Months after saying there was “no reason,” to suspect foul play, a Mississippi Sheriff now claims he has not ruled out murder in the case of Rasheem Carter, 25, who was found dead with his head severed off.
According to NBC News, Smith County Sheriff Joel Houston made the claim during an interview on March 14 in which he defended he and his department’s previous statement about the crime. Sheriff Houston claimed there was no evidence at the time that pointed to homicide while also claiming his department was still waiting on search warrants to rule more definitively. After he was reported missing on October 2, Carter’s remains were discovered on November 2 in a wooded area south of Taylorsville, Mississippi. Smith County Sheriff’s Department originally claimed foul play was not involved in a statement published on Facebook the day Carter’s remains were discovered. However, Sheriff Houston has now revealed his department initially declared no foul play in Carter’s death to ease public concern amid an ongoing investigation.
Sheriff Houston’s comments arrive a day after Carter’s family and Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump accused authorities of stonewalling them for four months in an attempt to cover up a hate crime. Crump revealed that not only was Carter’s head severed off of his body when his remains were found, but the attorney also claimed his spinal cord and other vertebrae were discovered in a different location. It has also been alleged that an individual attempted to use Carter’s credit card sometime after it was already determined that he was dead.
“Nothing is being swept under the rug,” Houston said. “There’s nothing to hide. It was just letting the local or general public know that at this time no one else is believed to be involved.” Sheriff Houston continued, remarking on how his department’s choice to release the statement could have been harmful. “It does seem to have caused unnecessary headache, but we only have what the evidence tells us,” he said. “At that time, the evidence didn’t suggest anything.”
Tiffany Carter said her son told her about several white men he worked with that he believed were capable of causing him harm shortly before he called her on October 2 and said he was being chased by white men in three trucks. Carter, who was a business owner and welder from Fayette, was working at a short-term gig in Taylorsville, which is about 100 miles from his home, at the time of his death.
His mother said the 25-year-old reportedly had a disagreement with at least one of his co-workers before he fled the scene fearing for his life. Tiffany says she recalls he said “‘I got these men trying to kill me,'” before she lost contact with him. Crump called the death of Carter a “nefarious act,” and urged his alleged murderer(s) be brought to justice.
“This was a nefarious act,” Crump said. “This was an evil act. Somebody murdered Rasheem Carter, and we cannot let them get away with this.”
Sheriff Houston claims his department interviewed “everybody involved,” at Carter’s job site, including the individuals he told his mother about. They were all ruled out as possible threats, though, due to data from phone records and GPS coordinates that prove they were allegedly 100 miles away from Taylorsville at another job site when Carter was last seen alive.
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Carter was reportedly last seen around 4:30 p.m. in the woods based on footage captured on a private landowner’s game camera. He is survived in death by his seven-year-old daughter who reportedly lives in California.