August 14, 8:40 a.m.

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<Warning, graphic images and language.
Editor’s note: We have classified this story under our “Gangs in the South” category because this behavior, along with the commissions of crimes and several other factors, meets the standard of the legal definition of a gang.>

As they stood before the judge in court on Thursday, a few of the six former law enforcement officers wiped tears from their eyes as the judge went over every painstaking letter of the law in the 13-count indictment against them. Whether those tears were for themselves or the literally hundreds of other people they hurt and disappointed is known only to them.

Five were former Rankin County Sheriff’s deputies, one was a former Richland police officer. But it would be wrong to have called them peace officers — that name describes hundreds of thousands of other law enforcement officers in America, but not this group.

Not the group that had dubbed themselves “The Goon Squad.”

Former Rankin County Chief Investigator Brett McAlpin, 52, wasn’t always the one to get his hands dirty, but according to sources, he ran things. The chaotic and charismatic former narcotics officer Christian Dedmon, 28, was the lead do-boy.

On the night of January 24, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker were at a home on Conerly Road in the Braxton community when the sights of the Goon Squad zeroed in on them.

According to court records Parker was a friend and caretaker of the white female owner of the home, identified only as K.W. by the court. Jenkins was staying there temporarily with Parker.

McAlpin, who lives in Braxton, got a call from someone identified by the court only as “a neighbor” that day, saying there were black men staying at the residence and something seemed suspicious. He made a call to Dedmon, telling him to “take care of it.”

Something else noteworthy about “The Goon Squad?” They called themselves that because of their penchant for using excessive force and never reporting it.

The Goon Squad

At one time, “The Goon Squad” is allegedly just what Lt. Jeffrey Middleton, 45, called the  night shift under his leadership. But eventually it seemed to have pared down to just a few chosen, and they had a challenge coin made to share with their secret brotherhood.

After hearing McAlpin’s directive, Dedmon sent a text to Deputy Hunter Elward, Middleton, and Deputy Daniel Opdyke.

“Are y’all available for a mission?” he wrote. Dedmon, Opdyke, Elward, Middleton were all SWAT Team members, sworn into the FBI’s Violent Crimes Task Force.

Then after Dedmon told the group where they were going, he wrote, “There’s a chance of cameras… let’s approach east and work easy,” a code for knocking instead of kicking in the door. Elward, 31, texted back an eyeroll emoji, and Opdyke, 27, responded with a crying baby gif. Dedmon followed that up with, “If we don’t see cameras, go.”

Then he told the group, “No bad mugshots,” meaning they were allowed to inflict damage on areas of the body that can’t be seen in mugshots.

Dedmon made one stop before the night began, picking up up former Richland narcotics officer Joshua Hartfield, 31, as the others staged at the Cato Volunteer Fire Department. When Dedmon and Hartfield passed the fire department, the others fell in behind them in a silent caravan. McAlpin sat waiting for them down the street.

Not one of the six stopped anyone else in progress to say, “Do you think this is a bad idea?”

The Entry

The Goon Squad noticed the camera above the front door, so Dedmon, Elward, Middleton, Opdyke, and McAlpin went to the door under the carport, while Hartfield went to the back. After Dedmon and Opdyke couldn’t kick in the carport door, the much taller and apparently stronger Elward was able to do it and five made entry that way as Hartfield came in the back.

Once inside the home with no warrant, they found Parker and Jenkins and began to shout orders at them. The two complied. Dedmon took Jenkins and Elward went after Parker, tasing them and then handcuffing them before continuing to tase them. As Elward was tasing Parker in his handcuffs, Opdyke kicked him in the ribs.

But there had to be a cover story for this. The deputies had to sell it as something real, so Dedmon began to demand loudly, “Where are the drugs?” Parker told him there were no drugs, so Dedmon took his service weapon and shot it into the wall, again demanding to know where the drugs were.

Drugs don’t materialize just because you shoot the wall. And still, nobody stopped and said, “Hey guys, maybe we should stop here.”

Darkness takes over

Getting no cooperation from Jenkins and Parker in finding the drugs that didn’t exist, and still intent on sending the message that they were not welcome in Braxton, the deputies dragged them into the living room.

