn’t mean that it will actually come back into the program.”