Approximately 30 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have descended upon this small Southern town to investigate the death of a black man whose body was found hanging from a tree.
However, two federal law enforcement officials on Friday said that preliminary indications suggested that the man might have committed suicide, and the local sheriff said that there was no indication that racism had played a part in the death.
“I don’t have any reason to even think that,” said Claiborne County Sheriff Marvin Lucas, an African-American who was recently president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch.
However, officials emphasized on Friday that it was too early to draw definitive conclusions about the cause of death of the man, Otis James Byrd, 54, a Claiborne County resident who had been missing since March 2. State wildlife agents who were participating in a search for Byrd found his badly decomposed body hanging from a tree in the woods near his home just outside of town on Thursday morning.
At a news conference in front of the county courthouse in Port Gibson on Friday afternoon, Don Alway, special agent in charge with the US FBI, said the state medical examiner had confirmed that the body was Byrd’s.
Alway described a vigorous effort by officials from the FBI and the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to determine a cause of death.
He said the investigators “are out trying to identify friends and family that can gather additional information that might help us paint a picture as to the cause of death of Mr Byrd.”
As the extrajudicial killing of blacks by Southern whites was often accomplished by hanging in past decades, the discovery of Byrd’s body touches on some of Mississippi’s worst fears. When Byrd was found hanging, the state conference of the NAACP requested that federal authorities intervene to help determine whether he had been the victim of a hate crime.
Alway said that a preliminary report on the cause of death would not be completed until next week. The agents were searching the house Byrd rented, as well as a storage facility, to help piece together his story, Alway said.
The two federal officials who suggested in interviews that the death might have been a suicide spoke on the condition of anonymity, because the investigation was still in progress.
Byrd’s family filed a missing persons report with the sheriff’s office six days after his disappearance. According to the Mississippi Department of Corrections, Byrd was convicted of murder for killing a woman in February 1980 during a robbery. He was released on parole in November 2006. Lucas said he was a quiet presence in town, collecting an unemployment check and taking on odd jobs.
A small crowd gathered at the courthouse as officials updated reporters. A few people in the crowd held posters saying “Black Lives Matter.”
Willie Smith, 66, who said he taught Byrd eighth-grade social studies, was suspicious, given that Byrd’s victim in the 1980 killing was white.
“Normally when a young man, black, goes to prison for killing a white person, they don’t return,” he said.
However, Lucas urged caution in arriving at conclusions. From what he had seen, he said, it was “fifty-fifty” as to whether Byrd had been killed by others or had killed himself.
“I don’t want this to be another Ferguson, Missouri,” the sheriff said, adding, “Let’s wait until the autopsy comes in.”
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