Mother demands answers, weeks after black woman found hanging from Mississippi tree

Spivey last saw her daughter alive on 26 July, when Fortune had travelled from Mississippi, where she had lived for roughly the last decade, to Kentucky, where Spivey lives, for a family reunion.The next time she saw her daughter - in a funeral home, days before her burial - she could barely look at her body."I didn't look straight at her. Her daddy did," she said. "I kind of looked from the side."Spivey remembered their last conversation. "She was talking about, you know, maybe even coming home," she explained.Fortune's death has left the community concerned that racial violence in Mississippi could be on the rise again. And in the absence of concrete details about the case, their suspicions are left to fester.Fortune's death was the third incident in Mississippi in less than a year where police found someone dead and hanged from a tree.The other two bodies - one black male, one white - were discovered in September 2025, on the exact same day.Both were ruled a suicide, though the mother of one of the deceased - Trey Reed - contests those findings.Fed-up residents have launched an online petition, which has gathered more than 50,000 signatures, for an independent investigation into...