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Dishawn Sanders

Age :

Gender : Male

Race : Black

Date : 09/19/2021

Location : Olive Tree Hotel, 5075 I-55 North Frontage Road

City : Jackson

County : Hinds

State : Mississippi

Agency : Jackson Police Department

Officer(s) :Unknown

Cause of Death : Gunshot

Event : Killed by police during domestic violence call

OPEN RECORDS SUMMARY :

On 09/19/2021, Jackson Police Department officers shot and killed Dishawn Sanders at the Olive Tree Hotel at 5075 I-55 North Frontage Road in Jackson after responding to a shooting in which another man, Josh Casaus, was found dead. Police alleged that Sanders shot Casaus and then fired at responding officers, who returned fire and killed Sanders. Contemporary reporting did not disclose Sanders' age.
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The initial circumstances were unusually unclear. Police were called to the hotel Sunday morning and discovered Casaus dead from a gunshot wound. JPD identified Sanders as the person who allegedly shot Casaus, but investigators said they had not determined a motive or explained what precipitated the shooting between the two men.
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Police alleged that when officers arrived, Sanders fired at them and officers returned fire, striking and killing him. The publicly available early accounts do not identify how many officers fired, how many shots police fired, where Sanders was positioned when officers encountered him, or the sequence between officers' arrival and the exchange of gunfire.
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The case therefore remains notably thin compared with many other police shootings from the same period. WJTV returned to the scene the following day under the headline “Questions remain after deadly officer-involved shooting in Jackson” and reported that there were still “more questions than answers.” A hotel employee said Sanders was a frequent visitor to the property, while witness Sabriana Beard described hearing the violence but did not provide an eyewitness account contradicting the police assertion that Sanders fired at officers.
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The available later public record does not appear to contain the type of detailed shooting reconstruction found in many cases: no publicly located body-camera release, ballistics reconstruction, prosecutorial shooting report or later investigative report identifies the officers who fired or provides a shot-by-shot account of Sanders' killing.
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Sanders' death is consistently recorded in later national police-killing compilations as a Jackson police shooting, and sources documenting Black people killed by police in 2021 identify him as Black.
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No affirmative later evidence located for this update establishes that Sanders' family publicly contested JPD's claim that he fired at officers, and no encounter-related wrongful-death or federal civil-rights lawsuit arising from his killing was identified.
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OFFICER BACKGROUND
The Jackson police officer or officers who shot and killed Sanders have not been publicly identified in the records located for this update. That prevents the mandatory individual review for prior or subsequent shootings, complaints, discipline, lawsuits or other misconduct.
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The institutional background of the Jackson Police Department at the time is more substantial. Only months before Sanders was killed, a former JPD officer, Mark Anthony Coleman, was sentenced in federal court to 30 months in prison for obstructing a federal investigation by destroying evidence concerning his involvement with a 16-year-old girl. Coleman had pleaded guilty in January 2021 following an investigation involving the FBI, Mississippi Attorney General's Office and JPD.
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JPD was also facing significant internal litigation at precisely the time Sanders was killed. Twenty-one current and former JPD employees sued the City of Jackson, Police Chief James Davis and other department personnel in federal court, alleging violations of their federal rights and state-law torts. A federal judge issued a substantive ruling in that litigation on 09/29/2021, only ten days after Sanders' death.
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The department also entered this case with a recent history of fatal force. Three months earlier, on 06/15/2021, Jackson police shot and killed 28-year-old Solomon Jamison at a Northside Drive gas station. Police alleged that Jamison was firing inside the store and then fired toward responding officers before police returned fire.
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The most important unresolved police-accountability issue specific to Sanders' case remains the identity of the officers who killed him. Later reporting confirms Sanders' identity and the basic JPD account, but the publicly accessible record located for this update still does not identify the shooters or provide the detailed independent reconstruction necessary to examine their individual histories.

SOURCE LINKS :

https://www.wapt.com/article/police-on-scene-of-potential-shooting-at-jackson-motel/37653007
https://www.wjtv.com/news/local/questions-remain-after-deadly-officer-involved-shooting-in-jackson/
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-jackson-dd31b8de2cf359fa037ba338bb419843
https://thebeatofthecapital.com/2021/09/19/murder-suspect-killed-in-officer-involved-shooting-at-jackson-hotel/
https://thebeatofthecapital.com/2021/09/20/questions-remain-after-deadly-officer-involved-shooting-in-jackson/
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdms/pr/former-jackson-police-officer-sentenced-obstruction-federal-investigation-0
https://www.wapt.com/article/jpd-on-scene-of-north-jackson-shooting/36732761