Group: Investigate Sheriff’s Role in Hanging Cover-up

The recent hanging death of Frederick Jermaine Carter, 26, in Mississippi has many outraged and wanting more answers. Ruled a suicide by hanging in an initial autopsy, a second, independent autopsy has been requested by the family. The Mississippi office of Operation Help Civil Rights Group has been actively involved in the tragedy, even conducting their own investigation into the matter.

Wendol Lee

Mississippi resident, Wendol Lee (WL) is President of the group and recently spoke with Adeeba Folami of The Black House (BH), prior to holding a press conference announcing the group’s call for a review of the county sheriff’s role in tampering with evidence and conducting an incomplete and careless investigation.

There are also a number of other injustices that Blacks in the southern state face on a regular basis and Brother Lee outlines some of those issues as well as his fear that outrage over many of these cases will be minimized by Christian preachers who are paid off by “higher ups” to calm the masses down.

Below are excerpts from the interview:

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(WL) – Let me let you know who we are first. My name is Wendol Lee and I’m the President of Operation Help Civil Rights Group and it’s based in Memphis, Tennessee and our organization is a mixture of White and Black, i.e., it’s a rainbow coalition – we got White, Black, Mexican, all. This is a civil rights group. We deal with civil rights violations. Now in our organization we have all kind of people, political people, judges, lawyers, DA’s all of them are part of our movement. It’s an independent citizen movement.

We got petitions from Greenwood Mississippi, the people there asked us would we come to Greenwood and investigate a hanging. They [were] all paranoid. A lot of people was gathered around us when we got there, afraid that it was a group of White people, in other words we want to say [Ku Klux] Klans … was active. They was afraid that they were gonna start hanging Black people around there. We went down there and we did some investigation and this is what we come up with.

He was hung in a predominantly White neighborhood that Blacks have problems in when they go into that neighborhood. Although you have a few Blacks live out there, they’re upper class Blacks and what it is, when Blacks go into that neighborhood, they’re either stopped by police officers or either they’re met with the residents there, with [hostility]. They don’t want them there.

When we went to the scene, Frederick, what we got there is that he was hung and they had found some short ropes which would be a perfect match if you bound his feet and hands. Now, with these ropes, nobody knows how, I mean, there was no knife found anywhere. These was cut ropes and we wonder why they was found at the scene, on his body, around his body and there was no knife to show where he cut it.

Now we wanted to know what was he doing in that neighborhood. They said he pulled a table up and that he stood on the table and that was the way he was able to hang himself but when we measured the body, even if he was standing on the table, he still wouldn’t be tall enough to hang himself. He wouldn’t be tall enough to reach the tree limb to do that. Then we talked to one person – but we hadn’t finalized that yet – stated that he saw him talking to a sheriff’s deputy earlier and it was a White sheriff’s deputy. That’s about the time that his father had left and went across the street, ’cause they was working on a job in that neighborhood and when he came back, when his father came back … he couldn’t find his son.

Sheriff Ricky Banks

The sheriff’s department, we’re gonna probably ask that charges be brought against the sheriff’s dept for tampering with evidence. The area was never taped off, all it was, the sheriff went over there and in a few seconds said that this was a suicide and that’s the way it was wrote up. It really wasn’t an investigation at all until Operation Help Civil Rights Group came down.

So the family ordered another autopsy and that’s what we’re waiting on now but we still don’t believe that it was a suicide because we’re asking that the sheriff, there be some kind of charges brought on him for tampering with the evidence, not taping off the scene, allowing people to come all around and walk through the area and we don’t think there was a full investigation.

The sheriff’s been there like 28 years, he know the procedures, that anytime there’s a murder you’re supposed to tape off the scene but he didn’t do that in this case right here. He gave [the] suicide ruling real quick and fast.

(BH) – Some of the pictures that we saw in The Final Call and on the website, show a fence around the body. Who put the fence up since it’s clear the sheriff’s department didn’t do it?

(WL) - The sheriff didn’t tape off the area. If you saw a fence behind there, it was there all the time. He didn’t tape off the area at all. All he did was walk over there and said there was a suicide and we believe he’s covering up something.

(BH) – Was that a high traffic area or was it back off of a road where maybe it wouldn’t have been so noticeable?

