"I have more questions now': Mother seeks answers after police say Jackson woman's hanging was staged

The mother of a 29-year-old woman whose body was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Mississippi, has said she is more disturbed than ever after police revealed that her daughter was already dead when the scene was created. Christy Spivey told the BBC she was "starting to break down" as the latest details emerged this week, nearly a month after Tasia Fortune was discovered at an abandoned home in the majority-black city in August.

Jackson Police Department said on Friday that the medical examiner who carried out Fortune's post-mortem had concluded her death was a homicide and that "the scene and [the hanging were staged]". In other words, investigators believe she was killed by other means first, and her body was then suspended from a tree to resemble a lynching. Officials have not disclosed her exact cause of death, the date she died, or any motive for the arrangement, and they have not explained how three people charged in the case are connected to her.

That uncertainty is at the heart of Spivey's frustration. The BBC asked how she was processing the news that her daughter did not die by hanging, and she said the coroner's update had briefly brought some relief. "When the police called me, I started crying and thanked them and felt a little more at peace than I had before," she said. But rather than settling the matter, the staging revelation has opened it wider. "I have more questions now than what I did before," she said, adding that police have still not told her what actually killed her daughter or when.

Her concerns are shared across a city still reeling. Fortune's body being found in August triggered widespread fear and unease, not least because of Mississippi's long and painful history of racial violence and lynchings — a history that makes any Black woman found hanging from a tree in the state an instant trigger for memories of far older atrocities. The case prompted lawmakers to demand federal investigations, and the sight of the scene drew national attention. If investigators now say the hanging was deliberately staged, the implications are significant: it suggests the image was engineered to send a message, whether to frighten a community, to obscure a more ordinary killing, or both.

Police have said little publicly about that intent. Asked in court on Friday about the circumstances of the killing, a detective told the judge that Fortune's death was thought to stem from a drug-related dispute. The detective said she may have been killed over allegations that she stole drugs. Spivey rejected that characterisation, though she did not dispute that her daughter struggled with substance misuse. "Tasia has an addiction - had - an addiction problem. She was trying to get better," she said, insisting that even if her daughter was still using drugs at the time, "she still didn't deserve to be done like that. Nobody does."

Three people have been arrested, all of whom are Black. Spivey said she hopes the arrests bring answers, saying she "just hope[s] they've got the right person/people", but noted that police have not set out for her family how the suspects knew her daughter or why her body was allegedly arranged in such a way. She also described her frustration with how the investigation has been handled, saying she had been hoping the latest update would make her feel relieved rather than further adrift.

The circumstances of Fortune's life in the weeks before her death are central to the case. She was homeless at the time, though she typically stayed with friends and relatives, moving between homes. Her four sons, aged between one and seven, are now being cared for by a mix of family and friends, and two of the children are in the process of being adopted. Spivey, who shared family photographs of her daughter with the BBC, said the children are the deepest part of her worry as questions about their mother's death go unanswered.

For the family, the shock has come in stages rather than all at once. In the first days, the image of the body in the tree dominated the family's thoughts. Then came the news that Fortune had not died by hanging, which offered a small measure of comfort even as it introduced a new horror — the idea that someone had moved her body and left it there. The claim that the scene was staged deepened that horror, raising the question of who did it and why, and whether the answer would ever be shared with the family.

That is why Spivey's reaction, rather than the detective's account of a drug dispute, is likely to shape what happens next. Legal and investigative scrutiny has already been promised or demanded, and the questions she poses — cause of death, date of death, and the motive behind the staging — are the same ones she says remain entirely unanswered. For now, the family's position is unchanged on the central point: a woman trying to recover from addiction, and raising four very young sons, was killed, and the circumstances of that killing have not yet been fully explained to the people left behind.

The BBC has previously reported that police said a Black woman found hanging from a tree was dead before her body was "staged", and that Fortune's mother had demanded answers weeks after the discovery. This article forms part of the BBC's continuing coverage of the case.