GULFPORT -- It was Feb. 4, 2006, the night before Super Bowl XL, when Gulfport police arrested 40-year-old Jessie Lee Williams on misdemeanor charges.
The ride in the back of a patrol car to the Harrison County jail would be the last conscious ride of his life. Williams was headed for a deadly encounter with a slap-happy jailer.
At the time, the public knew little about what happened to Williams in the jail. How could he arrive without a scratch on him - according to his jail booking photo - and then be hardly recognizable and brain dead hours later?
Today, we know Williams was cuffed with his hands behind his back, smacked in the testicles, zapped with a Taser, squirted with pepper spray and fatally beaten by jailer Ryan Teel.
On Monday, Feb. 6, family members decided to remove the breathing tubes that were keeping Williams alive. He died in a bed at Memorial Hospital at Gulfport.
Harrison County Sheriff George Payne initially told the Sun Herald his jailers said they had no choice but to fight Williams.
"They pepper-sprayed him, and it didn't slow him down. It cranked him up even higher, which it does when they're on crack or meth or something like that," Payne said.
But that didn't last long. Medical reports from Memorial Hospital, obtained three weeks after the attack, showed Williams tested negative for drugs. But he was in a coma when he arrived at the hospital from the Harrison County jail.
The night Williams died, Payne said he wasn't sure if the head injuries occurred at the jail or before Williams arrived.
That was just about cleared up Feb. 21, when the Sun Herald first published the photo of a beaten and lifeless Williams lying in a hospital bed. It was then obvious Williams' mangled face didn't match the one in the booking photo taken when he arrived at the jail.
Around that time officials clammed up. No one offered the public or Williams' seven children anything close to an explanation. Payne began referring all questions to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations.
Gulfport attorney Michael Crosby, who represents Williams' family, had subpoenaed the surveillance tape made at the jail the night of the beating, but Payne's lawyer filed court papers to stop the tape's release on Feb. 24.
Crosby would eventually file a $150 million wrongful-death lawsuit, naming more than a dozen defendants including Teel.
Jail nurses, other employees and prisoners who were at the jail that night slowly began coming forward and telling their stories.
More than a month went by and Payne and District Attorney Cono Caranna said little to dispel the allegations that a law enforcement official had savagely pummeled a man to death.
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