Court documents say Parker and Jenkins were accused of “taking advantage” of the white woman who owned the house, but the description doesn’t get any more specific. But the Goon Squad did. The Goon Squad went personal in a way that sounds like it came straight from “Mississippi Burning.”

“Monkey.”

“Go back to Jackson.”

“Boy.” “N—-r.”

“Head back to your side of the Pearl River.”

All this while Dedmon continued to tase Jenkins. And by all appearances, nobody said, “Maybe we shouldn’t act so much like those KKK cops in the old movies.”

Opdyke, in searching the rest of the house, found a padlocked bedroom and kicked the door in. Rummaging through things, he found a dildo and a BB gun. He attached the dildo to the gun and carried it into the other room, where Jenkins and Parker were handcuffed on the couch and forced it into Parker’s mouth. When he tried to force it into Jenkins’ mouth, Dedmon snatched it away from him, turning on Parker and Jenkins.

Court records say Dedmon slapped the men in the face with it, taunting and harassing them, and finally making them get on the floor on their hands and knees. He threatened to anally rape them with the object. The court makes no reference to anyone trying to stop him, but it does say that he grabbed the back of Jenkins’ pants and moved toward him with the dildo, but found that he had already soiled his pants and decided against it.

“I tried to put it in his ass but he shat himself,” Dedmon told the others, according to court testimony.

Jenkins and Parker were then forced to lie on their backs, still handcuffed, as Elward held them down and Dedmon poured milk, alcohol, chocolate sauce and other kitchen items in their faces and down their throats until they gagged. Finding some cooking grease, Dedmon dumped it on Parker’s head, and Elward threw eggs at them.

Then Parker and Jenkins were forced to shower together to wash away any evidence of abuse as the deputies guarded the bathroom door so they wouldn’t try to escape.

Again, there is no indication that anyone said, “So, y’all think maybe we’ve made our point? Maybe we can call it a night?”

The shot heard county-wide

Once Parker and Jenkins were wearing clean underwear and sweats, they were brought back to the side bedroom, where they were met with additional brutal and nonsensical beatings that seemed almost like a scene out of a bad comedy. Opdyke assaulted them with a wooden kitchen utensil, while Middleton hit them with a metal sword. McAlpin and Dedmon then beat Parker in the back with two pieces of wood.

Although it’s unclear whose bright idea it was, Dedmon, Middleton, Elward, and Opdyke then decided to test their tasers to see whose was the strongest, tasing Parker and Jenkins an additional 19 times altogether.

McAlpin and Middleton, the two highest-ranking deputies on the scene, then went to the front room. Some rubber bar mats had caught their attention so they took them out to their trucks and came in for another load. McAlpin was allegedly about to steal a Class A military uniform when a gunshot from the direction of the side bedroom stopped him.

Dedmon had stepped out into the carport and fired into the woods, as it turned out, to further intimidate the victims, who had already been beaten, tortured, tased, assaulted with a dildo, and terrified into defecating.

Nobody intervened, nor did they intervene when Elward took the bullet out of the chamber of his police-issue Glock and inserted the gun into Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger. He racked the slide, allegedly not thinking about how racking the slide in most weapons loads a bullet into the chamber.

He put the gun back in Jenkins’ mouth, and he fired.

CYA Mode

Jenkins’ tongue was lacerated, his jaw broken, and he fell bleeding. Medical reports would later show his teeth weren’t even broken. It is entirely unclear whether the Goon Squad knew that he wasn’t dead, but they immediately went into CYA mode. Gathering on the back porch as Jenkins lay bleeding out in the bedroom, the deputies concocted the story that somehow they believed would save them from the cost of what they had done.

“Do you think we should call an ambulance?” nobody said.

Their story to cover why they went in without a warrant was to be that when they pulled up, they saw Jenkins in the driveway and Dedmon got consent to search his pockets, in which he found two baggies of methamphetamine. Jenkins fled into the house, so Dedmon followed him.

They decided the best way to cover Elward’s shooting Jenkins was to say that the two were in the bedroom conducting a controlled drug buy over the phone when Jenkins reached for a gun, so Elward shot him in self-defense.

