lit a candle 22 Sept 2026i saw this pop up on my phone last night while i was half watching a movie and couldn't stop thinking about it, kept scrolling back to the article. four kids. she was trying to start a cleaning business, get things together, and that part got me more than anything else honestly, the wanting to build something small and normal after everything. i don't know her, never heard of her before this week, i'm just some guy in Colorado, but that detail stuck. edit: just saw she was only 29.
Their story
Tasia Fortune was a 29-year-old mother of four from western Kentucky whose death in Jackson, Mississippi, in August 2026 became a national story after her body was discovered hanging from a tree behind a vacant house. Her death was later ruled a homicide, and a man known to her was…
Tasia Fortune was a 29-year-old mother of four from western Kentucky whose death in Jackson, Mississippi, in August 2026 became a national story after her body was discovered hanging from a tree behind a vacant house. Her death was later ruled a homicide, and a man known to her was charged with her murder, a case that continued to develop into September 2026.
According to her obituary, Fortune was born on February 4, 1997, and grew up in the Marion and Powderly area of western Kentucky before, as a teenager, she ran away from foster care and made her way to Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived for the next decade. Her family and friends described her as intelligent and resilient. Her obituary noted that she had skipped a grade in high school and had been a competitive cross country runner, and that she held a lasting religious faith through difficult periods in her life. She was the mother of four young children, and her mother, Christy Spivey, said Fortune had been talking about starting a cleaning business and getting her life on track in the months before her death.
Fortune's body was found on the evening of Monday, August 3, 2026, in the backyard of an abandoned home in the 500 block of Road of Remembrance in Jackson. The Jackson Police Department said officers responded after neighbors reported discovering the body of an unidentified Black woman hanging in a tree. The Hinds County Coroner's Office publicly identified her as Tasia Fortune three days later. For weeks afterward, the Jackson Police Department classified the case as a death pending investigation while the Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office conducted an autopsy.
The case drew intense national attention in part because of Mississippi's history of racial violence and because Fortune's death followed two other tree hanging deaths in the state within the previous year, those of Trey Reed, a Black college student in Cleveland, Mississippi, and Cory Zukatis, an unhoused white man in Vicksburg, both of which were ruled suicides. Civil rights figures, including Bernice King, urged the public not to jump to conclusions while stressing that transparency was essential given that history. Fortune's mother said repeatedly in the weeks after the death that she did not believe her daughter had taken her own life.
On September 10, 2026, the medical examiner's office classified Fortune's death as a homicide. The following day, Jackson police arrested 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff, who Chief RaShall Brackney said had an association with Fortune, and charged him with murder. Ratliff pleaded not guilty and was denied bond at a court hearing on September 14. Police said the investigation remained active and that further arrests were expected, and news outlets reported in the days that followed that a second arrest had been made in connection with the case, though full details of that development were still emerging at the time of writing.
Biography adapted from News reports and the sources cited on this page; death reported by WAPT.
same, the cleaning business detail is what did it for me too