Suicide or Lynching? Mississippi Officials Insist Trey Reed’s Death Is Nothing Suspicious.

De’Martravion “Trey” Reed—21 years old, Black, not even a month into his freshman year of college—was found hanging from a fruit tree on the campus Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, just after 7 am on September 15. Within eight hours, campus police told the press there was “no evidence of foul play,” the coroner’s office declared no “visible injuries consistent with an assault,” and one official opined to the Mississippi Free Press that Reed’s hanging “was self-done.” As online speculation mounted that Reed had been murdered in a hate crime, the state’s autopsy report also ruled the death a suicide. In the police department’s press release announcing the findings, commissioner Sean Tindell praised the “quick work” of local officials, and condemned what he called “rumors circulating regarding [Reed’s] death.” In a follow-up statement, Tindell was even more blunt, saying,“We haven’t had a documented case of a lynching in decades. So when somebody jumps to that conclusion, I would believe that they’re just trying to get the clickbait and get you to come look at their stuff.”

When he finally got around to posting a social media message about Reed four days after his death, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves struck a similar tone. In a tweet labeling Reed’s death a “tragedy,” Reeves also criticized those allowing things like history and collective memory to cloud their thinking. “I know a lot of speculation from people who have no facts or evidence has dominated online conversations and even some national mainstream media outlets in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy,” the governor’s message stated. “It represents a sad state of affairs in today’s social media driven world….but it doesn’t represent today’s Mississippi!”

It all served to add to the nagging feeling that Mississippi authorities have been rushed in declaring Reed’s death an open-and-shut case. That hastiness was rendered more pronounced against the backdrop of unstinting coverage of the murder of Charlie Kirk, both nationally and by local Mississippi sources. (Reeves took just hours after Kirk was killed to post that he was “a great man” who “blessed America”; even with no suspect in that case, Reeves readily speculated that “the left” had engaged in “assassination and violence” and encouraged “righteous anger” in response.) In a state where trees once served as gallows for Black bodies, Mississippi authorities’ insistence that there’s nothing to see here, keep it moving, and seeming active discouragement of further investigation only provokes more questions.

Those questions start with the actions of state and local officials, who have offered conflicting and confusing accounts from the start. Reed’s grandfather J.B. Reed told a local Fox affiliate that officers first told him his grandson was found “in his [dorm] room unconscious.” Grenada County Sheriff’s Department Chief Deputy Ricky Williamson countered that version of events in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press. The outlet reported that he and other investigators had not “specified where [Reed] had been found when they informed the family of Trey Reed’s death”—a declaration that, even if true, seems like a glaring omission. Attorney Vanessa J. Jones, who is representing the Reed family, held a press conference the day after Reed’s body was found during which she informed media that Reed’s family learned of his death from news reports the day prior. Jones claims that an ongoing lack of communication with the Reed family by authorities has resulted in the family’s “getting all of their information secondhand through the news,” reports the Mississippi Free Press. Delta State University Campus Police chief Mike Peeler has told reporters that there is video evidence, although authorities have refused to specify if the moments leading up to Reed’s death are captured in the footage. The family has not seen it.

“If this young man was on the campus of Delta State University with all these cameras and all this modern technology, from the moment he left his dorm room or entered the campus, there should be surveillance of all his actions,” Jones said, according to the Mississippi Free Press. “That’s what we want.”

Nationally known civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who also represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and many other victims of fatal racial violence, declared that he has joined the family’s legal team. In a September 19 press release, Crump announced that Colin Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights Camp Autopsy Initiative”—which covers the costs of independent autopsies for people who die in police custody or other suspicious conditions—will pay for a second independent autopsy for Reed. The move underscores how little faith Reed’s family has in the determinations of local and state authorities. That skepticism is shared by Jill Collen Jefferson, a Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer and Mississippi native who has spent years documenting the failures of the state’s death investigations.

“Mississippi’s medical examiner system is notoriously flawed,” Jefferson told me. “I’ve seen these medical examiners miss some pretty big things. And often, if there are no injuries, they’ll say that there’s no evidence of foul play.”

Jefferson notes that candidates for county coroner in Mississippi need only a high school diploma and, if they are elected, a five-day, 40-hour training program. In 2018, then–Washington Post columnist Radley Balko wrote that Mississippi’s death investigation system was the country’s worst, citing its “antiquated, easily corrupted” and “underfunded” coroner system. Equally troubling is the Reed family’s contention that they could not confirm the coroner’s report that there were no signs of injury because they were only permitted to view the body “from the neck up.”

There is something disconcertingly familiar about all this. Seventy years ago, the beaten and broken body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was found just 30 miles from where Reed’s body was discovered on Delta State University’s campus. From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to 1950 in Mississippi, 654 Black people were murdered by white racial terror violence—“hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, [or] beaten to death”—more than any other state, according to the Equal Justice Institute. In 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported at least eight suspected lynchings of young Black men and boys in Mississippi since 2000, nearly all of which local officials ruled as suicides.

“Suicide being a cover for lynching is not something that’s new,” Jefferson told me. “It goes back centuries. It has been a joke at times. There were cases where it was it was obvious that somebody had been lynched—people would have even attended the lynching—but then if they were asked about it, ‘Oh, yeah. I saw him get a rope and string himself up!’ A joke kind of situation.”