Autopsy room (Photo by Gilles Corona)
By April Ryan
The autopsy for Trey Reed is underway. The 21-year-old student at Delta State University was found dead hanging from a tree on the campus. There are questions about whether it was foul play or suicide.
The state’s report will be completed in 24 hours. However, Civil Rights Attorney Ben Crump confirms the parents of Reed will perform an independent autopsy in Mississippi after the current procedure is complete. It has yet to be determined if the family will use someone from Mississippi or outside of the state to perform the independent postmortem examination. Delta State’s initial contact with the family about Reed’s death was that he was found dead in his dorm room. Reed’s grandfather contradicts the information, saying the family found the truth from social media that he was dead, hanging from a tree. Crump is on the ground in Mississippi, working in collaboration with civil rights groups, including the Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP, and Southern Poverty Law Center, “trying to get to the truth,” as he confirms, “the rumors are rampant.”
Compounding the issue, another man, 36-year-old Corey Zukatis, was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area in Vicksburg, Mississippi, near a casino. The family of Zukatis confirms he was homeless at the time of his hanging death. Both cases are under investigation. Democratic Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, is calling for a full federal investigation following the hanging deaths of two black men in Mississippi, long considered the most racist state in the nation. Brian Fair, Interim President and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is also calling for a thorough investigation into the circumstances that led to the deaths, saying, “the tremendous outcry from the local community over concerns surrounding the loss of these two should not go unaddressed.”
Fair also says the optics “of these two deaths immediately evokes the collective consciousness of those who are deeply aware of Mississippi’s troubled past. These events remind us how inequity continues to endanger lives.” According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America documents more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the United States during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. Also, according to their website, EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950. On March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law. The federal law says any act where someone conspires to commit a hate crime that results in death, serious bodily injury, or significant harm can be prosecuted as a federal crime. The law carries up to 30 years in prison plus fines.
The question now is, will this Trump administration recognize and/or utilize this law if there is a lynching conviction in these cases?