A second person has been arrested in the death of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old mother who was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Mississippi, according to Jackson police.
The person has been charged with homicide and two additional arrest warrants have been issued, Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney told Jackson City Council on Tuesday evening. Police are also in contact with U.S. Marshals regarding a warrant for a third person and more warrants and arrests are expected, Brackney also said.
Earlier this month, authorities arrested Jarques Ratliff, 51, who has since pleaded not guilty.
Fortune’s death has drawn “strange fruit” comparisons as details emerge in the ongoing investigation. Her mother, Christy Spivey, has insisted: “She did not do this to herself.”
The Emancipator has been tracking other cases of people recently found hanged.
Over the past couple of decades, a number of other cases have raised similar pain points as Fortune’s, causing online speculation, official rulings of “suicide,” and skeptical families looking for comfort even while soliciting independent investigations.
2025 – Trey Reed
In Cleveland, Mississippi, Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a college student, was found hanging from a tree on the campus of Delta State University.
Trey’s death was ruled a suicide, and there was evidence of suicidal text messages, according to The Mississippi Free Press.
The family retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump for an independent autopsy. But the family has told the press that Crump’s legal team has gone silent.
Around the same time as Reed’s body was found, the body of a White man, Cory Zukatis, was found hanged in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The cases are not considered linked.
2018 – Willie Andrew Jones Jr.
In 2018, Willie Andrew Jones Jr., then-21, was found hanging in a tree in Scott County, roughly 50 miles east of Jackson, where Fortune’s body was recently found.
Jones was father to a fourth-month-old.
Police almost immediately concluded that Jones committed suicide.
The family said that Jones had been lynched. The family noted that reports from Scott County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which also looked into the death and also concluded there was no evidence of a murder, contained contradictions.
The family noted that a witness to an argument, in the minutes before Jones’ death, said that he had been threatened with a gun by his girlfriend’s White stepfather.
The Jones family won a lawsuit against the stepfather by default, meaning that the man did not show up to court, according to reporting on the case, which noted that between 2000 and 2018, there were at least eight Black men discovered hanging from trees in the state, including Jones.
Based on the eventual findings of an independent autopsy, the nonprofit JULIAN called for overturning the original designation of Jones’ death as a “suicide.”
In that same year, in the lead-up to two Donald Trump rallies and a runoff Senate election, nooses were slung over trees at the Mississippi state capitol.
2015 – Otis Byrd
In 2015, Otis Byrd, a 54-year-old Black man, was discovered hanging from a tree in Port Gibson, a little more than 60 miles southwest of Jackson.
Byrd was on parole after serving time for a robbery that led to the murder of a woman in 1980, according to reporting.
Byrd’s death led to a federal investigation into whether it was a hate crime. The probe concluded that there “was no evidence to prove that Byrd’s death was a homicide” and was subsequently closed, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department.
Byrd’s family hired Michael Baden, the pathologist who had performed the independent autopsy of Michael Brown, to conduct a review. Reporting at the time noted that Byrd’s body was cremated, complicating an independent autopsy.
Investigative Correspondent Daniel Mollenkamp contributed to this report.
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