Mother Christy Spivey says police silence has left family without answers
The Jackson Police Department confirmed Tuesday that it is investigating the August 3 hanging death of Tasia Fortune, 29, as a potential homicide, the BBC reported — weeks after the case had been described only as a “death investigation.” Her mother, Christy Spivey, said she is still waiting for answers from authorities more than a month after Fortune’s body was found hanging from a tree in the lot of an abandoned home in Jackson, Mississippi.
In a public city meeting Tuesday evening, Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney said the department “has been investigating this case from day one as a homicide.” Brackney, in a statement to the BBC, elaborated that the department treats any pending death case as a “potential homicide” so that crucial evidence is not lost while police wait on autopsy results. The medical examiner’s office said it would not comment on the pending case.
Spivey described her frustration with what she characterized as silence from investigators. “It’s making me angry,” she said. “What is the hold up?” She said she made multiple enquiries to police that went unanswered, and that her first update from authorities in weeks came at Tuesday’s city meeting.
Spivey last saw her daughter alive on July 26, when Fortune traveled from Mississippi — where she had lived for roughly the last decade — to Kentucky, where Spivey lives, for a family reunion. “She was talking about, you know, maybe even coming home,” Spivey said. The next time she saw her daughter, at a funeral home before burial, she said she could barely look at the body. “I didn’t look straight at her. Her daddy did,” Spivey said. “I kind of looked from the side.”
Local concern has been heightened by Mississippi’s history of racial violence and lynchings. The majority-Black city of Jackson has been left on edge, and in the absence of concrete details about Fortune’s death, suspicions have festered.
Fortune’s death was the third incident in Mississippi in less than a year in which police found someone dead and hanged from a tree. Two other bodies — one Black male, one white — were discovered on the same day in September 2025; both were ruled suicides. The mother of one of those deceased, Trey Reed, has contested those findings. Separately, four Black Americans have been found hanged from trees in North Carolina this year; three deaths were ruled suicides and an autopsy is pending on the fourth.
Two online petitions have drawn attention to the case. One asks for an independent investigation into Mississippi’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Staci Turner, over the handling of recent cases involving people of color, and has gathered more than 50,000 signatures. Another calls for an FBI investigation into Fortune’s death.
Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes has also pressed for action. “All cases are important, but this one — a hanging in Mississippi — should rise to the top of the food chain,” Stokes said. He told the BBC he sent letters weeks ago to both federal prosecutors at the Mississippi US attorney’s office and the FBI urging that the investigation was “in dire need of assistance,” and that he has yet to hear back from either. “Nothing from nobody,” Stokes said. “It’s like nobody cares.”
US Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett has similarly requested federal intervention. In a letter to the US Department of Justice, she asked for an investigation into recent deaths in Mississippi — including Fortune’s — calling them “possible cases of modern-day lynchings” and citing the state’s “appalling historical reputation of violent terrorism against black Americans.”
Brandon King, president of the student NAACP chapter at Jackson State University, said the uncertainty around Fortune’s death and the lack of police updates have led him and other students to be “extra cautious” around campus. “Hey, you could be next. This is in Jackson. This is in your backyard,” King said. The concern, he added, is compounded because “this is supposed to be the capital. This is where I’m supposed to feel the most safe.”
Spivey said she cried before heading to the funeral home for her daughter, dreading having to fill out a death certificate and decide whether to cremate or bury her firstborn child. She wanted to cremate Fortune but chose burial in the end, she said, because she was holding out hope that an update in the investigation might require exhuming her body.