FBI: No police wrongdoing in disappearance

Memphian stopped by Walls officer

The FBI found no misconduct by a Walls police officer who stopped a Memphis man miss- ing since a May 4 traffic stop on U.S. 61, the town’s attorney said Thursday.

“I’ve been told that the FBI found no wrongdoing on the part of the Walls Police Department,” attorney Billy Myers said by phone. “I am out of town, but that is what I have been told. I have not seen or heard any evi- dence of wrongdoing on the part of any Walls official, uniformed or otherwise.”

Deborah Madden, a spokesman for the FBI office in Jackson, could not be reached for comment.

The federal agency was asked to investigate the disappearance of James Irby Jr. after his family raised questions. Irby has not been seen or heard from since.

Walls Police Chief Gary Bois- seau would not answer the door at the Police Department on Thursday when reporters tried to question him about the FBI investigation and ask him to release the dash-cam video from the traffic stop. Boisseau said earlier the video could not be released because it was part of an active investigation.

James Mathis of Southaven, an investigator with the local NAACP chapter who has been assisting Irby’s family with the case, said authorities searched the area again Thursday and found no trace of Irby.

He said the family had not heard that the FBI concluded its investigation, and that Boisseau wouldn’t talk to family members while they were at the site Thursday.

Irby was last seen the morn-

that sector, in a year when Toyota Motor Corp. was ramping up production at its new plant in Blue Springs and Nissan Motor Co. was bouncing back from the recession in Canton.

“Manufacturing started picking up in 2012,” Webb said. “I’ve seen that in the jobs numbers and in the hours worked.”

Only three times in the last 15 years has Mississippi’s economy grown faster than the nation’s economy.

Those years included 2007 and 2008, when reconstruction from Hurricane Katrina allowed Mississippi to forestall the forces that were dragging the national economy.