Jackson police dismiss Tasia Fortune's staged hanging as a dispute
By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso ·
Police claim Tasia Fortune was killed in a drug dispute, but the decision to stage her body in a tree evokes a history of racial terror the state refuses to name.
Tasia Fortune was 29 years old. She was a mother to four children. She had spent a decade in Jackson, Mississippi, though she was born in Kentucky. In her final years, she struggled with homelessness. She had dreams of starting a cleaning business. Then, on August 3, someone found her hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home.
The Jackson Police Department wants us to believe this was just a drug deal gone wrong. They say it was a dispute over missing illegal narcotics. They have arrested 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff, 25-year-old Earnest Lloyd Jr, and Eric Clark. But the police are missing the point, or perhaps they are just too comfortable with the silence. When you kill a Black woman and then stage her body in a tree in Mississippi, you are not just settling a debt. You are speaking a language of terror. To call this a simple homicide is la vergüenza—a shame that ignores the ghost standing right next to the crime scene.
The theater of the staged tree
The details coming out of court are chilling. A detective stated that Fortune was dead before her body was "staged" and placed in the tree. The medical examiner confirmed the scene was staged. NBC News reports that Earnest Lloyd Jr is accused of using a black cable cord to hang her. Officials believe she may have been dead for two or three days before she was found.
The police are quick to label this "drug related." They want to isolate the violence. They want to keep it in a small box where it is just a crime between individuals. But the act of staging a hanging is a choice. It is a performance. It is designed to be seen. It is designed to tell every other Black person in that neighborhood that they are not safe.
This is the same pattern we saw in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, where the investigation into racialized violence was subject to intense public scrutiny. When the state focuses only on the "why" of the murder and ignores the "how" of the display, they protect the system. Christy Spivey, Tasia’s mother, told reporters she knows her daughter fought for her life. She is still waiting for real answers.
A Mississippi tradition of terror
We have seen this play before. This is the Emmett Till murder all over again. In 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy was abducted and lynched in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. The mechanism is the same here. Whether the killers are Black or white, the use of the tree in Mississippi is a tool of racial terror. It is a cultural weapon.
The long record of this state predicts this outcome. Local authorities routinely minimize suspicious hangings of Black people. Look at Trey Reed, a 21-year-old Black student at Delta State University who was found hanged a year ago. Authorities ruled it a suicide. Look at the death of Cory Zukatis, an unhoused White man in Vicksburg, also ruled a suicide.
When Black bodies appear in trees, the state's first instinct is to close the file. Representative Ayanna Pressley sent a letter to Congress citing at least 10 documented incidents of Black people found hanging. Lawmakers are now calling on the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate. They have to. Because when the local police handle these cases, they treat the hanging as a detail rather than the point.
The narrow path to a conviction
The strongest argument from the Jackson Police Department is that the suspects are Black. They will argue that this cannot be a hate crime or racial terror if the perpetrators share the victim's race. They will say the "drug dispute" is the only fact that matters.
That argument is a lie. Racial terror is not just about who holds the rope; it is about the rope itself. The choice to stage Tasia Fortune in a tree is a nod to a history of lynching that the state of Mississippi built its power upon. By focusing only on the narcotics, the police are erasing the psychological warfare waged against Tasia’s community.
cbsnews.com reports that Chief RaShall Brackney says police interviewed over a dozen people. They have their suspects. But they are pursuing a narrow trial. They will likely secure convictions for murder and leave the institutional failure untouched. They will ignore how a homeless mother of four could be killed and left in a tree for days without a soul noticing.
The state owes Christy Spivey more than a set of handcuffs. It owes her an admission that Tasia was targeted not just as a person, but as a Black woman in a place where the trees have long memories. Justice requires that we stop calling these "drug disputes" when the scene is a lynching. Until the federal government steps in, this is just another Mississippi ghost story, told by a police department that prefers a convenient lie to a terrifying truth.
Sources
- BBC: Black woman found hanging from tree was dead before body was 'staged', police say
- NBC News: Police believe Tasia Fortune’s hanging was staged as new details revealed in court
- BBC: Black woman found hanging from tree was dead before body was 'staged', police say
- cbsnews.com: Police make 2nd arrest in death of Tasia Fortune, Mississippi woman found hanging from tree