Early autopsy suggests suicide of black man found hanging in Mississippi

Preliminary results from an autopsy on the body of Otis Byrd, found hanging from a tree in rural Mississippi, strongly suggest the death was a suicide rather than a homicide or other foul play, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.

“It looks like that,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because authorities are planning to make an announcement at a later news conference. But he said, “that’s where they are headed” – with a finding of suicide.

The official declined to give further details, only adding that suicide is emerging as the apparent cause of death at this time.

The death has shocked the area and the nation partly because there is no more powerful image in the South than the body of a black man hanging from a tree, the symbol of white racists’ refusal to accept the outcome of the Civil War and to continue their illegal fight for supremacy. Though the practice reached its peak during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the image continues to haunt, explaining in part why the case of Byrd has captured the nation’s attention.

The body of Byrd, 54, was found Thursday after he had been missing for two weeks, hanging from a tree near Byrd’s home in Port Gibson.

Claiborne County Sheriff Marvin Lucas said the body was fully clothed, including boots and a skullcap, when it was found hanging from a 15-foot locust tree in a clearing about a quarter-mile off the road where Byrd had rented a house in recent months.

“I want to be sure that justice is done,” Lucas said before the autopsy findings were revealed. Lucas is black, as is the mayor, city clerk and five of six city aldermen.

Byrd’s father, Willy Shorter, 83, said he was told by authorities that they had found his son’s body.

Lucas said he hoped forensic evidence would be able to determine whether Byrd’s death was a homicide.

“The crime lab is going to help us a lot to determine how his neck was broke and whether there were any other wounds,” Lucas said.

While rural Mississippi was known for racial strife and lynchings years ago, Lucas said, “I’m 57 years old and that’s the first time I’ve seen anything like that. I’ve never heard of a lynching in Claiborne County.

“In the South, we do have a history of whites lynching blacks. But this is 2015,” Lucas said.

Derrick Johnson, head of the state chapter of the National Associtation for the Advancement of Colored People, said the group wanted to be certain the death was not racially motivated.

“We want to make sure it was not a racial hate crime,” he said. “We cannot stand by in 2015 and watch a lynching, if in fact that’s what happened.”

A lynching is any illegal effort by a mob, usually associated in the South with white supremacist groups enforcing Jim Crow laws and mores that separated the races and were designed to keep blacks in an inferior position.

Estimates vary, but the best numbers show that there were 4,742 lynchings between 1882 and 1968. Of those, about 3,400 were lynchings of blacks and 1,297 were of whites, mainly allies of civil rights efforts, according to Mark Potok, senior fellow of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights advocacy group. Mississippi has had the most lynchings, 581.

The manner of death usually, but not always, involved hanging. Civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, including James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were shot to death for working on voting rights. Viola Liuzzo was shot to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama after the Selma march in 1965.

Byrd’s body was found about seven months after the body of Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old black man, was found hanging from a swing set in North Carolina. That case was initially ruled a suicide but the FBI recently said it was looking into the death.

The body of Frederick Jermaine Carter, 26, was found in 2010 hanging from an oak tree in the predominantly white North Greenwood area of Leflore County, Miss. That death was ruled a suicide, though the family questioned the decision.

There have been a handful of similar cases in the last decade, Potok said, but none have turned out to have been racially motivated killings, despite “real fears through the black communities around these deaths.”

“There have been rumors the men were dating white women, that police were covering up,” Potok said. “But there has never been a shred of evidence that these suicides were anything other than suicides.”

The discovery of the latest body stunned this small rural town southwest of Jackson, where Byrd had worked as a riverboat employee.

The Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks located the body in the woods near Roddy Road.

About a quarter-mile down a dirt road, investigators had strung yellow police tape around several trees in a grassy clearing. One of the locust trees that fit the sheriff’s description appeared to have had a portion of a sturdy vine removed near the ground where someone might have stepped, and an area beneath it was crawling with bugs and stank of decay.

Johnie Baker, 87, who owns the 40-acre plot and leases it out to his nephew for hunting, said he does not suspect foul play.

“I don’t think it was repercussions for what happened in the past,” Baker, who is white and grew up nearby in a poor sharecropper family, said of Byrd’s death. “That would be my last conclusion – that it’s race-related.”

According to court records, Byrd was convicted of murder in 1980. The victim, according to news accounts from the time, was a 55-year-old convenience store operator, Lucille Trim. She was shot four times during an armed robbery. Byrd was paroled in November 2006, according to the Clarion-Ledger newspaper.

Lucas told reporters that there was no evidence linking the latest death to the events of 1980.

Shorter, Byrd’s father, said authorities told him his son “was dangling in the tree, up in the tree hanging by his neck.”

“I don’t want to see my son,” Shorter said. “I want to remember him the way I always saw him. I don’t want to remember him hanging from the tree.”

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(Muskal reported from Los Angeles, Hennessy-Fiske from Port Gibson and Serrano from Washington.)

This story was originally published March 20, 2015 at 7:07 AM with the headline "Early autopsy suggests suicide of black man found hanging in Mississippi."