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A woman whose daughter was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Mississippi, has said she is more disturbed — not less — after police revealed they believe she was killed before her body was placed at the scene. Christy Spivey, the mother of Tasia Fortune, told the BBC she had "more questions now than what I did before," saying the explanation offered so far has deepened rather than answered the family's concerns.
Fortune, a 29-year-old mother of four, was found hanging from a tree at an abandoned home in the city in August. The image prompted immediate and widespread alarm in a majority-black city, where residents and civil rights advocates drew on Mississippi's long and painful history of racial violence and extra-judicial lynchings to fear that the discovery represented something other than an ordinary homicide.
On Friday, the Jackson Police Department said medical examiners who conducted Fortune's post-mortem had determined that her death was a homicide and that both the discovery site and the hanging itself had been staged. Authorities have not disclosed her exact cause of death, nor have they shared any potential motive for the alleged staging — leaving the family's most basic question, of what killed her, unanswered. Three people have been arrested in connection with the case, all of whom are black, but police have not explained how those suspects were connected to Fortune.
Detectives told a court on Friday that the killing was thought to stem from a drug-related dispute. A detective said Fortune may have been killed over allegations that she had stolen drugs. Spivey rejected those allegations, though she acknowledged that her daughter had struggled with addiction. "Tasia has an addiction — had — an addiction problem. She was trying to get better," she said, adding: "If she still was doing drugs, which I'm sure she probably was, she still didn't deserve to be done like that. Nobody does."
Spivey described how, when officers first contacted her with the news that her daughter had not died by hanging, she reacted with a sense of relief. "When the police called me, I started crying and thanked them and felt a little more at peace than I had before," she recalled. "I just hope they've got the right person/people." She said she had been comforted by the idea that at least her daughter had not died in such a gruesome manner. But she added that when fuller details emerged this week, describing the death as a staged homicide, she was "starting to break down."
Her frustration centers on the gaps in the account. Spivey said: "Still no cause of death, no date of death — nothing. What actually killed her?" She said she had been hoping to feel more relieved, and that police had still not specified how the three suspects were connected to her daughter, nor why her death was allegedly staged in this particular way. The reversal of hope into renewed anguish illustrates how a correction meant to bring clarity has instead amplified uncertainty for a family that has already spent weeks without a full accounting of what happened.
The case has unsettled Jackson well beyond Fortune's relatives. Her death left the local community on edge and prompted lawmakers to call for federal investigations, reflecting broader anxiety about how such deaths are investigated in a state with a documented history of racial terror. The claim from police that the scene was staged raises questions of its own: investigators have said the hanging was arranged to resemble something else, and the case has now shifted from a possible lynching narrative — one that carried its own historical weight — to a claim of a premeditated effort to mislead. Critics have questioned whether the speed and clarity of that determination match the pace of the original investigation.
Spivey has said she is upset at how the police handled the investigation. The mother's account of being called, thanking them, and only later learning of the alleged staging has been described as a sequence in which reassurance gave way to devastation — an experience she said left her feeling that the answers she was given did not hold together.
Fortune was homeless at the time of her death, according to her mother, though she typically stayed with a rotating circle of friends and relatives. That instability, combined with her age and the presence of four young children, places her death in the context of a widening housing and addiction crisis that disproportionately affects Black women in the United States — a group Spivey says her daughter was trying to leave behind.
Her four sons, aged between one and seven, are now living with a mixture of family and friends. Two of the children are in the process of being adopted. Spivey said she was fighting to keep her daughter's children close while pressing for a fuller accounting of the circumstances of her death.
The BBC has previously reported that a Black woman found hanging from a tree in Mississippi was dead before her body was "staged," and separately that a mother was demanding answers weeks after the discovery. Both pieces of reporting documented a community still seeking clarity. Now, with police having named a drug-related motive and three arrests announced, the questions Spivey raises have shifted from what happened to a 29-year-old mother of four, to whether the account given so far by authorities is complete — and whether it will be enough.
For Spivey, it is not yet. "I have more questions now than what I did before," she said — a refrain that captures a family left, for the moment, without either an explanation or a resting point.
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