‘Goon Squad’ officers sentenced in Miss. assault cases of three men

Two get prison time over civil rights offenses

Two of six former law enforcement officers who called themselves the Goon Squad were sentenced to prison Tuesday, months after the two and their co-defendants pleaded guilty to federal civil rights offenses for torturing and sexually assaulting two Black men and a third white man who has remained anonymous until now.

Hunter Elward, the deputy who shot one of the victims in the mouth, received a 20-year sentence, the maximum penalty allowed under his plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

Elward broke down in tears as he stood before a US District Court judge, Tom Lee, and apologized to the victims and their family members. Elward turned to face Eddie Parker, 36, and Michael Jenkins, 33, who were tortured and sexually assaulted by the officers during a raid on Parker’s home.

“I hate that I was involved in this,” he said. “I hate what’s happened to them.”

As Elward left the podium, Parker stood up and said that he forgave him.

The leader of the Goon Squad, Jeffrey Middleton, was given a 17.5-year prison sentence. The four other defendants are set to be sentenced later this week.

During the hearing, Elward said that he had witnessed brutal conduct by other deputies throughout his seven years at the department, which his lawyer, Joe Hollomon, said was “the culture of Rankin County sheriff ’s department.”

Outside the courtroom, Jenkins, the man Elward shot in the face during what was described as a mock execution, said that he did not forgive Elward. “If he wouldn’t have gotten caught, he would still be doing the same thing,” Jenkins said.

Both men said they were satisfied with Lee’s sentences.

Over the next two days, the other officers involved in the incidents, who each could be sentenced to a decade or more in prison, will appear in federal court in Jackson. Prosecutors are expected to detail the officers’ violent actions, and victims will have an opportunity to share their stories.

The sheriff ’s department in Rankin County, a suburban community just outside Jackson, came to national attention last year after five Rankin County deputies and a Richland police detective raided the home of Parker and his friend, Jenkins, following a tip about suspicious activity.

The officers handcuffed and tortured the men by shocking them repeatedly with Tasers, beating them, and sexually assaulting them with a sex toy. Elward put his gun into Jenkins’s mouth and shot him, shattering his jaw and nearly killing him.

“They tried to take my manhood away from me,” Jenkins said in a statement to the court Tuesday morning. “I don’t ever think I’ll be the person I was.”

The officers destroyed evidence and, to justify the shooting, falsely claimed that Jenkins had pointed a BB gun at them, federal prosecutors said.

Three of the department’s deputies also pleaded guilty to violently attacking 28-year-old Alan Schmidt in a separate incident in December 2022.

So far, charges against officers in Rankin County have been narrowly focused on these two incidents, but residents in impoverished pockets of the county say that the sheriff ’s department has routinely targeted them with similar levels of violence.

In November, The New York Times and Mississippi Today published an investigation revealing that for nearly two decades, deputies in the Rankin County sheriff’s department, many of whom called themselves the Goon Squad, would barge into homes at night, handcuff people, and torture them for information or confessions.

In the pursuit of drug arrests, the deputies rammed a stick down one man’s throat until he vomited, dripped molten metal onto another man’s skin, and held people down and beat them until they were bloody and bruised, according to dozens of people who said they had witnessed or experienced the raids.

Many of those who said they had experienced violence filed lawsuits or formal complaints detailing their encounters. A few said they had contacted Sheriff Bryan Bailey of Rankin County directly, but were ignored.

Bailey, who has denied knowledge of the incidents, has faced calls to resign by local activists and the NAACP. He has said that he will not step down.

Malcolm Holmes, a professor of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Wyoming, said that the case was “going to be one that finds its way into the chronicles of history.”

“There’s so much well-documented evidence that this is a pattern of behavior,” he said.