OLD CONTENT
Developing story (and very good TYT commentary - please listen to the whole thing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf-SFtuZm4YThis becomes even more suspicious when we note a second similar recent death in the same region:
sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/13/palmdale-hanging-victorville-suicide-investigation-black-suspicious-death/
In neighboring San Bernardino County, authorities there said they were still investigating the cause of death of 38-year-old Malcolm Harsch, whose body was found hanging in a tree near the Victorville city library. A sheriff’s spokeswoman, Jodi Miller, told Victor Valley News foul play was not suspected in Harsch’s death but the man’s family said they were concerned it will be ruled a suicide to avoid further attention.
In a statement to the publication on Saturday, the family said a few people who were at the scene told them there was blood on his shirt but no indication of a struggle. They said Harsch didn’t seem to be depressed and had recent conversations with his children about seeing them soon.
“The explanation of suicide does not seem plausible,” the statement said. “There are many ways to die but considering the current racial tension, a black man hanging himself from a tree definitely doesn’t sit well with us right now. We want justice not comfortable excuses.”
A serial lyncher?
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More hangings:
www.yahoo.com/news/hanging-deaths-of-black-men-raise-fears-and-echoes-of-an-ugly-era-in-history-151101900.htmlAs protests against police brutality and racist violence have rocked the country over the past month, the deaths of four Black men by hanging has put Black Americans on edge, raising ugly reminders of the lynchings that terrorized African-Americans during Jim Crow and the civil rights era.
Robert Fuller, 24, was found hanging from a tree in a public square in the early morning of June 10 in Palmdale, Calif., a city 60 miles north of Los Angeles with a population of 156,000. His death was initially ruled a suicide by county officials, but the investigation has been reopened in response to demands by hundreds of protesters.
“We want to find out the truth of what really happened. Everything that they’ve been telling us has not been right,” Diamond Alexander, Fuller’s sister, told the Los Angeles Times. “My brother was not suicidal. My brother was a survivor.”
Last week, officials announced that the finding of suicide had been rescinded.
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Suspicion about Fuller’s death was heightened when his half-brother, Terron Boone, was killed by sheriffs’ deputies in what police described as a wild shootout exactly one week later. Authorities have not established a connection between the two incidents. In addition to the local investigation, federal authorities and the state attorney general’s office also announced they would be looking into Fuller’s death.
But Fuller isn’t the only Black man who’s been found hanging in a public place in the past few weeks. A Black teenager in Texas and a 27-year-old Black man in a New York City park were also found hanging this month.
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There is a long history of investigations into the deaths of Black Americans being peremptorily closed by findings of suicide and never properly investigated. Writing in the Washington Post, author Stacey Patton noted a number of examples, including the case of Ab Young, a Mississippi man who was lynched in 1935.
“He fled to Tennessee and was captured by a mob that dragged him back to Mississippi, where he was hanged in a schoolyard, his body peppered with bullets,” wrote Patton. “Though his lynching was advertised in advance, a reporter and photographer showed up to document the event and nearly 50 people were involved, a coroner’s jury ruled that Young’s death was a suicide.”
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There have also been investigations launched into the appearance of nooses across the country. On Sunday evening, one was discovered in the garage stall of Bubba Wallace, the only African-American driver in the top tier of the NASCAR circuit.
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Nooses were also discovered in Oakland and Harlem this month. After Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf ordered a hate crime investigation into the nooses, an effigy was found hanging in the same area. Schaaf called it “a deliberate and vile attempt to traumatize and divide Oaklanders.”
The incidents renewed speculation that followed the deaths of a number of activists who were involved with the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo. Two men were found shot in burned-out cars, three died of apparent suicides and one died of an overdose. Danye Jones, the 24-year-old son of organizer Melissa McKinnies, was found hanging from a tree in her yard in the fall of 2018. While a medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, McKinnies posted to Facebook that “they lynched my baby” and has maintained that her son was murdered.
“My husband, who is ex-military, and my brother both carefully examined the knots in the sheet, which they described as ‘intricate Navy knots,’ something Danye would never have known how to tie since he was never in the military or even the Boy Scouts,” McKinnies said last year. “If you were going to kill yourself, would you create these challenging knots? Plus, it was not a sheet from our home.”
Black leaders and organizations have called into question the legitimacy of suicide determinations by law enforcement before. In 2014, the North Carolina branch of the NAACP questioned the suicide ruling in the death of Lennon Lacy, a Black 17-year-old who was found hanging from a swing set in a largely white trailer park. The chapter handed the federal prosecutor a letter formally asking the FBI to join the investigation, raising questions about “quick call” suicides in which “suspicious deaths of black men are quickly classified as ‘suicides.’”
