On August 3, the body of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune was found hanging from a tree in the backyard of a vacant property in Jackson, Mississippi. Neighbors reported Fortune's body to police, and the investigation says she was likely in the yard for three or four days.
Fortune's family said from the outset that they did not believe Fortune committed suicide. She was a mother of four and family said she was "at peace" and "loved life." They also rejected theories that Fortune's death was racially motivated, telling authorities and the media they just want answers.
The body of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune was found Monday night, Aug. 3, behind an abandoned house on Road of Remembrance. Six days after the Jackson Police Department responded to the scene and launched an investigation, Fortune’s mother, father, and sister spoke with ABC News on Sunday.
“Tasia loved living life, like there’s no way, no way that she took her own life,” her mother, Christy Spivey, said.
Fortune was a mother of four. Her father, Antonio Fortune, said her children were her priority and that is one of the reasons he believes she did not take her own life.
“She was a good mom,” Antonio Fortune said. “She had her ups and downs, but she loved her kids, she loved her family, and she knew her family loved her.”
Terrence (or Terence) Anderson, 65, was soon named as a person of interest. He's the father of Fortune's 5-year-old son, and police believe Anderson and Fortune were in a relationship. Anderson denied the relationship and denied involvement in Fortune's death. He was arrested on an unrelated charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm, and his bond was set at $250,000.
The autopsy report is still pending, and Anderson has not been charged in connection with Fortune's death, yet.
Despite this, CNN is trying to use Fortune's death to stir up racial tensions and imagery of Jim Crow era lynchings.
CNN: "The imagery of a black person in the South hanging from a tree evokes painful memories"
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 12, 2026
PS: Her black boyfriend was arrested
I wonder why CNN left that out 🤔 pic.twitter.com/7a6QNisPsC
"A lot we still don't know here, but obviously the raw image of a black person hanging from a tree in the American south evokes a very painful history," said correspondent Omar Jimenez.
The last widely recognized lynching in the United States happened in 1981. But CNN is trying to make this horrific crime even worse.
The boyfriend in question: pic.twitter.com/ALB82fzMRr
— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 13, 2026
Weird how this is being glossed over.
Isn’t that the ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ guy? pic.twitter.com/2gQk51LOqs
— David Dean (@DavidFrankDean) August 12, 2026
Sure looks like it.
They showed the tree.
— Patrioloop (@Patrioloop) August 13, 2026
They showed her race.
They somehow forgot to mention her Black boyfriend got arrested.
CNN doesn’t report news. They manufacture narratives.
Yes, they do.
And if the televised report was bad, it's got nothing on the online story, which tries to tie Fortune's likely murder to two other hangings.
The CNN article is disgusting. It drops the “two others found” line without saying that both were ruled suicides. https://t.co/iVS6C1Ste9 pic.twitter.com/SL17KwV5uK
— memetic_sisyphus (@memeticsisyphus) August 12, 2026
One of those victims, 21-year-old Demartravion Reed, was found near the Delta State University campus in Cleveland, Mississippi, last September. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office performed an autopsy and ruled that suicide was the manner of death.
The second victim was actually a white man named Cory Zukatis. He was homeless, and his body was found in a wooded area near the Ameristar Casino in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the same day Reed's body was found. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office performed the autopsy on Zukatis, too, and ruled it a suicide.
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