The mother of a black woman whose body was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Mississippi, has told the BBC she is still waiting for answers from officials more than a month later. Her demands have been echoed by a community in the southern US state that has been left shocked and angry. After weeks of silence, police on Tuesday confirmed for the first time that they were investigating the death of Tasia Fortune, 29, as a potential homicide - while clarifying that her official cause of death has yet to be confirmed.
Authorities discovered Fortune's body on 3 August, hanging from a tree in the lot of an abandoned home. Local concern over her death has been heightened by the fact that the state has a dark history of racial violence and lynchings. The majority-black city has been left on edge.
As the question lingers as to how Fortune died, petitions online signed by tens of thousands of people have called for more transparency, and members of US Congress have asked for federal intervention. "It's making me angry," Fortune's mother, Christy Spivey, said. "What is the hold up?" Spivey described desperate attempts to understand the status of the investigation and how multiple enquiries to police had gone unanswered.
The first update she had received from authorities in weeks came in a public city meeting on Tuesday evening as Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney discussed the case and said the department "has been investigating this case from day one as a homicide". Brackney, in a statement to the BBC, elaborated and said the department always treats any pending death case as a "potential homicide" so that crucial evidence is not lost as police wait on autopsy results. The department, though, had only previously described the case as a death investigation.
Tuesday's statement from Brackney said "we are conducting the investigation at the highest appropriate level while we await the medical examiner's findings", which would include an official cause and manner of death. The medical examiner's office said it would not comment on the pending case. Spivey last saw her daughter alive on 26 July, when Fortune had travelled from Mississippi, where she had lived for roughly the last decade, to Kentucky, where Spivey lives, for a family reunion.
The next time she saw her daughter - in a funeral home, days before her burial - she could barely look at her body. "I didn't look straight at her. Her daddy did," she said.
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