A Mississippi judge set a $5 million bond on Monday for a third man charged in the death of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman whose body was found hanging from a tree in August. Police revealed that Fortune was killed before her body was placed in a tree behind an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi's capital city.
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The discovery of Fortune's hanging body raised fears reminiscent of historical lynchings in Mississippi, a state with a notorious history of racial violence. Some officials had called for a federal civil rights investigation, but a Jackson police detective later stated that the scene was "staged."
Judge Jeffery Reynolds remarked on the situation, saying, "People justifiably didn’t know if we had a killer on the loose who might hang people for racial reasons." He described the act as "heinous" and expressed the shock it brought to the community of Jackson.
