Jackson police are investigating the death of a Black woman who was found hanging in a tree behind a vacant home in Mississippi’s capital city on Monday night.
The Jackson Police Department, which has not named the woman, said in a statement on Monday evening that officers “located the body of an unidentified Black female” at the 500 block of Road of Remembrance at 9:05 p.m.
The Clarion Ledger reported late Tuesday that Hinds County Coroner Jeremiah Howard had confirmed that the woman was hanging from a tree and that the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office will perform an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death.
Police have not named the woman, nor said whether they suspect foul play.
Mississippi authorities have investigated other cases involving tree-hanging deaths in the past year.
In September 2025, a group of student athletes found 18-year-old Delta State University student Trey Reed, who was Black, hanging from a tree on the campus in Cleveland, Mississippi. His death raised fears of a racially motivated murder, considering the history of hundreds of lynchings of Black men that occurred in Mississippi in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Ben Crump, the attorney who represented Reed’s family, cast doubt on the official ruling that Reed’s death was a suicide and helped obtain an independent autopsy. Last week, the Mississippi Free Press reported for the first time that Reed’s family said his girlfriend had received text messages from his phone the night before his body was found in which he threatened to hang himself. The family still has questions, though. They said they are waiting on the final independent autopsy results, but have not been able to reach Crump since January.
On the same day that Trey Reed was found last year, police in Vicksburg, Mississippi, found the body of Cory Zukatis hanging in a tree. Misinformation spread connecting that case to Reed’s, with some falsely claiming that Zukatis, a homeless white man whose dog had recently been taken from him, was also Black. Authorities later ruled his death a suicide, too.
