Mississippi rebuffs confession of murder carried out at direction of prison guards

For months, Chancellor Berrong, a 26-year-old in prison for assault and kidnapping, has been trying to tell the authorities that he killed a man in a Mississippi jail seven years ago, reported The New York Times.

He told a prison guard that he had information about the crime, attempted to confess to a detective and gave a written confession to a prison warden, he said, but agents with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the state agency that typically investigates in-custody deaths, took no action.

In interviews, Mr. Berrong said that he attacked William Wade Aycock IV at the request of a guard in 2018. That allegation is disputed by a former inmate, who told reporters he overheard Mr. Berrong and others planning the assault to stop Mr. Aycock from implicating a member of their gang in an unrelated crime.

Previous reporting on the Rankin County Adult Detention Center, where Mr. Aycock died, revealed that for years, guards relied on some inmates as an attack squad to help keep order and to retaliate against troublemakers.

A review of the initial investigation of the death reveals that the authorities took steps that could have hindered a full accounting of what happened. Guards and inmates cleaned the cell where Mr. Aycock died with bleach before the state investigators arrived, according to four witnesses. In addition, the M.B.I.’s investigation file contains no photos of the cell, no security camera footage and no notes from interviews with inmates.

Days after the death, M.B.I. agents and the state medical examiner determined that Mr. Aycock died by accident after falling off his bunk bed — without documenting the evidence that led them to this conclusion.

Mississippi Today and The New York Times have uncovered evidence that supports Mr. Berrong’s confession and suggests that the authorities ignored or destroyed evidence that could have helped solve the case. His account is the latest allegation of wrongdoing by law enforcement in Rankin County, a Jackson suburb where sheriff’s deputies have been accused of torturing suspected drug users.

Jason Dare, the spokesperson and attorney for the sheriff’s department, said he had forwarded reporters’ request for comment to the M.B.I. He declined to comment further.

The commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, Sean Tindell, said that the M.B.I. would reopen the case based on the new information.

Guards and inmates at the Rankin County Adult Detention Center cleaned up the scene of Mr. Aycock’s death before investigators arrived, according to four witnesses.Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times

Mr. Berrong, a member of the Latin Kings street gang with a long criminal record, said that in June 2018, he yanked a sleeping Mr. Aycock off the top bunk in his cell, slammed him to the floor and stomped on his head. He said he never intended to kill the man, just to send him a message to keep his mouth shut.

Mr. Berrong said he has come forward out of a sense of guilt.

For seven years, he said, he had gotten away with the crime, in part because of missteps in the investigation. Shortly after killing Mr. Aycock, he watched a group of inmates and guards soak up the blood, which had spread past the cell door, and douse the cell in bleach.

A former inmate named John Phillips said he cleaned the cell before the M.B.I. arrived and compared the scene to a horror film. Two former guards who spoke on the condition of anonymity witnessed the cleanup and confirmed the former inmates’ accounts.

When the investigators arrived, they were “angrily talking with each other about the fact that the whole cell has been bleached,” Mr. Berrong said. “They said, ‘There’s nothing here.’”

The M.B.I.’s investigative report on Mr. Aycock’s death, provided by Mr. Tindell, makes no mention of the cleanup.

Mr. Tindell said he spoke with the agent responsible for the report, who said he did not recall the cell being cleaned or seeing men enter Mr. Aycock’s cell in security camera footage. Mr. Tindell said the footage was not preserved by the M.B.I.

The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department declined to release investigative records related to the case, citing a state law that allows police agencies to withhold such materials.

The M.B.I.’s file on the case amounts to a two-paragraph summary of the investigation and the autopsy report. There are no photos or security camera footage and no interview descriptions, even though several inmates said they were interrogated by investigators.

“The reporting at the time obviously left some things to be desired,” Mr. Tindell said in an interview.

The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department declined to release records related to the case, citing a state law that allows police agencies to withhold such materials.Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times

In the years since he took over the department in 2020, the agency has improved its record-keeping practices by “making sure that we had witness lists, that we had narratives, that there was a narrative for everybody that you interviewed and that supervisors had to review their work,” he said. “In this report, there’s none of those things.”

Two days after the M.B.I. filed its report concluding that Mr. Aycock had died from an accidental fall, the Mississippi state medical examiner ruled his death an accident.

Local Investigations

This article was reported and edited as part of the Local Investigations Fellowship, a New York Times program where local reporters produce investigative work about their communities, and supported in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.

Three pathologists who reviewed the autopsy at the request of reporters said that while it was reasonable to conclude he had died accidentally given what the authorities knew at the time, Mr. Berrong’s account aligned with the injuries recorded in Mr. Aycock’s autopsy.

Dr. Thomas Andrew, the former chief medical examiner of New Hampshire, said that he would have told the agents assigned to the case to investigate further before he could reach a determination.

Details missing from the report, like pictures of Mr. Aycock’s cell and security camera footage, could have led examiners to a different conclusion, he said.

The M.B.I. had an opportunity to reopen the case in 2022, when an inmate eyewitness told a Rankin County Sheriff’s Department detective that he had seen Mr. Berrong and another inmate leave Mr. Aycock’s cell moments before guards found him lying in a pool of blood.

The witness, who was being held in the jail in 2018, spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retaliation from Mr. Berrong’s associates.

The detective relayed the information to an M.B.I. agent, the eyewitness said, but the authorities never contacted him again. The witness said that he also wrote a letter to the M.B.I. detailing what he had seen, and that his son called the Rankin County District Attorney’s Office to report the information, but they never heard back from the agencies.

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