Drug dealer turf war.
A woman had her family members walk her up the street from her home Saturday morning — past the crime scene tape and inquisitive reporters. Just away.
She said she just had to go somewhere else. There was a severed head just sitting on her neighbor’s porch. She didn’t know whose head it was, but she couldn’t stay either way.
Other neighbors gathered and dispersed intermittently, and none of them wanted their name or face in media reports of the incident.
“Someone’s sending a message,” one man said. “Why else do you do that?”
The head, Jackson Police Department spokesman Cmdr. Tyree Jones said, was that of a young black male who has not yet been identified.
The cause of death, he said, appeared to be “severance.”
A badly burned body was later discovered in a wooded residential area off Green Street near the corner of Grand Avenue — about a half-mile to a mile away. A resident using the road had spotted the body, Jones said. While the body was that of a black male, and it’s likely part of the same case, confirmation is still awaiting autopsy results.
After the initial crowds had cleared, the steps had been washed off, and the police were packing up, a man got out of a car that had pulled up. He wouldn’t identify himself, but told reporters he lived in the home where the head was found. He was clearly shaken, and didn’t want to talk about whether he knew the victim.
“What do you think about all this?” a reporter asked.
“I think it’s another funeral to go to. Every Saturday, we have another funeral. It’s every week,” he said.