Category: Mississippi News Feed

Three people have been arrested on murder charges and a fourth person on an attempted murder charge in a weekend shooting that left six dead and more than a dozen injured in a small Mississippi town, the FBI announced Monday.

Teviyon L. Powell, 29, William Bryant, 29, and Morgan Lattimore, 25, have been charged with capital murder, while Latoya A. Powell, 44, has been charged with attempted murder in the mass shooting, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Jackson Field Office said.

It was not immediately clear whether they have attorneys. The Associated Press left a voicemail with the Washington County Public Defender’s Office asking if its attorneys are representing the defendants.

The shooting, which came as people celebrated homecoming weekend in downtown Leland shortly after a high school football game, was the deadliest of several shootings across Mississippi over the weekend. Other shootings were reported at two Mississippi universities on Saturday, as those schools celebrated their homecoming weekends.

Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive for Friday night’s shooting in Leland, but the FBI said the gunfire appears to have been “sparked by a disagreement among several individuals.” The spokesperson said without elaborating in an email late Monday that “other arrests are pending” as the investigation continues into the shooting in the rural northwest Delta region.

Four of the victims died at the scene, where abandoned shoes were left and blood stained the pavement of a downtown street the following day.

Witness Camish Hopkins described seeing people wounded and bleeding and four people dead on the ground. “It was the most horrific scene I’d ever seen,” Hopkins told the AP.

The shooting in Leland was the 14th mass killing in 2025, according to The Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killing Database. The database tracks all homicides in the U.S. since 2006 in which four or more people were killed intentionally within a 24-hour period, not including any offender.

Elsewhere, in the small town of Heidelberg on the east side of the state, the bodies of two people, including a pregnant woman, were found on a high school campus Friday night. That shooting happened the same evening Heidelberg High School played its homecoming football game, according to police and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves. Police have not said exactly when the gunfire occurred or how close it was to the stadium.

An 18-year-old man was arrested and charged with two counts of murder and illegally having a gun on a school campus in the Heidelberg shooting, Jasper County Jail records show.

Heidelberg, a town of about 640 residents, is about 85 miles (135 kilometers) southeast of the state capital of Jackson.

On Saturday evening, three people also were found with apparent gunshot wounds on the Alcorn State University campus in Claiborne County, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said. One of the victims died, the agency said. Police found the victims after a call reporting shots fired in the area of the industrial technology building. No arrests were announced.

The shooting happened after a crowd of more than 7,000 watched Alcorn State defeat Lincoln University of Oakland, California, in the Mississippi school’s homecoming game Saturday afternoon.

In Jackson, police responded around 7 p.m. Saturday to the tailgating area of Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, where Jackson State University hosted Alabama State University. A juvenile had been shot in the abdomen and was taken to a hospital, police said. No arrests were announced, and few other details about that shooting were immediately available.

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Associated Press freelance photographer Katie Adkins in Leland and AP writer Mead Gruver in Fort Collins, Colorado, contributed.

CLEVELAND, Miss. (AP) — An autopsy by the office of Mississippi’s state medical examiner concluded that a Black student found hanging from a tree at Delta State University died by suicide, police said Thursday.

The police department in Cleveland, where the campus is located, announced the findings in a news release. It said the autopsy results were consistent with a preliminary examination of the body by the Bolivar County coroner, which found no evidence of foul play.

The 21-year-old student’s death, discovered early Monday, immediately ignited strong emotions in a Southern state with a history of racist violence.

Even before the autopsy results were announced, the student’s family and their lawyers had called for an independent autopsy and implored police to show them any security camera recordings and other video gathered as evidence. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has said he will lead an independent investigation.

Crump’s office did not immediately return an email message seeking comment Thursday.

Cleveland police released no details of the autopsy’s findings other than to say the cause of death was hanging and the manner of death had been ruled a suicide. It said results of toxicology tests are still pending and could take weeks.

The statement said police are still investigating the student’s death and that evidentiary files in the case are being shared with the FBI and federal prosecutors.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, had previously called on the FBI to investigate.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joining forces from three other Republican-led states, the Mississippi National Guard will deploy 200 troops to Washington as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing federal policing and immigration overhaul in the nation’s capital.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a statement Monday that he has approved the deployment of approximately 200 Mississippi National Guard Soldiers to Washington, D.C.

“Crime is out of control there, and it’s clear something must be done to combat it,” Reeves said.

Mississippi joins three other states that have pledged to deploy hundreds of National Guard members to the nation’s capital to bolster the Republican administration’s operation to overhaul policing in the Democratic-led city through a federal crackdown on crime and homelessness.