Nicholas Creary, associate director of the Center for Diversity & Enrichment at the University of Iowa, questions law enforcement’s recent suicide declarations, as the incidents suggest examples of modern-day lynchings.
“This does not seem like anything new,” Creary told Yahoo News. “It’s sort of a contemporary twist on a very old tradition of lynching.”
Creary added that through his previous research following lynchings in the past, there would be a formal inquest to determine the cause of death, which almost inevitably ended with the finding of suicide, or “this person met his death at the hands of parties unknown.” The most recent hangings align with these findings.
The family of a transgender woman, Titi Gulley, also believes that Portland, Ore., police dismissed her death because they saw little value in the body of a Black, queer, homeless person. Her body was found hanging from a tree in Rocky Butte Park on the afternoon of May 27, 2019. The Portland Police Bureau ruled the death of Gulley, 31, a suicide. Her family insists the police never considered any other possibility.
“[The police] didn’t ask any questions,” Kenya Robinson, the mother of the victim, who was named Otis Gulley at birth, told the Portland Mercury. “You saw a Black man in a tree who was in a homeless camp, and you wrote him off as being a transient homeless, and wrote it off as a suicide.”
This case has now been reopened after Gulley’s family presented evidence they collected showing that there may have been foul play involved.
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The number of hanging deaths by Black men doesn’t quite add up for Burkhalter.
“I’ll be frank, Black people very rarely go out and hang themselves publicly,”
What is really going on?
Further context:
www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/22/black-victims-hanging-suicide/Police say deaths of black people by hanging are suicides. Many black people aren’t so sure.
Even the official cause echoes the history of the lynching era
The historical seasons have changed, and once again, America’s trees are bearing a strange and bitter fruit — dead black bodies.
In less than one month, six black people have been found hanging from trees, in California, Georgia, New York, Oregon and Texas. Authorities say that all of these deaths appear to be suicides, with no signs of foul play. But family members of the deceased, protesters and activists, and some scholars of anti-black violence are intuitively suspicious about those conclusions. Rumors are also swirling on social media that these deaths are lynchings, with Twitter users saying things like: “With sound body and mind, I’m here to tell you right now, if my body is found hanging from a tree, I did NOT commit suicide, I was murdered.”
These incidents are happening at a time of nationwide racial upheaval — when people are already on edge and suspicious about police accounts of their encounters with black people. Tree hangings evoke traumatic memories of America’s grisly history of unpunished lynchings of thousands of black adults and children between 1880 and 1968.
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So it is quite difficult for many black folks to believe that within a matter of weeks, six black people chose to hang themselves by the neck, in public, from trees, while the fire of racial politics continues to blaze.
Kenya Robinson, the mother of Otis/Titi Gulley, 31, who was found hanging from a tree in Rocky Butte Park in Portland, Ore., on May 27, says she believes her son, who used the pronoun “she,” was murdered. Robinson says Portland police didn’t ask any questions about Gulley’s death and have treated her concerns with indifference.
“You saw a black man in a tree who was in a homeless camp, and you wrote him off as being a transient homeless, and wrote it off as suicide,” Robinson told the Portland Mercury. She had to demand an autopsy, which ultimately ruled Gulley’s death a suicide. She also reportedly told police that other homeless people said they witnessed Gulley being murdered and hung to make it look like a suicide, and that someone has video evidence.
The families of Malcolm Harsch and Robert Fuller, who were found hanging from trees in Southern California within 10 days and 50 miles of each other, are also denying police claims that the deaths were suicides. (On social media, attention is also focusing on the fact that Fuller’s brother, Terron Jammal Boone, was killed in a shootout with sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles County last week.)
The historical context is impossible to overlook as the number of similar deaths increases.
“The numerous accounts of a deceased black man found hanging in a tree are a horrific reminder of our country’s history. We are in a moment with parallels to the era of lynching that should cause us great suspicion of any rush to label the cases as suicide,” says Thomas Foster, author of “Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men” and a professor of history at Howard University.
During the lynching era, it was not uncommon for the deaths of black men to be ruled as suicides to cover up murders by white mobs and police officers. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, based at Northeastern University, has been compiling a database of lynchings and other forms of anti-black murder. Jay Driskell, a consulting historian for the project, says the trend of declaring black lynchings to be suicides stretches back to the 1930s. So far, he’s found around two dozen cases from 1930 to 1956; in each case, a public figure, police officer, coroner or jury deemed the deaths to be suicides and not lynchings or extralegal murders.
