Mississippi officials have investigated a series of deaths of people found hanging or found dead in unexplained circumstances since 2018. The victims have not all been Black men: they include Cory Zukatis, a white man found in Vicksburg in September 2025, and Tasia Fortune, a Black woman and mother of four found in Jackson in August 2026. In every publicly documented case that has been ruled on, state or county authorities concluded either that the death was a suicide or that the cause could not be determined. No one has been charged in connection with any of the deaths.
Families in most of those cases reject the official findings, and several have retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump, commissioned independent autopsies, or organized rallies. Their central objection is consistent: they say investigators reached conclusions quickly, communicated poorly, and did not answer basic questions about how the men died.
The most recent case: Tasia Fortune
Tasia Fortune, 29, a mother of four from Jackson, was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in west Jackson on Aug. 3, 2026. The Hinds County Coroner's Office identified her on Aug. 6, according to Mississippi Today.
Jackson police have called it an active death investigation and have declined to explain the circumstances. NBC News reported on Aug. 10, 2026 that a person of interest had been questioned; WLBT reported on Aug. 8 that a person of interest was arrested on an unrelated charge. No cause or manner of death has been publicly released, and an autopsy result was still pending as of the most recent reporting.
Fortune's mother told ABC News and NBC News that her daughter was at peace the last time they saw each other and that she does not believe Fortune killed herself. A Jackson city councilman has asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to investigate the death as a possible murder, the AP reported. The AP noted that Fortune's body was found in a state where two other people have been found hanging from trees in less than a year.
Cory Zukatis
Cory Zukatis, 35, was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area off Washington Street in Vicksburg on Sept. 15, 2025 — the same day Trey Reed was found at Delta State University, about 130 miles away. Zukatis was white, a Brandon native, and believed to be homeless, according to the Vicksburg Post and WLBT.
Vicksburg police Capt. Curtis Judge said that week that the two cases were not related. In early October 2025, the Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office ruled Zukatis's death a suicide. No arrest or charge has been reported.
The Southern Poverty Law Center nonetheless called for thorough investigations into both the Reed and Zukatis deaths. That call, made about a white man's officially ruled suicide alongside a Black student's disputed one, is part of why these cases keep being discussed together: the objection from advocates is to how quickly rulings arrive, not only to who the dead are.
De'Martravion "Trey" Reed
De'Martravion "Trey" Reed, a 21-year-old student, was found hanging from a tree on the Delta State University campus in Cleveland, Mississippi, on Sept. 15, 2025. Campus and local police said the same day that they had found no sign of foul play, according to The Associated Press.
Mississippi's state medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, the AP and USA Today reported in mid-September 2025. Authorities said surveillance and witness information did not indicate anyone else was involved.
Reed's family disputed the ruling and sought an independent autopsy, partly funded through Colin Kaepernick's Autopsy Initiative, NBC News reported on Sept. 19, 2025. On Oct. 18, 2025, Reed's mother appeared at a rally at Delta State organized with the New Black Panther Party, whose leader told the crowd he believed Reed was lynched, according to USA Today.
The independent findings have not been made public. In January 2026, Reed's grandmother said the family had still not received the second autopsy report. On July 31, 2026, the family told the Clarion Ledger and Mississippi Free Press that Crump never shared a final independent report and had stopped responding to them. As of this writing, the state's suicide ruling stands, and no published independent finding contradicts it.
The case that drew national attention: Willie Andrew Jones Jr.
Willie Andrew Jones Jr., 21, was found hanging from a tree in his girlfriend's yard near Forest, in Scott County, in February 2018. Scott County Sheriff Mike Lee said the scene was consistent with suicide, and said witnesses reported Jones had threatened to hang himself.
The FBI and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation opened a review in May 2018 after the state NAACP asked for federal involvement. No charges followed. Jones's mother has said publicly that she does not believe her son killed himself. In April 2021, a Hinds County jury found Harold O'Bryant, the father of Jones's girlfriend, liable in a wrongful-death suit and awarded the family about $11.3 million, the Clarion Ledger and WLBT reported. That is a civil verdict decided on a lower standard of proof than a criminal case, and no criminal charge has ever been filed.
The Washington Post examined the case in an Aug. 8, 2021 investigation that counted at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi since 2000, based on court records and police reports. Those cases have not produced criminal convictions for the deaths.
