Jackson police have been investigating the death of Tasia Fortune as a homicide since the day her body was found, Police Chief RaShall Brackney told the Jackson City Council on Tuesday.
The 29-year-old mother of four was discovered on August 3, hanging from a tree behind a vacant house on the 500 block of Road of Remembrance in west Jackson, a predominantly Black neighborhood. Until this week, the department had publicly classified the case only as a death pending investigation, which is the label police use when they have not yet determined how someone died. Brackney told the council that Jackson PD has treated it as a homicide from day one and will continue to unless the medical examiner’s office tells them otherwise.
An autopsy on Tasia Fortune was performed four weeks ago by the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office. Brackney told the council that police still have not received the results. That means there is still no official cause of death, which is what killed a person, and no official manner of death, which is the finding that says whether a death was a homicide, a suicide, an accident, or natural. Without that ruling, the case stays open and the family stays in the dark.
Her mother, Christy Spivey, has been the one pushing. She last saw her daughter on July 26 at a family reunion in Kentucky. Fortune had moved to Mississippi as a teenager and lived there for more than a decade. Spivey has said her daughter seemed better than she had been in a long time, and described her as at peace. Asked directly whether Fortune could have taken her own life, Spivey told ABC News, “She did not do this to herself.”
Spivey wrote a letter to the Jackson City Council describing what it has been like to deal with the department. She said detectives repeated the same thing to her over and over like a recording, and then stopped responding at all. Her account is what put the case on Tuesday’s agenda in the first place. Councilman Kenneth Stokes brought it forward, and only then did the department state publicly that Tasia Fortune’s death was being worked as a homicide.
Stokes said he intends to file a resolution at the next council meeting formally asking the medical examiner’s office to explain the delay. He has also written to U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger requesting federal help with the investigation. Stokes told reporters that hanging is an ugly part of the state’s past, and that what happened to Fortune could have happened to anyone’s child.
That history is why this case drew national attention within days. Mississippi has a documented record of racial terror lynchings, and a Black woman found hanging from a tree in a Black neighborhood carries a weight that does not require explanation for most people reading this. Two other people have been found hanging from trees in Mississippi in less than a year. Trey Reed, a 21-year-old Black student at Delta State University in Cleveland, and Cory Zukatis, an unhoused white man in his thirties in Vicksburg. Both of those deaths were ruled suicides. Reed’s family disputed the finding and called for an independent autopsy and for authorities to release security camera footage.
Spivey has been careful about the comparison. She told ABC News she does not want her name attached to claims that her daughter’s death was racially motivated. Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., made a similar point in a statement, urging people not to rush to conclusions while also saying the fear these circumstances stir in Black communities cannot be waved off, and that the history is exactly why transparency has to be the standard here.
Police have identified a person of interest in the case. That person is the father of one of Tasia Fortune’s children, and he was arrested shortly after her body was found, but on an unrelated weapons charge. He remains in custody according to jail records. No one has been arrested in connection with her death. Tony Anderson, the man’s brother, told CNN that the abandoned house where Fortune was found sits next door to his brother’s home.
Jackson police have asked the public to hold off on drawing conclusions. In a statement, the department acknowledged the attention the case has drawn and the speculation moving across social media, and said it recognized how sensitive the situation is for the community. Brackney told the council there is a lot of inaccurate information circulating about this case and others like it.
Fortune was buried in late August. Her family has kept a GoFundMe active, where Spivey has written that her children’s future is secure and that the family is still working toward justice. Six weeks after the autopsy, the one thing that would move this case forward, a ruling from the medical examiner, still has not arrived.