(WL) - Well, it’s plenty of traffic goes through there, ’cause it’s a road travels through there to get to town. Like I said, by talking to the people that knew him and the family and stuff, he was the type of guy that worked for a living. He was working when that happened and he was good about helping kids and stuff … and he was just a person that didn’t show no signs of mental illness .. and we hadn’t seen no documents where he was mentally ill.

What we’re doing, we can’t really put our, we can’t say anything about it yet until the autopsy come back but we feel that it’s probably gonna be some foul play from some of the stuff that we came across.

(BH) – So basically today you’re just gonna call for the sheriff’s role in this to be investigated …

(WL) – Right. Attack the way the sheriff handled the situation, we don’t think that he handled it right and we thought he allowed the evidence to be tampered [with] before the investigation was completed and like I just said, he didn’t tape off any area around there and that’s normal procedure. He knows this but he didn’t do it in this case.

(BH) – Were you aware that there’s a call for a mass rally in August to come down and protest what they’re calling a lynching?

(WL) - No, I wasn’t aware of that at all. Nobody’s ever told me that. If they hold a mass rally and want us to join in we’ll be more than happy but I think until the autopsy comes back, we want to make sure that’s really what happened. Like I said, there hasn’t been any evidence yet to support that he did hang himself but we don’t want to rule out anything. We want to make sure that’s what that is. That they did hang him or that he was hung and then I think that rally would be good at that time.

(BH) – Thank you. I hope I can call you again in the future.

(WL) – Feel free to call me ’cause our organization is working in Mississippi right now dealing with a lot of things even outside the hanging. You got a lot of judges who’s giving a lot of time to young Black men and even Whites that are poor, but the majority of the people is Black.  Giving a lot of time to them – these judges are – and the time don’t fit the crime. If a guy got a burglary charge, he gets like 30 years and they’re not letting them out. A middle class White kid does a burglary, he gets something like 2 years probation. There’s a lot of that going on in the state of Mississippi.

We’re trying to get together a rally to get the senate and get the government to do something about all these people that they got in prison. You got men that’s convicted way back in the 60s still sitting up in there, 70 and 80 years old – they’re holding them there. We got 30 people released in the last month that had been convicted back in the 60s and 70s and they found out now that they wasn’t even guilty. One of them … he died before we could get him out but the rest of them, we got out.

(BH) – What kind of charges had they been convicted of?

(WL) – They were convicted of rape charges and they found out later that they wasn’t even the person that raped the woman, they weren’t even nowhere around the scene. You always have – what you got is a group of DA’s that’s racist and they go after Black people even when they don’t have enough evidence, they still go ahead on and prosecute it and we got a lot of innocent Black men in prison in Mississippi. It just fills up with Black men and if we don’t do something about it then they’re probably gonna genocide the Black race in Mississippi and that’s something a lot of people are overlooking. Operation Help Civil Rights Group, we’re not overlooking that. We’ve been on attack on that for the longest.

(BH) – Do you find a lot of fear in the people there who live near where Frederick was found?

(WL) – Yes, it’s a lot of fear there because when they contacted our organization and we went there, and as we went around and talked to people, there was a lot of people showing fear, afraid that they done started back hanging in Mississippi, ’cause you never know who’s next. That’s the kind of atmosphere I felt when we were touring around in Greenwood, Mississippi.

(BH) – They’re afraid that a series of hangings is gonna happen. Are they also afraid to rally and speak out?

(WL) – I don’t think that they would be afraid to rally because I have a large organization in the state of Mississippi and they’re pretty strong but I’ma tell you what I’m afraid of though, is that they’ll get to the Black preachers. When you rub the preachers’ hands with money, then they’ll preach to the congregation, “Let Jesus Christ handle it,” and with that kind of talk, that makes the Black people just throw their hands up and say “Well, Jesus’ll get it.” That happened in many cases that I’ve been dealing with in the state of Mississippi that you have these preachers come out and tell everybody it’s gonna be okay and let God handle it. Then I found out, in a lot of cases, that these preachers take money to quiet things down. I know that they would offer money because it’s been offered to me.

(BH) – Who do the offers come from?

(WL) – They come from the higher up people like the mayor and people like that. Money has been offered to me in some cases to quiet things down and I refused to accept the money because I care more about my people and I’m against wrong doing. I respect the law and that’s why we’re out here …. is to work with the lawyers and judges that are not crooked .. to fight against corruption.

(BH) – Thank you.

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