В Миссисипи мать четверых детей найдена повешенной, родственники требуют расследовать дело как расовое убийство

Tasia Fortune, 29, a mother of four, was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home on the 500 block of Road of Remembrance in a predominantly Black west Jackson, Mississippi, neighborhood on Aug. 3. Her body was identified three days later by the Hinds County Coroner’s Office. An autopsy was performed on Aug. 12 by the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office; results have not been announced. A person of interest, Terence Anderson, 65, who shares a child with Fortune, was arrested on Aug. 8 on an unrelated felon-in-possession-of-a-firearm charge. No official ruling on her cause or manner of death has been issued. “She did not do this to herself,” Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, told ABC News. “Tasia was strong-minded, she was full of laughs and love, she had faith in God. She had so little and gave so much.” Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes asked U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger for federal assistance, calling Fortune a murder victim. “It is still an active investigation, she had white family members, and it was on their property she was found hung and there are just too many questions,” said Priscilla Williams-Till, cousin of Emmett Till and founder of the Emmett Till Justice for Families Foundation. “We are prepared to challenge these injustices through lawful means, using every available legal avenue to investigate, expose, and pursue accountability in modern-day lynchings and other racially motivated acts of violence.” The foundation was named after the 14-year-old Chicago child who was kidnapped and murdered by white men while visiting relatives in Money, MS, during his summer vacation. August 28th of this year marks the 71st anniversary of the case, widely credited with sparking the Civil Rights Movement. Speaking from her home in Jackson, Williams-Till said she has been investigating lynching cases since 2003. “The lynchings and racial violence occurring today demonstrate that white supremacy and systemic injustice continue to influence our communities and contribute to a deeply divided social climate,” she said. A State Besieged Fortune’s death is the latest in a cascade of disputed deaths in Mississippi. In September 2025, Demartravion ‘Trey’ Reed, 21, a Black freshman at Delta State University in Cleveland, and Cory Zukatis, 36, a white homeless man from Brandon, were found hanging from trees on the same day more than 100 miles apart. Both deaths were ruled suicides by the Mississippi State Medical Examiner. The one-year anniversary of Reed’s death is less than a month away, and his family says critical questions remain unanswered. In July 2026, Nolan Xavier Wells, 18, a Black college football player, went missing during a July 4 boat trip to Horn Island. His body was found floating two days later. At the NAACP National Convention in Chicago on July 22, attorney Ben Crump presented findings from an independent autopsy in the Wells case. Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr., president of the National Medical Association, found the cause and manner of death “undetermined pending investigation.” The Rev. Al Sharpton delivered Wells’ eulogy on July 20 in Ocean Springs: “For an 18-year-old young man to no longer be with us, we want answers, not bias either way: just answers.” “The world is watching and Nolan Wells’ family deserves a thorough accounting of what happened,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said on Aug. 17, when the NAACP’s Office of General Counsel joined the family’s legal team. On Aug. 13, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY) sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel urging an independent federal review and requesting a response within seven days. Beyond Mississippi The pattern of Black Americans found hanging in public, ruled suicides before autopsies are complete, and disputed by families who say investigations were rushed, extends well beyond Mississippi. In 2026 alone, Juliana Umba Nzita, 16, a Congolese immigrant, was found hanging on church grounds in Charlotte, North Carolina, ruled a suicide in three days with no autopsy performed. To’Nea Nicole Miller, 27, was found dead near a Miami park on Juneteenth weekend. Justice Kai James, 21, was found hanging at Turner Job Corps in Albany, Georgia. In Illinois, the 2021 death of Jelani Day, 25, a Black Illinois State University graduate student found in the Illinois River near Peru, remains unresolved. The coroner ruled it a drowning. Day’s mother and civil rights activists maintain foul play. Peru is a confirmed sundown town, according to the Tougaloo College database. Illinois had an estimated 507 sundown towns. The “Crimson Report,” released earlier this year, documented 70 suspected modern-day lynchings and hate crimes in Mississippi since 2000, the highest of any state examined. But the data complicates the popular ‘suicide’ narrative being pushed by officials. According to the CDC, suicide rates among Black Americans climbed 53 percent between 2014 and 2024, more than 10 times faster than among white Americans. Black men ages 20 to 24 now die by suicide at a rate of 31.9 per 100,000, the highest of any Black age group. For the first time on record, young Black men ages 16 to 29 are dying by suicide at a higher rate than young white men. Without transparent investigations, independent witnesses and complete autopsies, neither the lynching claim nor the suicide ruling can be resolved, some activists have explained. And the federal law designed to address racial terror has never been used. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed March 29, 2022, made lynching a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years. No prosecution has been brought under it. According to the FBI’s 2024 Hate Crime Statistics, anti-Black bias accounted for 3,004 incidents, 25.7 percent of all hate crimes in the United States. Attorney Jill Collen Jefferson has been documenting these failures for years. The Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer founded JULIAN, a nonprofit named for her mentor Julian Bond, to investigate what she calls modern-day lynchings. The Crusader reached out to Jefferson this week for comment on the Fortune case but did not receive a response. “These modern-day lynchings are hate crimes that must be solved,” Jefferson told the Crusader in a previous interview. “The families speak for themselves. I am there to help them get justice in these murders. All of these cases are egregious and present a pattern. Lynchings have never stopped in America.” On Feb. 18, JULIAN released “A Crimson Record: Seven State Modern-Day Lynching Report 2000-2025,” a 222-page investigation covering a quarter-century of suspected racial violence. The report documented more than 70 suspected modern-day lynchings across Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama, with the total number of documented cases exceeding 100 when hate crimes and suspicious deaths are included. Mississippi had the highest count with 20 cases. The methods ranged from hangings and shootings to decapitations, burnings and deaths in police custody. Twenty-three cases across the seven states involved police officers or correctional guards, and 12 occurred in jails or prisons. The youngest victim was 14. The oldest was 65. People in their 20s comprised the largest group at 37.5 percent of all suspected modern-day lynchings. JULIAN identified a distinct pattern of killings involving Black transgender women, with Texas as the deadliest state for anti-transgender violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Most transgender victims were killed by gunfire, the report found, contrasting with the hanging deaths more commonly documented among Black male victims. The majority of cases had been officially classified as suicides, homicides without a proven discriminatory motive, or conventional hate crimes. The group stated it believes the true number is “significantly higher, given the frequency of suicide misclassifications and premature case closures.” The report’s title is a deliberate echo of Ida B. Wells’ 1895 “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States,” the first statistical analysis of lynching in America. Published in Chicago, the 100-page pamphlet documented more than 10,000 African Americans killed by lynching between 1864 and 1894 and recorded between 150 and 250 lynchings per year across the South. Wells proved that fewer than one-third of the victims had even been accused of rape, dismantling the primary justification white mobs used for the killings. She found that in 1894 alone, 197 people were killed by mobs while only 132 were executed through the legal system, meaning extrajudicial killings outnumbered lawful executions. Born enslaved in 1862, Wells was driven to her anti-lynching crusade after a white mob in Memphis lynched three of her friends and destroyed her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech. The Crusader newspaper, founded in 1940 in Chicago’s Wells housing development, was named in honor of the pioneering leader who carried the nickname. “In a lot of these cases, you have coroners who are not medically trained and are not required in Mississippi to have any medical or investigative training ruling these deaths as suicides, even when there’s glaring contradictions,” Jefferson said. Williams Till put it another way, “Mississippi government is rooted in white supremacy, and we have never taken decisive action to remove it from state (and local) government,” she said. “Our mission is to seek justice for victims and their families, and to confront systemic racism and ensure that those responsible are held accountable under the law.” New Revelations in Reed Case The Crusader’s Lynchings by Suicide investigative series reported in October 2025 that a family-commissioned autopsy in the Reed case alleged blunt force trauma to the back of his head. Those results have not been publicly released, and the Crusader could not access the report to verify its findings shared by a relative who requested anonymity. Deputy Coroner Murray Roark had declared the death “self-done” the same day Reed’s body was found. However, in a story published in late July 2026, the Mississippi Free Press reported that Reed’s family confirmed his girlfriend told them he had sent suicidal text messages from his phone the night before his body was found. The family also reportedly said Crump never provided the final results of the independent autopsy and stopped responding to them after approximately January 2026. The Mississippi Free Press reported it had also reached out to Crump’s office multiple times beginning in October 2025 and received no response. The Crusader reached out to Crump’s law office via phone and email for comment but received no response. The popular attorney has been accused by critics of seeking “media attention,” which Crump has denied. In Jackson, Fortune’s manner of death has not been determined. The state autopsy in the Wells case has not been released. The independent autopsy in the Reed case has not been made public. In Charlotte, no autopsy was performed on Juliana Nzita. Across all of these cases, no one has been arrested for causing the death of a Black person found hanging in public. “When officials rush to label a death a suicide, they don’t just close a case. They close a story,” Jefferson told the Crusader. Stephanie Gadlin is an award-winning, independent investigative journalist whose work blends historical analysis, data reporting, and cultural commentary. Her work is published in the Crusader and other publications across the country. She specializes in uncovering the intersections of Black culture, public health, environmental justice, systemic racism, public policy and economic inequality in the U.S. and across the African Diaspora. For confidential tips, please contact: [email protected]