HATTIESBURG, Miss. — One was a decorated “Officer of the Year.” The other was a recent academy graduate who had wanted to be a police officer since he was a boy.
A routine traffic stop led to their shooting deaths Saturday night — the first Hattiesburg police officers to die in the line of duty in more than 30 years. Four people were arrested, including two charged with murder.
The deaths of Officers Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate stunned this small city in southern Mississippi.
On Sunday morning, bloodstains marked the street where the two were shot, and a steady stream of people visited the site to leave flowers or balloons. In the nearby New Hope Baptist Church, worshippers prayed for the fallen officers and their families.
“This should remind us to thank all law enforcement for their unwavering service to protect and serve,” said Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant in a statement. “May God keep them all in the hollow of his hand.”
Marvin Banks, 29, and Joanie Calloway, 22, were each charged with two counts of capital murder, said Warren Strain, a spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. Banks also was charged with one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm and with grand theft for fleeing in the police cruiser after the shooting, Strain said.
“He absconded with a Hattiesburg police cruiser,” Strain said. “He didn’t get very far, three or four blocks and then he ditched that vehicle.”
Banks’ brother, Curtis Banks, 26, was charged with two counts of accessory after the fact of capital murder.
The fourth person, 28-year-old Cornelius Clark, was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, he added.
All four are expected to make their initial court appearances Monday at the Forrest County Justice Court, Strain said.
A preliminary investigation indicated Deen had pulled over the vehicle on suspicion of speeding and then called for backup, which is when Tate arrived. Strain said it was too early to say who shot the officers or how many shots were fired.
For many in the community, the first deaths of officers in three decades while on duty was a shock. The pain hit particularly close to home for Erica Sherrill Owens, whose mother, Sgt. Jackie Dole Sherrill, was killed in 1984 while trying to serve a warrant on a suspect. When Owens heard that two officers had been killed, she said she hoped it wasn’t someone she knew.
“Then when I heard one of the names, my heart just sank because I went to high school with him,” Owens said, who had gone to Sumrall High School with Deen and graduated a year after him in 1999.
Local reports identified Deen, 34, as a former “Officer of the Year” in Hattiesburg.
Tate, 25, grew up in Starkville, 150 miles north of Hattiesburg. Strain said he was a 2014 graduate of the law enforcement academy. He was known to his friends as “CoCo,” said his stepfather, B. Lonnie Ross of Jackson, adding that Tate was 12 when they met and already wanted to be an officer.
“He was the most respectful young man you would meet. It was a pleasure to meet someone so gentle and nice,” Ross said. “Everybody who met him liked him.”
