Police investigate death of Tasia Fortune, found hanging from tree, as a homicide
By Chris Boyette, CNN
(CNN) — Jackson, Mississippi, police are investigating the death of Tasia Fortune as a homicide after the 29-year-old Black woman was found hanging from a tree outside an abandoned house last month, the city’s police chief said Tuesday.
“Jackson Police Department has been investigating this case from day one as a homicide, until we hear otherwise from the medical examiner’s office,” Chief RaShall Brackney said at a city council meeting.
Police had previously categorized the case as a “death pending investigation.”
With the autopsy results pending, Fortune’s family is demanding answers and local officials are questioning the circumstances surrounding the case.
The scrutiny is unfolding against Mississippi’s long history of racial violence involving hangings and follows other recent hanging deaths in the state that authorities ruled were suicides.
“We need to pursue (Fortune’s) investigation to its final conclusion and whatever the results, we need to address those results,” Jackson City Council President Vernon Hartley said.
The police chief addressed the city council after a letter written by Christy Spivey, Fortune’s mother, was read aloud at the meeting.
“I have no more answers from one day of this investigation,” Spivey wrote. “The detectives are like they are on a prerecorded message, just saying the same thing over and over. And now it’s gone to silence.”
On Thursday, Spivey said in a post on the family’s GoFundMe page that she had asked Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes for help “because of the silence and rudeness of Jackson Police Department.”
“Thanks to him putting Tasia’s case on for the council meeting Jackson Police department finally came out and admitted that they were treating this as a homicide which I had already known that but the public didn’t personally know,” Spivey wrote.
Investigators have remained in regular contact with Spivey and her husband, but are awaiting the ruling from the medical examiner’s office, Brackney said.
CNN has reached out to Spivey for comment.
The Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office conducted an autopsy on Fortune on August 11, but police have not yet received the results, Brackney told the council.
The chief said she had been in contact with the director of the medical examiner’s office as well as the commissioner who oversees it but has not been able to get a ruling on the cause and manner of Fortune’s death.
CNN has reached out to the medical examiner’s office for more information.
There have been no arrests made in relation to Fortune’s death, police told CNN in August, but the father of one of Fortune’s children was arrested shortly after the discovery of her body on unrelated weapons charges. He is still in custody, jail records show.
Fortune’s “children have their future secured” as the family continues “working on justice,” Spivey said in the GoFundMe post.
Brackney warned people not to jump to conclusions before all the results are in.
“There is a lot of misinformation out there about this case and other ones,” she said.
Stokes called for answers, especially considering the violent history of race relations in Mississippi and several other hangings in the state.
The investigation into Fortune’s death comes less than a year after the hanging deaths of 21-year-old Trey Reed, a Black student at Delta State University in Cleveland, and Cory Zukatis, an unhoused white man in his 30s, in Vicksburg, according to The Associated Press. Both deaths were determined by authorities to be suicides.
“Hanging is an ugly, ugly part of our past that we never, ever want to come back again,” Stokes said at the city council meeting.
The council member also told CNN affiliate WLBT the delay in answers about Fortune’s death raises questions about the investigation.
“It sends the message that you’re trying to hide something, and we do not need to hide anything in the state of Mississippi. We want the world to know we’re open and above board,” he said.
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