TAYLORSVILLE, Miss.—Rasheem Carter worked for Clements Mechanicals at the local Georgia-Pacific company in downtown Taylorsville. He was a Fayette, Miss., native and an accomplished 25-year-old welder and a highly skilled millwright. Since his car had broken down in September 2022, he would hitchhike 20 miles back and forth from Taylorsville to the Super 8 Hotel in Laurel where he lived.
On Oct. 1, 2022, Rasheem caught a ride with his roommate, but they had an intense argument, he would later tell his mother. Rasheem got out of the vehicle during the argument and walked the 20-mile stretch to Taylorsville in southeastern Smith County. While on foot, some co-workers picked him up and drove him to the Family Dollar store in Taylorsville. There, he called his mother, Tiffany Carter, and told her he needed a ride from there to her house in Fayette, more than 100 miles away in Jefferson County.
While in the store, Rasheem told his mother that someone had called the Family Dollar clerk and asked if he was inside.
“Rasheem told me that he left the dollar store when he heard the clerk say, ‘He’s in here,’” Tiffany Carter recalled later in front of protesters on Dec. 31, 2022. “He said that he was being followed by three trucks filled with ‘racist white men trying to kill me.’”
A month later, Rasheem’s dismembered remains were discovered on private property in Smith County.
‘I Have A Dream, Justice for Rasheem’
On Dec. 31, 2022, three months after her son was found in the wooded area near Highway 37, Rasheem’s mother stood on the steps of the Taylorsville Police Department with tears in her eyes. Family and friends surrounded Carter on the gloomy Saturday morning after some of them traveled from across the country to help bring awareness to her son Rasheem’s death.
“Transparency. Where is the f-cking transparency?” Carter yelled toward the tinted, locked glass doors of the police department. Her bright-red shirt bore the image of her son on a clenched fist with the words, “I Have A Dream, Justice For Rasheem.”
Tiffany Carter, Rasheem Carter’s mother