Police, family ask public for help on investigation into West Point man’s murder outside mother’s home

November 25, 2020

Joey Barnes,

WEST POINT, MISS. (WCBI) – Willie Mae Spraggins barely had the strength to talk Wednesday, much less plead for someone to come forward with information that could lead to her son’s killer.

“Who did such a thing to my child? That’s all I want to know,” she asked. “Who did that? And then I had to come out there and find him all shot up in the head.”

Spraggins is still looking for answers after her son Jamel Banks was shot and killed right outside her front door on Lowe Street in November 2019.

On Wednesday, she stood with her daughter and granddaughter as West Point Police Sgt. Ramirez Ivy once again asked for help to find Banks’s killer.

“We need you,” Sgt. Ivy says. “We need you to come forward to help solve these crimes and help this mother who’s grieving and has to relive this everyday.”

Sgt. Ivy said police have struggled to come up with credible witnesses or promising leads to find out why Banks was killed and who pulled the trigger.

“Conspiracy theories don’t solve a case,” he says. “So the hugest stumbling block we face with this case and many others is people’s thoughts. What they think happened. We need to know what they know. What actually happened.”

Banks’s daughter Jamia Webber thinks some people are just too afraid to talk.

“People don’t want to be labeled a snitch or a tattle tail,” she says. “So I think that is a big barrier to people coming forward.”

Banks was a father of three who worked at a car wash and had no apparent enemies.

“Somebody come forward to help us please so I can be able to tell my niece one day that somebody murdered her father and we know who it is,” said Banks’s sister Adriane Spraggins.

Anyone with information on Banks’s murder is asked to contact the Golden Triangle Crime Stoppers at 1-800-530-7151 or the West Point Police Department at 662-494-1244. Information can be reported anonymously and Crime Stoppers is offing a reward of up $5,000 for information leading to an arrest.