Rasheem Carter
Rasheem Carter, 25, was last seen in Laurel on Oct. 2, 2022, after telling his mother that white men in trucks were following him and shouting racial slurs. His remains were found on Nov. 2, 2022, in woods roughly 21 miles from Taylorsville. He was not found hanging, but the case is frequently raised alongside the others.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation initially listed the cause of death as undetermined, and investigators suggested some damage to the remains may have been caused by animals. In March 2023, Crump released an independent autopsy that the family said pointed to homicide and called for a Justice Department investigation, according to the AP, NPR and the BBC. No suspect has been publicly identified and no charges have been announced.
Jackson's burial scandal
A separate set of cases exposed failures in how Mississippi counties handle the dead. Dexter Wade, 37, was killed on March 5, 2023, when he was struck by an SUV driven by an off-duty Jackson police officer. His mother, Bettersten Wade, reported him missing; she was not told he was dead for about seven months, and he had been buried in the Hinds County pauper's field behind the county jail without her knowledge, NBC News reported in October 2023.
Marrio Moore and at least one other man were buried the same way, CNN and the AP reported. Then-Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart told NBC News in February 2024, "I don't know how to find people," referring to next-of-kin notification. She announced her retirement in October 2024.
On April 4, 2024, the Justice Department said it would provide technical assistance to the Jackson Police Department and the Hinds County Coroner's Office on death notifications. Bettersten Wade joined a rally at Jackson police headquarters on Nov. 20, 2025, saying she still does not have complete answers.
What has produced convictions
The only recent Mississippi case of racially motivated violence in this period to end in convictions did not involve a hanging. Six white former Rankin County and Richland officers who called themselves the "Goon Squad" pleaded guilty to state and federal charges after breaking into a home in January 2023 and torturing two Black men, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, for hours. One officer shot Jenkins in the mouth. They were sentenced in federal court in March 2024 to terms ranging from about 10 to 40 years, with state sentences following in April 2024, according to Reuters and the AP.
Otis Byrd
The case families most often cite as precedent came before this period. Otis Byrd, 54, was found hanging from a tree about half a mile from his home outside Port Gibson, in Claiborne County, on March 19, 2015, more than two weeks after he was reported missing. Because a bedsheet was used and his hands were not bound, the FBI, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and state investigators opened a possible lynching inquiry, the AP reported.
Federal officials closed the civil rights investigation in May 2015, saying the autopsy found no evidence of homicide and that the death was consistent with suicide. Byrd's relatives and local NAACP officials said the finding did not explain how he reached the branch. No charges were filed.
Deaths in custody
Hangings in Mississippi jails and prisons are a separate but related dispute, and they are more numerous than the outdoor cases. The Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond has operated under a federal consent decree since 2016 over unconstitutional conditions and a pattern of deaths; the Mississippi Free Press has reported multiple inmates found hanging there. In October 2025, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves placed the jail into federal receivership, appointing Wendell M. France Sr. to run it, citing the county's failure to stop deaths in custody.
At the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, a series of deaths during unrest in December 2019 and January 2020 included inmates found hanging, and Gov. Tate Reeves ordered a unit closed. In April 2022, the Justice Department concluded that conditions in Mississippi's prison system violated the Constitution, citing inadequate suicide prevention and mental health care among its findings, Reuters reported. The state disputed parts of the finding.
These deaths are usually ruled suicides. What the DOJ findings establish is not that the rulings were wrong, but that the conditions preceding them were unlawful.
How many cases there are
There is no official count of suspected lynchings in Mississippi. The most cited figure comes from attorney Jill Collen Jefferson of the civil rights organization JULIAN, who told the Washington Post for its Aug. 8, 2021 investigation that she had identified at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in the state since 2000. That tally is an advocacy organization's, not a government's; the Post named some of the cases and did not independently verify all eight. No state or federal agency publishes a comparable list, which is itself part of what families and researchers object to.
The coroner system at the center of the dispute
Mississippi investigates deaths through locally elected county coroners rather than a single centralized medical examiner system for initial determinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public health law summaries. Coroners are elected officials and are not required to be forensic pathologists. Reporters and families have pointed to that structure as a reason official rulings are met with skepticism, particularly after the Hinds County notification failures.
Why it matters
Congress made lynching a distinct federal hate crime for the first time with the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed March 29, 2022. No Mississippi case described here has been prosecuted under it.
That gap defines the current dispute. Official records in these cases say suicide or undetermined. Families say the investigations were too fast, too thin, and too poorly explained to be trusted, and they have so far not produced public evidence that changes the official rulings. Both statements can be documented; neither has been resolved in a courtroom. The Fortune case is the first in this group in which authorities have publicly acknowledged questioning a person of interest, and its ruling is still pending.
The Plain Record will update this report if independent autopsy findings are released, if any case is reopened, or if charges are filed.