Tasia Fortune: Suspect Arrested in Hanging Death in Mississippi

For more than a month, Tasia Fortune’s family has waited for answers after she was found hanging from a tree outside a vacant house in Jackson, Mississippi.

This week, authorities arrested a suspect. Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney said at a news conference Friday that police had secured search and arrest warrants for Jarques Ratliff, 51, and arrested him when they encountered him walking on the street. Brackney said the man had an “association” with Fortune but would not elaborate on their relationship.

The state medical examiner’s office determined on Sept. 10 that the death was a homicide, Brackney said, allowing police to execute the warrants they already had on hand.

“This case remains active, and additional arrests will be pending,” he said.

“Jackson Police Department has been investigating this case from day one as a homicide until we hear otherwise from the medical examiner’s office,” Brackney said at a city council meeting on Sept. 8.

The young mother’s body was discovered on Aug. 3. Neighbors in the mostly Black Jackson neighborhood contacted police after finding her body, though it is not clear how long it had been there.

At the time, the Jackson Police Department said that officers “located the body of an unidentified Black female” at the 500 block of Road of Remembrance, a mostly Black neighborhood, at 9:05 that night.

The Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office conducted an autopsy on Fortune on Aug. 11, but police have not yet received the results.

Ratliff did not appear in Hinds County jail records, and court records were not accessible online. It couldn’t immediately be determined whether he had a lawyer, and a message was left for the public defender’s office, according to the Associated Press.

A family keeps her memory alive

Christy Spivey, Fortune’s mother, told ABC News her daughter was a loving mother of four who was not behaving strangely when she last saw her in Kentucky. 

Spivey is trying to keep her daughter’s memory alive.

“The last time I spoke with her was like, you can watch, morning, 7:00. We had that family reunion. July 26th was the last time I’ve seen her,” Spivey told local news outlet WJTV. “And on the 27th, she asked me to send her, picture all the pictures we had. She wanted to do a collage.”

“She did not do this to herself,” Spivey said. “I know my daughter, and she did not do this to herself.”

Fortune’s aunt, Etta Avolio, started a GoFundMe to help raise funds to cover burial expenses and final arrangements. The GoFundMe, which has a $3,000 goal, had raise Mississippi Free Press.

“Tasia Fortune was a beloved daughter, sister, and friend whose passing has left her family devastated and heartbroken,” Avolio’s fundraiser says. “During this lifetime, families go through ups and downs, and right now Tasia’s loved ones are facing one of the hardest moments they have ever known. Tasia was a strong-minded, big-hearted, vibrant young woman whose life was taken at just twenty-nine years old. Her loss has deeply shaken everyone who knew and loved her, and her family is now trying to begin healing while also facing the painful responsibility of saying their final farewells.”

“The family also wants others to know that justice will be served, and they hold firmly to their faith, believing that God is on their side as they walk through this heartbreaking loss,” Fortune’s aunt adds.

Ward 3 Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger’s office on Wednesday asking for assistance, WLBT reported.

Mississippi authorities have investigated other high-profile 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. Crump also represents the family of Nolan Wells.

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.

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