Six officers had full and complete control of Michael the entire time,” Shabazz said. “They had complete control of him the entire time. Jenkins’ attorney, Malik Shabazz, said his client didn’t have a gun. Jenkins’ hospital records, parts of which he shared with AP, show he had a lacerated tongue and broken jaw.ĭeputies said Jenkins was shot after he pointed a gun at them department officials have not answered multiple inquiries from the AP asking whether a weapon was found at the scene. Jenkins said six white deputies burst into a home where he was visiting a friend, and one put a gun in his mouth and fired. In Mississippi, the police shooting of Michael Corey Jenkins led the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Nichols’ death led to a Justice Department probe of similar squads around the country that comes amid the broader public reckoning over race and policing sparked by the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Such units have drawn scrutiny since the January killing of Tyre Nichols, a Black father who died days after being severely beaten by Black members of a special police team in Memphis, Tennessee. In three of them, the heavily redacted documents don’t indicate if they were serving in their normal capacity as deputies or as members of the unit. Police and court records obtained by the AP show that several deputies who were accepted to the sheriff’s office’s Special Response Team - a tactical unit whose members receive advanced training - were involved in each of the four encounters.

In one of the two fatal confrontations, the man’s mother said a deputy kneeled on her son’s neck while he told them he couldn’t breathe. In one case, the deputy pulled the trigger, leaving the man with wounds that required parts of his tongue to be sewn back together.

Two of the men allege that Rankin County sheriff’s deputies shoved guns into their mouths during separate encounters. (AP) - Several deputies from a Mississippi sheriff’s department being investigated by the Justice Department for possible civil rights violations have been involved in at least four violent encounters with Black men since 2019 that left two dead and another with lasting injuries, an Associated Press investigation found.

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