West Virginia said it was deploying 300 to 400 troops, South Carolina pledged 200 and Ohio said it will send 150 in the coming days, deployments that built on top of President Donald Trump’s initial order that 800 National Guard troops deploy as part of the federal intervention.

Trump’s executive order that launched the federal operation declared a “crime emergency” in the District of Columbia and initiated a takeover Washington’s police department. The administration has ordered local police to cooperate with federal agents on immigration enforcement, orders that would contradict local laws prohibiting such collaboration.

“D.C. has been under siege from thugs and killers, but now, D.C. is back under Federal Control where it belongs,” Trump wrote on his social media website a day after issuing his order. “The White House is in charge. The Military and our Great Police will liberate this City, scrape away the filth, and make it safe, clean, habitable and beautiful once more!”

National Guard members in the District of Columbia have been assisting law enforcement with tasks including crowd control and patrolling landmarks such as the National Mall and Union Station. Their role has been limited thus far, and it remains unclear why additional troops would be needed.

Over the weekend in Washington, protesters pushed back on federal law enforcement and National Guard troops fanning out in the city. Scores of protesters gathered in the city’s Dupont Circle on Saturday and marched to the White House.

A Mississippi law that requires social media users to verify their ages can go into effect, a federal court has ruled. A tech industry group has pledged to continue challenging the law, arguing it infringes on users’ rights to privacy and free expression.

A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals overruled a decision by a federal district judge to block the 2024 law from going into effect. It’s the latest legal development as court challenges play out against similar laws in states across the country.

Parents — and even some teens themselves — are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media use on young people. Supporters of the new laws have said they are needed to help curb the explosive use of social media among young people, and what researchers say is an associated increase in depression and anxiety.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued in a court filing defending the law that steps such as age verification for digital sites could mitigate harm caused by “sex trafficking, sexual abuse, child pornography, targeted harassment, sextortion, incitement to suicide and self-harm, and other harmful and often illegal conduct against children.”

Attorneys for NetChoice, which brought the lawsuit, have pledged to continue their court challenge, arguing the law threatens privacy rights and unconstitutionally restricts the free expression of users of all ages.

The industry group, which has filed similar lawsuits in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Utah, represents some of the country’s most high-profile technology companies, including Google, which owns YouTube; Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat; and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

In a written statement, Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said the group is “very disappointed” in the decision to let Mississippi’s law go into effect and is “considering all available options.”

“NetChoice will continue to fight against this egregious infringement on access to fully protected speech online,” Taske said. “Parents — not the government — should determine what is right for their families.”

___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

The weather system moving across the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday was showing a greater chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves toward the northern Gulf Coast, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The system has a 40% chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves west over the Gulf toward southeastern Louisiana on Thursday, the federal agency said. The severity of its impact will depend on how far it travels offshore, where conditions are ripe for a tropical depression, before reaching Louisiana. The tropical weather will affect Alabama and Mississippi as well.

Regardless of whether the system intensifies, heavy downpours could cause flooding, officials warned.

New Orleans is bracing for 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of rain through Saturday, but some areas could see as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters), especially near the coast, the National Weather Service said.

“While a tropical depression cannot be ruled out near the coast on Thursday, the main focus remains the heavy rain threat,” the agency wrote on X.

Volunteers and local elected officials played music as they shoveled sand into bags to hand out to residents in New Orleans on Wednesday morning at the Dryades YMCA.

“My street flooded just the other day when we got a little bit of rain and so I want to just make sure that I’m proactive,” New Orleans resident Alex Trapps said as he drove away with sandbags in his car.

The looming threat in the southeast comes on the heels of a series of lethal floods this summer. On Monday, flash floods inundated New York City and parts of New Jersey, claiming two lives. And at least 132 people were killed in floodwaters that overwhelmed Texas Hill Country on the Fourth of July.

The system percolating over Florida will be called Dexter if it becomes a named storm. Six weeks into the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, there have been three named tropical storms — Andrea, Barry and Chantal — but no hurricanes.

Chantal made landfall in South Carolina last week, and its remnants caused flooding in North Carolina that killed an 83-year-old woman when her car was swept off a rural road.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said in May there was a 60% chance that there will be more named storms this hurricane season than there have been in past years on average.

The currently developing weather system is expected to move fully inland by the end of the week.

Southern Louisiana — a region all too familiar with the potentially devastating impacts of flooding — is expected to be hit hardest Thursday and beyond.

Erika Mann, CEO of the Dryades YMCA, said that local elected officials managed to organize the storm supply distribution within a day after the threat intensified.

“We open our doors and help the community when the community is in need,” Mann said.

Some residents who came to get supplies “jumped out of their cars and they helped. And it just represents what New Orleans is about. We come together in crisis,” Mann said.

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Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.