Mississippi police make arrest in Tasia Fortune case after medical examiner rules death a homicide
By Dalia Faheid, Elise Hammond, CNN
(CNN) — Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have arrested a man in the case of Tasia Fortune, the 29-year-old Black woman found hanging from a tree outside an abandoned house last month, following the state medical examiner ruling her death a homicide.
Jarques Ratliff, 51, has been charged with murder in connection with Fortune’s death, police said Friday. CNN is working to determine if he has legal representation. Ratliff will have his first court appearance Monday, police said.
“Last night, the medical examiner’s office officially classified Miss Fortune’s death as a homicide. With that determination, our investigators moved quickly,” Chief RaShall Brackney said at a Friday news conference.
Brackney told CNN on Saturday no one else had been arrested overnight, but she expects “more arrests to come.”
CNN has reached out to the Jackson Police Department and Hinds County Coroner for details on the autopsy report conducted by the state medical examiner’s office. Fortune’s manner of death has not yet been disclosed.
“There are certain things that the persons involved in this would know about this case and continuing to disclose a lot of the information puts the investigators at a disadvantage and then could also compromise the integrity of this case,” Brackney said on “First of All with Victor Blackwell” Saturday morning.
Police secured two search warrants and an arrest warrant, she said. After being unable to locate Ratliff at the search warrant location, officers returning to police headquarters arrested him as he was walking along a city street, she said.
The medical examiner ruling Fortune’s death a homicide was a key step for investigators, Brackney said Saturday. Police were unable to get an arrest warrant for murder until that determination was made, she said.
Christy Spivey, Fortune’s mother, told The Associated Press on Friday that when she learned about the arrest, “I just started crying and told them ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’” Spivey said she did not know Ratliff, but she was asking her daughter’s friends if they knew him, according to the AP.
Ratliff had “an association” with Fortune that became “more and more apparent” as police interviewed nearly 15 people related to the case and collected forensic evidence, Brackney said, but she declined to provide further details. She said more details about their connection to each other would be revealed at Ratliff’s first court appearance.
“We cannot speculate about the nature or the manner in which Miss Fortune was killed beyond what has been officially determined by the medical examiner,” Brackney said. “We owe it to Miss Fortune, to her family and the integrity of this investigation to let the evidence guide us.”
Ratliff had other encounters with the police before this arrest, according to Brackney. She would not say if he was cooperating with investigators.
The chief said Fortune was found in a “hanging position” with “various states of decomposition of her body” on August 3.
Spivey said she was adamant her daughter would not have died by suicide, according to the AP. Fortune had four children, her mother said, and had struggled with homelessness in recent years.
Fortune’s death shook her family and community in Mississippi, where two other people have been found hanging from trees in less than a year.
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.
Asked if there was a connection to those other cases, the police chief said she would “not make that determination.”
“That would be a determination that the FBI would make, but this is a very local case from the way that we’re looking at it,” she said.
The chief emphasized the investigation into Fortune’s death remains active.
“This is not closure. This is just one step as we continue to investigate this case,” Brackney said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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CNN’s Chris Boyette and Leah Thomeer contributed to this report.
