# JPD Calls Tasia Fortune's Death a Homicide. The Paperwork Comes From a State Office.

> Jackson's police chief told the City Council her department has treated the case as a homicide since Day 1. Four weeks after the autopsy, the family still has no written cause of death, because that document is issued by a state agency the city does not control.

*General News · By Jackson Wire Staff · September 11, 2026*

Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney told the City Council on Sept. 8 that her department has investigated the death of Tasia Fortune as a homicide from the beginning. The state medical examiner has still not said how Fortune died, and the family has nothing in writing.

Fortune, 29, a mother of four, was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house in the 500 block of Road of Remembrance on Aug. 3. Brackney said an autopsy was performed about four weeks ago. "To date, we have not received the outcomes of that autopsy," she told council members, according to the Clarion Ledger.

The gap between those two facts is the story. A police chief can declare a homicide posture. She cannot produce the document that tells a mother what happened to her daughter. Under Mississippi law, that document comes from the State Medical Examiner's Office, which sits inside the Department of Public Safety, not the city of Jackson (Miss. Code Ann. § 41-61-55).

The statute matters because it explains the silence. The State Medical Examiner is the official empowered to amend a death certificate and to sign one where an attending physician will not (Miss. Code Ann. § 41-61-63). County coroners, who are elected and often have no medical training, cannot release findings the state office has not issued. Brackney made that point directly: "The coroner cannot give any information to the family that the medical examiner has not given them."

Fortune's mother, Christy Spivey, wrote a letter that Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes read aloud during the meeting's closing minutes. "I have no more answers from Day 1 of this investigation," she wrote. "I'm asking for your assistance in my daughter's 'death investigation,' as they are calling it." Spivey said the coroner's office had told her the death was a homicide but had not put that determination in writing.

This is not a new problem for the state office. An Associated Press review found the Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office was waiting on roughly 1,300 autopsy reports dating back as far as 2011, about 800 of them involving homicides. Mississippi's backlog was described at the time as the worst in the country. The office has never been accredited.

Brackney said she has contacted state officials overseeing the office, including Director Dr. Christy S. Simmons, to ask when JPD can expect a ruling. She also pushed back on the idea that the family has been cut off, saying investigators remain in frequent contact with Spivey and Fortune's estranged husband. She disputed claims that the examiner who handled Fortune's autopsy was the same one involved in the Nolan Wells case on the Gulf Coast.

The case has drawn national attention because of where and how Fortune was found: a Black woman hanging in a state with a documented history of racial terror lynchings. Stokes said the questions are spreading well beyond Jackson. "We cannot sweep this idea under the rug," he said. He has written to Mississippi's two U.S. senators and to U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger seeking federal involvement.

Authorities have identified a person of interest, Terence Anderson, who was arrested in August on an unrelated charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. WLBT reported that detectives said Anderson had been interviewed about Fortune's death, denied involvement, and told police he had argued with her. He has not been charged in connection with her death.

Council President Vernon Hartley asked Brackney to bring the council an update. That request puts a city body in the position of tracking a state agency's timeline, which is a mismatch the city cannot fix on its own. The council can pass a budget by Sept. 15 and set millage, but it cannot order an autopsy report.

What the council can do is keep asking, in public, on the record. The next scheduled opportunity is the budget vote, and the Fortune case is not on that agenda. Whether it becomes a standing item, the way the city's water and public works crises did, depends on whether the family's unanswered letter keeps getting read into the minutes.

For now, Spivey's offer stands. She told the council she would travel from Kentucky to Jackson to be heard. "I will attend anything I need to attend," she wrote. The question is whether anyone with authority over the medical examiner's office will be in the room when she does.

---
[The Jackson Wire](https://www.thejacksonwire.com/) · [Read on the web](https://www.thejacksonwire.com/article/jpd-calls-tasia-fortune-death-a-homicide-but-the-paperwork-comes-from-a-state-office)