Text messages and a video from a prisoner inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary have raised questions about a homicide there during a 2020 gang war.
During the war, Denorris Howell was strangled to death. No one was charged with his killing.
Howell was one of 42 people who died by homicide in Mississippi prisons over the past decade, a toll uncovered by a reporting team that includes Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project - Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link. Total convictions in those cases? Six.
“Oh, my God, there’s something wrong with that picture,” said Howell’s great aunt, Annie Moffitt, who runs Annie’s Home Cooking in Holly Springs, where he once worked.
Parchman’s gang war came after years of neglect by state officials, who slashed millions in funding and allowed conditions at the prison to deteriorate after federal courts ended oversight of the facility in 2011, according to an investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, now a part of Mississippi Today, and ProPublica.
The U.S. Department of Justice later blamed the war and the violence leading up to it on inadequate staffing, cursory investigations, insufficient security measures, unfettered access to contraband and uncontrolled gang activity.
“These systemic failures result in an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang activity, extortion, and violence,” the report said.
Mississippi Department of Corrections officials said they referred only one of the three homicides in three days to prosecutors. Overall, the agency referred 15 of the 42 homicides to prosecutors over the past decade, and said in a recent statement that it “remains committed to ensuring the safety of inmates in its custody.”
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, called these numbers inconceivably low. “I can’t imagine any other law enforcement agency failing to refer three-fourths of the homicides under its jurisdiction to prosecutors,” he said. “These victims’ lives are not seen as sufficiently valuable to warrant the effort.”
After the gang war, Gov. Tate Reeves hired the former head of Angola, Louisiana’s most notorious prison, to clean up Parchman and the other prisons. The Mississippi Legislature passed raises for correctional officers.
But the violence that initially declined under Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain’s leadership is now back on the rise. With five killings already, 2025 marks Mississippi’s worst year for prison homicides since 2021.
Fatal response to a dispute over money
Denorris “Nod” Howell grew up in the Waterford community between Oxford and Holly Springs, the eldest of three children.
“He was a good young man who treated all of us with the ultimate respect,” recalled Moffitt, his great aunt. “He loved his grandmother, who was my sister.”
After the teen shot up to 6-foot-1, he played power forward for Holly Springs High School and graduated in 2001.
“Denorris was a good kid,” said his mother, Janice Wilkins. “He was an obedient child. I didn’t have much problems out of him growing up, other than him being a typical teenager.”
Unlike others, he and his brother didn’t hang out in clubs, she said. “When kids grow up, they venture out and do their own thing, but as long as you are in my house, you have rules.”
After graduating, Howell moved out and got married. He and his wife had four children. He worked a series of odd jobs, first at a warehouse in Oxford and then at his great aunt’s restaurant.
In 2010, Howell and a friend were at his home when LaKeith Jones arrived. According to testimony, Howell had recently sold a car to Jones, who still owed him money. Once Jones paid the remaining balance, Howell would give him the keys.
The conversation between them grew heated. Howell shot Jones five times.
Howell called 911 and told the dispatcher that he had shot Jones in self-defense because he thought Jones was about to pull out a pistol. He later told a deputy that he had not wanted to shoot Jones, but that Jones was robbing him and had robbed him four times in the past.
Sheriff’s investigators did not find a pistol on Jones’ body, and none of the witnesses who testified at Howell’s trial said that Jones had a weapon.
In 2012, a jury convicted Howell of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 17 years and began serving that time at Parchman, one of the nation’s most infamous prisons.
The maximum security prison holds up to 2,542 men in seven buildings, surrounded by an 18,000-acre working farm. The prison’s long history of violence and abuse has been documented by journalists, researchers, filmmakers and blues singers.
‘I was praying that he was safe’
After her son began serving his time in Parchman, two hours away, Wilkins began working locally at the Marshall County Correctional Facility, where she taught incarcerated men how to give haircuts.
The whole time there, she thought of her son, she said. “I was praying that he was safe.”
Through her classes, men learned all styles of cuts, and she said prison officials grew to appreciate her. “They call me ‘Boss Lady,’ the one that everybody loves,” she said.
After a year of instruction, the men “know what they’re doing,” she said. “They get a license just like mine,” she said, flashing her own license from the state Board of Cosmetology and Barbering.
Many of those she taught have left prison far behind. “They’re in barber shops, and some of them have ventured out and gotten their own shop,” she said. “They’re just doing really good.”
While she worked, she waited for her son’s release. He had told her that he might come home as early as 2020, because he could be paroled after serving half his sentence.
She began to plan for a huge family gathering to welcome him home, complete with chicken, fish, frog legs, shrimp, crab legs and vegetables — all the food he loved.
‘Ain’t nothing under control’
In the waning days of 2019, a war between the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples spread across Mississippi prisons.
In hopes of preventing the violence from spreading, Parchman officials locked down the men in their cells to prevent their movement.
