Jackson police arrested a man Friday afternoon and charged him with murder in the death of Tasia Fortune, the Mississippi mother of four whose body was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house last month. Jarques Ratliff, 51, who goes by “Jock,” was taken into custody after officers spotted him walking along Capitol Street. Investigators had already secured two search warrants and an arrest warrant, and they were waiting on one thing before they could use them.
That thing came Thursday evening, when the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office classified the death as a homicide. Manner of death is the official finding about how a death happened, and there are only a few categories a medical examiner can choose from: natural, accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. Homicide means the examiner concluded another person caused the death. It is a medical conclusion rather than a criminal charge, but it was the piece Jackson police had been waiting on, and Police Chief RaShall Brackney said her investigators moved quickly once it came down. The autopsy itself had been completed roughly a month earlier, which is part of why the case sat in public limbo for so long.
Tasia Fortune was found on the 500 block of Road of Remembrance on August 3. Neighbors called police, and officers located her body at 9:05 that night in the overgrown backyard of an abandoned home, in what the department described as a hanging position on a tree. Brackney said the body was found in various stages of decomposition. Police have still not said how Fortune was killed. The chief has been careful to say only that she was found in the position of hanging, and she declined at Friday’s briefing to go further than what the medical examiner has officially determined.
Brackney said Ratliff had an “association” with Fortune but would not describe what that association was. She also made clear the case is not closed. Police expect additional arrests as investigators keep following evidence, and she called Friday’s arrest an important development rather than a conclusion.
For Fortune’s family, the arrest brought relief without answers. Her mother, Christy Spivey, said she cried when police called her and felt a small measure of peace, then added, “I just hope that they’ve got the right person.” Spivey said police did not share a motive with her and did not tell her whether DNA led them to Ratliff. She did not recognize his name and has been asking her daughter’s friends whether they knew him. She described the family as being in disbelief and shock and said they still do not have much to go on.
Spivey has been publicly rejecting the idea that her daughter took her own life since the week the body was found. She last saw Tasia Fortune on July 26, when her daughter traveled from Mississippi to Kentucky for a family reunion. Fortune had lived in Mississippi for more than a decade after moving there as a teenager, and Spivey said she was doing better than she had been in a long time, describing her as at peace and even talking about the possibility of coming home. “She did not do this to herself,” Spivey said in early August, repeating it for emphasis. Her sister LaToni Fortune said the family stayed in regular contact, either through visits to Mississippi or when Tasia came back to Kentucky. An aunt, Etta Avolio, started a fundraiser to cover burial and final arrangements.
The reason this case drew national and international attention long before an arrest is the image itself. A Black woman found hanging from a tree in Mississippi carries a weight that no press briefing can neutralize, and Brackney addressed it directly on Friday. She said the department understands the case is being viewed through a broader, global lens given Mississippi’s history, that she does not dismiss those concerns, and that she takes them seriously. She also said the department has a responsibility to make sure anything it says publicly is supported by evidence.
Fortune’s death was not the only one raising that question in the state. In less than a year, two other people were found hanging from trees in Mississippi. Trey Reed, a 21 year old Black student at Delta State University in Cleveland, was found in September, and police concluded his death was a suicide, with autopsy results consistent with the Bolivar County coroner’s preliminary examination that found no evidence of foul play. Cory Zukatis, an unhoused white man in his thirties, was found in Vicksburg. None of the three cases has been connected to the others by investigators.
Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes sent a letter in August to Mississippi U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger asking for federal assistance in the case, referring to Fortune as a murder victim. Spivey, for her part, has said she does not believe her daughter was the victim of a hate crime, and no official finding has tied the death to racial motive.
