JACKSON, Miss. — The Hinds County Coroner’s Office on Thursday identified the woman found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in west Jackson as Tasia Fortune, 29. Days after her body was discovered, the most basic questions about her death remain unanswered — and the Jackson Police Department is declining to release its incident report.
Officers located the body of a then-unidentified Black woman at 9:05 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 3, in the 500 block of Road of Remembrance, a mostly Black neighborhood in west Jackson, according to a statement the department released that evening. Neighbors discovered the body and contacted police; it is not clear how long it had been there.
Hinds County Coroner Jeremiah Howard said Fortune’s body was sent to the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of her death. No autopsy results had been released as of this writing.
Authorities have not said whether they suspect foul play. Jackson police declined to release the incident report from the scene. “This is an active investigation,” department public information officer Tommie Brown said by email.
That official silence has not stopped calls for outside scrutiny. Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes sent a letter to Baxter Kruger, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, requesting a federal investigation into Fortune’s death. In the letter, Stokes characterized the death as a murder — a characterization that is his alone; no law enforcement agency, coroner, or medical examiner has made any finding about how Fortune died.
Fortune lived in Jackson; her family is in Kentucky. Her sister, LaToni Fortune, has spoken publicly to Mississippi Today. An aunt, Etta Avolio, started a GoFundMe campaign with a $3,000 goal to cover burial costs, which had raised more than $1,600 as of Thursday; Avolio confirmed the fundraiser’s legitimacy to the Mississippi Free Press. Some aggregated reports describe the family as “demanding justice” and suggest they may pursue legal action, but no attorney representing the family has been publicly identified.
The discovery of a Black woman hanging from a tree carries particular weight in Mississippi, a state with one of the nation’s most extensive documented histories of lynching. It also comes less than a year after the death of Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a 21-year-old Black student found hanging from a tree on the Delta State University campus in Cleveland, Mississippi, on Sept. 15, 2025. Reed’s death was ruled a suicide following an autopsy; his family sought an independent autopsy. The Reed case drew viral claims of lynching before any official findings were released — a caution that applies here, where the cause and manner of Fortune’s death remain genuinely unknown.
What is known is limited: a woman is dead, her name is Tasia Fortune, her family is raising money to bury her, and nearly a week after her body was found, the public record consists of a brief police statement, a coroner’s identification, and a pending autopsy. The Jackson Police Department has been asked to explain the basis for withholding the incident report; the state medical examiner’s office has not provided a timeline for the autopsy.
Drafted by News Observed Editorial AI, human reviewed and published.
Based on reporting by Bakersfield News Observer.
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