Despite this, Walter Gates, 25, who was serving a 10-year sentence for burglary from Coahoma County, was stabbed to death on New Year’s Day at Parchman. Roosevelt Holliman, 32, who was serving 12 years for armed robbery and burglary out of Forrest County, met the same fate a day later. Two suspects in the Holliman killing are pending trial.
Reeves declared in a Jan. 3, 2020, tweet, “Grateful to those working to restore order and safety. That is the first priority. Then we need answers and justice on the people who perpetrated this violence.”
The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting received a series of text messages and videos during that war from people in the prisons and their loved ones.
A message sent on Jan. 2 identified a female correctional officer in Unit 29 “giving inmates keys right now, and my brothers have no one to alert.”
A similar message followed on a private Facebook page, accusing the same officer of cutting off lights.
Photos and videos showed men in red-and-white-striped uniforms, reserved for people convicted of the most violent crimes, walking freely through Unit 29, with no correctional officers in sight.
The message from inside Parchman continued: “If MDOC thinks they have control, they are very mistaken.”
In a video recorded during the unrest on a contraband mobile phone, a cell sits in darkness while other parts of the prison are lit.
Loud shouting can be heard as an incarcerated person inside the cell appears to be punching someone. A prisoner recording the video narrates, “They’re straight up hitting the motherf---ers with knives and s---, beating them motherf---ers up.”
A man can be heard saying, “I’ve got him in a chokehold.”
Another voice cheers him on: “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Dead. Oh, yeah. Dead. Deaaaaad.”
Despite the loud shouting throughout the incident captured on video, no officer can be seen responding.
At 3 a.m. on Jan. 3, an officer called additional staff to the Unit 29 building, where they found Howell’s body in his cell. His cellmate, who had been stabbed repeatedly and whose name was blacked out on the incident report, was taken by ambulance to the hospital. At 4:22 a.m., the coroner pronounced Howell dead.
The coroner ruled that Howell’s cellmate had strangled him to death in self-defense.
By the time the governor decided to shut down Unit 29 on Jan. 28, five prisoners at Parchman had been killed, and dozens had been injured. Three others were found hanging in their cells. MDOC ruled their deaths suicides.
Detrick Munford, who was a captain over Unit 29 then and later served as Parchman’s deputy warden, said he heard on the evening of Jan. 2 about a female officer allegedly sharing her keys with prisoners. He said he confronted her and took her keys.
After that, he opened an investigation into the officer’s actions to determine if she had a relationship with a gang, he said. “When she found out, she quit.”
He sent his findings to the prison’s investigators, he said. “They take it from there.”
No charges were ever brought against the officer, who was never identified in any department report. She said in text messages recently that prisoners lied about her, that she was never investigated by MDOC and that she wasn’t even at work that night. MDOC has not responded to requests for her timesheets.
No one ever got her keys, she wrote. “I was the one lied on.”
She said after Howell’s death, Munford checked that she had her keys.
Munford said he knows of some cases where correctional officers did favors for gangs. He said he also knows of several cases where correctional officers enabled violence against those behind bars, but he doesn’t know of any cases where officers were prosecuted.
Munford said officers can cut off the lights to an individual cell.
Parchman is located in a rural area where there are few jobs, he said. “People tend to think they can’t do no better, so you have to go along with the system.”
If people refuse to “go along with the system, they’ll find a way to get you out of the way,” he said. “There’s so much corruption.”
Within weeks after Howell’s death, two more men were killed at Parchman. Prison officials tried to reassure the public that these were isolated incidents.
“We have been working around the clock with MDOC and DPS [the Department of Public Safety] to respond immediately and prevent this going forward,” Reeves tweeted on Jan. 21, 2020.
In the wake of the killings, Reeves appointed Cain as corrections commissioner to clean up the prisons and restore safety.
By the end of that year, six people had been killed at Parchman and three more in other parts of the state’s prison system. No one has been convicted in connection with any of the deaths.
‘He told me that he feared for his life’
On Jan. 3, 2020, Wilkins got a call from the chaplain that her son was dead. Since then, she said, she has received no other details about his death and no autopsy report.
“I just felt empty,” she said.
She paused. “Sometimes it feels like it just happened yesterday.”
She had just talked to her son the night before, and he sounded nervous, she said. “He told me that he feared for his life.”
She said her son told her that the lights had been turned out and that a guard was letting men out of their cells.
Years later, she heard a rumor from the men she worked with at the Marshall County Correctional Facility that her son’s cellmate had been killed in prison, but it offered her little solace. “I don’t wish that on nobody,” she said. She later found out that the rumor was false.
Today, five years after his death, Wilkins continues to have questions. No one from the prison has ever explained what happened to her son, she said.
“Justice needs to be served,” she said. “My son had four children who loved him very dearly.”