Six Mississippi former law enforcement officers who dubbed themselves the “Goon Squad” pleaded guilty to state charges for detaining and torturing two Black men for more than an hour after breaking into their home in January, ABC News reports. One of the officers put a gun in a victim’s mouth and pulled the trigger; the gun did not discharge.
According to court documents, a neighbor called police because the victims, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, two Black men, lived in a house with a white woman, Kristi Walley, a disabled childhood friend of Parker’s whom Parker was helping to care for.
For 90 minutes, the group used stun guns, sex toys and other instruments to torture Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in their Rankin County house. Brett McAlpin, Hunter Elward, Christian Dedmon, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke–all members of the sheriff’s department–and Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield pleaded guilty to state charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to hinder prosecution. Elward, the one who put the gun in the man’s mouth, also pleaded guilty to aggravated assault.
Rankin County is a primarily-white suburban area outside of Jackson, where people moving out of Jackson settle. One of the officers reportedly told the victims to “go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River.”