There was Ab Young, a farm laborer from Slayden, Miss., who was killed on March 12, 1935, after being accused of killing a state highway worker. He fled to Tennessee and was captured by a mob that dragged him back to Mississippi, where he was hanged in a schoolyard, his body peppered with bullets. Though his lynching was advertised in advance, a reporter and photographer showed up to document the event and nearly 50 people were involved, a coroner’s jury ruled that Young’s death was a suicide.
“One of the first ways that lynchers and police who murdered blacks got exonerated was through the coroner,” Driskell says. Back then, coroners did not have to have medical training. “Once in a while, they would use suicide as a way to not do their job, to cover up for police officers they knew or community members they wanted to protect from prosecution.”
A few years after Young’s murder, the 19-year-old soldier Felix Hall went missing from his barracks at Fort Benning, Ga. On March 28, 1941, his body was found hanging over a ravine in the woods on the base. His hands and legs were tied behind his back with a wire. The NAACP tried to get the Department of War to investigate, but military officials said that death was a suicide even though a military doctor who had examined Hall’s body within two weeks of when it was found had said it was a homicide and put that on his death certificate.
James Johnson was beaten to death in a jail in Florence, S.C., on Dec. 5, 1939, after being pulled over by police around 2:30 a.m. Johnson had a good amount of lumber in his car, and officers suspected he had stolen it. Johnson struggled physically with police during his arrest. Once in his cell, a 14-year-old boy who was in custody witnessed the arresting officers beat Johnson and use one of his shoestrings to hang him. But despite the wounds on his head and bruises on his body, the coroner’s jury exonerated the officers by stating that “ ‘he butted his head deliberately against the bars of the cell. He cut himself from the glass of a broken milk bottle and tried to drown himself in a toilet on the cell block,’ ” Driskell says, reading from the file. “Even though the coroner says that the blow to his head from police could have been the one that killed him, the jury chose to believe that Johnson hung himself from a shoestring. The jury basically made up a story that this guy is crazy, suicidal and does all this damage to his body before killing himself.”
In perhaps the most bizarre case, Shadrack Thompson was found hanging on Sept. 15, 1932, in Linden, Va., after being accused of attacking a white farmer and his wife. Thompson vanished, and his body was found two months later. He was burned; dismembered body parts had been distributed to members of the community as celebratory souvenirs, and his head was put on display 25 miles away, in Warrenton. The official verdict on Thompson’s death was suicide.
There’s no way to know how black family members reacted to those murders that took place so long ago, Driskell says, because their voices are lost to history and don’t show up in records from the NAACP or the Department of Justice investigations. But “there’s a whole world of rumors of lynchings that are hard to dispel because so many of them occurred well beyond the range of news reporters or police records. Lynchings were a shared communal terror that got passed down from generation to generation like a bruise on a memory.”
That’s why the current deaths are unsettling — even though police say they’re not suspicious.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” says civil rights activist and theologian Ruby Sales, who ticks off the names of other recent cases authorities ruled to be suicides that she has investigated since 2008: Billy Joe Johnson, Chavis Carter, Roosevelt Champion, Lennon Lacy, Denzel Curnell, Kendrick Johnson, whose organs were missing, Kindra Chapman, and Wakiesha Wilson and other black women from Birmingham to California who allegedly hanged themselves in jail cells.
Of course, given the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic disaster, it is possible that rates of suicide have spiked. The pandemic has also brought massive economic dislocations in black communities — which were already in dire straits financially. “So it’s not outside the realm of possibility,” Driskell says. “But it’s plausible that some, if not all, are contemporary lynchings.”
These recent incidents do follow the historical pattern of displaying black bodies publicly to intimidate black communities. “Think of Michael Brown, whose body was left on the street for four hours as evidence of black people’s powerlessness. The spectacle of displaying the black corpse is meant as a deterrent to political action and resistance,” says Tommy Curry, author of “The Man-Not” and professor of philosophy and black male studies at the University of Edinburgh. “It says to the subjugated population that we can kill your men without consequence so your cause, your resistance, your attempt to overthrow the current rule is futile.”
The days when hundreds or thousands of white people show up to witness the barbaric torture and killing of black people at lynchings are over, Driskell says. But as the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement has taken off, there’s also growing resentment from members of angry white supremacist fringe groups, some of them with badges. There’s bound to be violent reactions.
Congress is still considering bipartisan legislation that would make lynching a federal crime — but it can’t even act on this largely symbolic move because Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has argued that the language in the bill is too broad and the law may be wrongfully applied.
No wonder black communities are skeptical of the official story, after centuries of ongoing racist terrorism and government failure to prosecute our serial murderers. Here in 2020, those pastoral scenes of the gallant South are still with us. Black bodies are a strange and bitter crop.
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