Jackson police arrested a 51-year-old man Friday in the homicide of Tasia Fortune, a Black mother of four found hanging from a tree last month.
Jacques Ratliff was taken into custody as he walked down Capitol Street, mere hours after officers served search and arrest warrants tied to the Aug. 3 killing. The bust came one day after state medical examiners officially reclassified Fortune’s death as a homicide, shifting the trajectory of a case that has rattled Mississippi.
Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney addressed reporters with measured caution about the breakthrough. “That arrest today is an important development in this investigation, but it is not the conclusion,” she said. Brackney warned that additional arrests are pending and stressed that the active probe remains far from closed.
“We understand the questions, and the desire for answers, given Mississippi’s history,” Brackney added, noting that officials are approaching the sensitive case with what she called a “global lens.”
Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, wept upon learning of Ratliff’s capture. “I just started crying and told them ‘thank you, thank you, thank you,'” she told reporters.
Spivey said investigators have not shared a motive with the family and have not indicated whether DNA evidence played a role in identifying Ratliff. She said she did not know the suspect personally. The family remains in “disbelief” and “shock,” she added. “We still don’t have a lot of answers,” Spivey admitted.
Spivey last saw her daughter, 29, on July 26 at a family reunion in Kentucky before Fortune headed back to Mississippi. “She was better than I had seen her in a long time. She was at peace,” Spivey said.
Fortune, whose full name was Tasia Sidea Fortune, had spent a decade in Jackson after relocating from Marion, Kentucky. Relatives describe her as deeply religious, bright and athletic. Her obituary notes she was “intelligent and talented, having skipped her junior year of high school.” She was also a standout cross country runner. “But no matter what, she never lost her faith in God,” the obituary reads. “She leaves a powerful legacy of resilience, rooted deeply in her unwavering faith.”
Fortune’s body was discovered hanging from a tree in the backyard of an abandoned home in Jackson. The grim discovery has drawn renewed scrutiny to hanging deaths in Mississippi, a state with a brutal history of lynching. Fortune’s case marks the third such death in less than a year. In two previous instances — the deaths of 21-year-old Delta State University student Trey Reed and Cory Zukatis, a homeless man in his thirties — authorities ultimately ruled both suicides. Those determinations did little to quell suspicion in a region where Black communities have long distrusted official narratives around suspicious deaths.