Jackson police have charged 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff with murder in connection with the death of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman found hanging from a tree in the backyard of an abandoned home in Jackson, Mississippi, on 3 August. Police Chief RaShall Brackney said further arrests are expected as the investigation continues.
The break in the case came after the state medical examiner's office ruled the death a homicide on a Thursday evening, which let police act on warrants they were already holding. Officers arrested Ratliff after encountering him walking on a street. He is a Jackson resident, according to Hinds County jail records, and was due to appear in Jackson Municipal Court by Monday morning. Brackney said Ratliff had an "association" with Fortune but declined to give details or a motive. She stressed the arrest was "an important development" but not the conclusion of an active case that has drawn media attention far beyond Mississippi.
Fortune's mother, Christy Spivey, said she was certain her daughter had not taken her own life, and described the family's shock when police told her of the arrest. She said investigators have not shared whether DNA evidence led them to Ratliff, whom she says she did not know.
Family and an obituary from Tucker Funeral Home in Central City, Kentucky, sketch a harder, fuller picture of Fortune's life than the circumstances of her death. She skipped her junior year of high school, ran cross-country at a competitive level and was, by her family's account, a woman of deep faith. Her childhood was turbulent: her parents, a mixed-race couple, faced racism and violence in Crittenden County, Kentucky, before she was born, and Fortune spent part of her youth in foster care and group homes before running away to Mississippi, where she lived in Jackson for a decade. She struggled with homelessness in recent years but had been talking about starting a cleaning business and getting her life on track. She leaves behind four children.
This is a developing criminal case rather than a travel story, but it touches a city many visitors pass through on Deep South road trips, and the intense local and national attention around it is worth knowing about if you are heading to Jackson or central Mississippi in the coming weeks. The core facts, for now: one man charged, the case officially a homicide, and police saying plainly that more arrests are coming.