To make sure it was harder for investigators to grill them about the shooting and easier for Goon Squad members to keep their story straight, they decided to say that McAlpin and Middleton had left the scene and Dedmon and Hartfield were at Dedmon’s truck, and that Opdyke was taking Parker to his patrol unit.

The lie wasn’t enough. Then, there was the alleged evidence tampering. Middleton offered to plant a throw-down gun, an untraceable extra weapon that he kept in his car, to show Jenkins had a weapon. Elward said instead that he would use the BB gun that had been found there in the house, so he took it into the bedroom where he planted it next to Jenkins, who still lay bleeding from the mouth and neck.

An ambulance had still not been called.

Dedmon volunteered to provide the drugs they allegedly found there, using some he had gotten from an informant and hadn’t entered into evidence yet. He picked up the taser cartridges while Opdyke searched for shell casings. One casing was found, and Opdyke put it in a bottle, later to be thrown from his vehicle into a field on Cato Road in Braxton.

Hartfield tried to burn the clothes that had evidence of the torture, and when they wouldn’t burn, he threw them into the woods. Then he took the hard drive from the home’s surveillance system and put it in Dedmon’s truck, later throwing it into the Steen Creek in Florence.

McAlpin handled the human evidence, telling Parker if he’d just go along with their story, that he would get out of jail for the fake crimes he was accused of. Then McAlpin left the scene so his vehicle’s GPS would record his movements. Dedmon called him a few minutes later and he came back, making an electronic evidence trail.

Then McAlpin and Middleton told the others that they would kill them if they ever told anyone what happened that night.

The trail of lies then went to paper, as the deputies filed false charges against Jenkins that could have cost him eight years in prison, made false reports, and told their false cover story to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.

Those false charges remained pending until July 5, when a judge ordered them to be remanded.

The rest is history

And nobody told, not at first. Sources say McAlpin was the one who told the story to the FBI first when they made it clear that their investigation was serious. The others all followed suit.

Without a plea deal, there were numerous additional charges to be filed.

As their grief-stricken families watched on Thursday, the defendants, now stripped of their guns and badges, now looking more like characters from “The Hangover” than sworn officers of the law, stood before the court. Each of them, one by one, had to reply, “Yes, Your Honor,” as Judge Tom Lee walked them through all the elements of the crimes they were pleading guilty to. They had to acknowledge multiple times that they knew what they were doing was wrong, and over and over came the haunting phrase from Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Chalk’s mouth: “Declined to intervene.”

As the press conference was held to announce the federal charges, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office announced that they had filed charges as well.

Their federal charges are as follows.

Count 1: Conspiracy against rights
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Jeffrey Middleton
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke
Joshua Hartfield

Count 2: Deprivation of rights
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Jeffrey Middleton
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke
Joshua Hartfield

Count 3: Deprivation of rights
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Jeffrey Middleton
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke
Joshua Hartfield

Count 4: Deprivation of rights under color of law
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Christian Dedmon

Count 5: Use and carry and brandish and discharge of a firearm during the course of a crime of violence
(Not less than 10 years, not more than life, to run consecutive, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 5 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Christian Dedmon

Count 6: Deprivation of rights under color of law
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke

Count 7: Deprivation of rights under color of law
(Not more than 20 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke

Count 8: Deprivation of rights under color of law
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Hunter Elward

Count 9: Use and carry and brandish and discharge of a firearm during the course of a crime of violence
(Not less than 10 years, not more than life, to run consecutive, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 5 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Hunter Elward

Count 10: Deprivation of rights under color of law
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Jeffrey Middleton
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke
Joshua Hartfield

Count 11: Conspiracy to obstruct justice
(Not more than 20 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Jeffrey Middleton
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke
Joshua Hartfield

Count 12: Obstruction of Justice
(Not more than 20 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Jeffrey Middleton
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward
Daniel Opdyke
Joshua Hartfield

Count 13: Conspiracy against rights
(Not more than 10 years, not more than $250,000 fine, not more than 3 years post-release supervision, $100 special assessment)
Brett McAlpin
Christian Dedmon
Hunter Elward