A Mississippi mother, Bettersten Wade, who spent 7 months searching for her missing son, later discovered that an off-duty officer ran him over less than an hour after he left the house

A Mississippi mother, Bettersten Wade, who spent 7 months searching for her missing son, later discovered that an off-duty officer ran him over less than an hour after he left the house.

Authorities then allegedly buried him without notifying his family. She pulled up to the gates of the Hinds County penal farm, her sister in the passenger seat. A sheriff’s deputy and two jumpsuited inmates in a pickup told her to follow them. 

They bounced down the road and curved into the woods, crawling past clearings where rows of small signs jutted from the earth, each marked with a number. The caravan came to the end of the road, at another clearing with more markers. The deputy took one of Bettersten’s hands, her daughter the other, and they walked to the mounds of loosely packed dirt. They stopped at grave No. 672.

“Really?” Bettersten said. 

She bent over, hands on her knees. She cried out, her voice echoing off the surrounding trees. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” “My mama told me, ‘They’re not going to do anything,’” Bettersten told NBC News. “But I had to do something to find Dexter, and I thought that was the best way.”

Bettersten remained in frequent contact with the Jackson Police Department – who initially spelled her son’s name wrong on an official incident report form.

“She called someone every week and asked about her child,” said Bettersten’s friend Carey Banks. “She couldn’t get it off her mind. She was crazy about that boy.”

She later learned that Dexter was struck and killed by the off-duty corporal only an hour after he left home. The corporal contacted the police but was not given a field sobriety test or cited for any traffic violations, according to NBC News. The death was ruled an accident.