Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba held a moment of silence for Dexter Wade on Thursday, who was struck by an off-duty police officer on March 5 and buried four months later in an unmarked grave.

“At no point have we identified, nor did any investigation reveal that there was any police misconduct in this process, nor was there any malicious intent,” he told listeners at his State of the City Address Thursday. Wade’s death has garnered national attention and put a spotlight on Jackson, Mississippi, he said.

An off-duty Jackson police officer struck and killed Dexter as he was crossing a highway leaving his mothers house in March. The Hinds County Coroner’s Office identified him using fingerprints and information from prescribed medication police found at the scene. Police said they couldn’t reach Wade’s mother, Bettersten Wade, after establishing Dexter’s identity, however, and left his body unclaimed at the morgue for months before burying him in an unmarked grave on the Hinds County Penal Farm.

Wade’s mother filed a missing person’s report one week after last seeing her son and cooperated with Jackson Police Department in a seven months-long search before finding out he’d been dead and buried all along.

Lumumba called this a “tragic accident” and said investigators have determined there was “no malicious intent.”

“It is tragic to bury your child,” he said. “But, to add insult to that trauma, it is even more difficult to not have the ability to grant a proper burial for that child.”

Lumumba said Wade’s death was ultimately a result of lack of communication between the missing person’s division, coroner’s office and traffic accident investigators and cautioned community members against regarding Wade’s death as anything but an accident. He then commended the city’s new police chief, Joseph Wade, for the department’s expansion in force.

The department added 29 officers to its ranks under his leadership and Lumumba said it plans to swear in more soon. He did not mention what the city police plan to do in the wake of Wade’s death.

Bettersten Wade told NBC News she didn’t trust the police and even hesitated calling to report Dexter missing because of prior bad experiences. Last year, former Jackson Police Officer Anthony Fox, was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for the 2019 beating death of her brother, George Fox.

There are no known connections between Fox’s death and Dexter Wade’s death. Bettersten has retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump but has not taken any legal action as of this writing.

“Dexter’s story is a living nightmare for any mother. The secrecy surrounding his death, the alleged concealment of vital information and the callous burial in a pauper’s field without his mother’s knowledge are not just oversights — they are a grave miscarriage of justice,” Crump said in a statement. “The fact that Dexter’s tragic end involved an off-duty police officer only deepens the wounds of this community and raises troubling questions about the integrity of those entrusted with upholding the law.”