RULED SUICIDE
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Part Two of Three
This is the second installment in ROTWR’s three-part Special Report series examining how American institutions and media respond to violent death, and how that response changes depending on who died. Part One examined the reaction gap between comparably contested deaths. Part Two turns from who gets remembered to who gets believed.
Delta State University’s campus sits roughly fifty miles from the spot on the Tallahatchie River where searchers pulled Emmett Till’s body from the water in 1955.
On September 15, 2025, a faculty member found 21-year-old Demartravion “Trey” Reed hanging from a tree near the campus pickleball courts. A coroner’s initial examination found no lacerations, contusions, or broken bones consistent with an assault. Within days, the Cleveland Police Department said a state medical examiner’s autopsy was “consistent with the initial investigation,” ruling the death a suicide by hanging.
Reed’s family did not accept the finding. They retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump and commissioned an independent autopsy to review the state’s conclusions. Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson said the national attention the case drew reflected the state’s history of racial violence against Black Americans. Investigative materials were turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Attorney’s Office. Delta State’s public safety director called it “an isolated incident” with no ongoing threat to campus. Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell praised what he called the “quick work” of local police and said unfounded online speculation did not reflect “today’s Mississippi.”
Two months later, in Brookfield, Wisconsin, the pattern repeated with a different name attached.
THE SAME SEQUENCE
Torrance “Tory” Medley, 39, was found on November 13, 2025, near the Brookfield Hills Golf Course, kneeling with his feet on the ground and a strap around his neck attached to a tree branch, according to police. Within ten days, the Brookfield Police Department said there was “no indication of foul play,” citing the absence of other trauma and stating that Medley had been experiencing mental health challenges before his death.
Medley’s family disputed both the speed of that conclusion and the department’s handling of it. Attorney William Sulton, representing the family alongside the Milwaukee and Waukesha chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said police “rushed to judgment” and denied the family “routine investigative courtesies” that are extended in other kinds of death investigations. Marquette University historian Dr. Robert Smith, asked to comment on the case, said it was “absolutely fair to question how this person died,” citing what he called the heightened political moment around issues of race and bigotry. Medley’s sister, Shena Medley, wrote on social media that the family was pushing for “a thorough, transparent investigation” and had been met instead with a rushed label and silence.
Three months after that, in Cobb County, Georgia, 21-year-old Kyle Bassinga was found hanging from a tree on February 15, 2026, a day after witnesses saw him walk alone into a wooded area. Police ruled it a suicide with no signs of foul play. Cobb County Commission Chairwoman Lisa Cupid called the death “heartbreaking” while urging the public not to let online speculation outpace the investigation. A local resident, speaking to reporters at the scene, offered a blunter assessment shared by others in the community, saying, “Black men, especially in the South, are not hanging themselves from trees.”
Eight months before Reed, in Albany, New York, a Black man named Earl Smith was found hanging from a tree. His case drew a local vigil, a community fundraiser for his family, and comparatively little coverage beyond that. Even within a pattern of underattention, attention is not evenly distributed.
THE MOST RECENT NAME
On April 13, 2026, schoolchildren in Washington, DC, found 19-year-old Isaac Carlos Aguirre hanging from a tree limb on Quackenbos Street NW, within sight of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Fourth District station. Aguirre had recently moved to the city from Arizona. DC Fire and EMS attempted lifesaving measures. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said investigators found no indication of foul play and were treating the case as a suicide investigation.
Aguirre’s family traveled more than 36 hours to reach Washington. Organizers of a fundraiser for the family said police were slow to release information and that the family faced difficulty simply retrieving his body for burial. The DC Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Movimiento Migrantes DC held two vigils at the precinct itself, on the day of his death and again two weeks later. At the second vigil, one organizer connected the case to the pattern directly, saying, “When a young Latino child is found hanging lifelessly from a tree next to a police station, of course we will ask questions, and of course we will demand answers.” As of the most recent reporting available, the DC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has not released an official cause and manner of death.
Aguirre’s case has drawn local coverage and organized community response. It has not, so far, drawn the sustained national coverage that Reed’s or Medley’s did.
A DIFFERENT SHAPE OF THE SAME QUESTION
Nolan Xavier Wells was not found hanging from a tree. His case does not belong in the same category as Reed’s, Medley’s, Bassinga’s, Smith’s, or Aguirre’s, and this report does not place it there. But it raises a version of the same question these cases do: how much urgency and scrutiny a death receives, and from whom.
Wells, 18, a Black community college football player from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, disappeared on July 4 during a boat trip to Horn Island with a group of friends who were white. His friends returned to the mainland without him that evening. According to the family’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, Wells’s mother, not his friends, was the one who tracked his phone and alerted authorities. Crump has said the friends did not voluntarily disclose that they had Wells’s phone and keys. Wells’s body was found in the water near the island on July 6 or 7. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said there were no immediate signs of foul play and has treated the case as a probable drowning.
Wells’s family disputes that theory, saying he was a capable swimmer, and has commissioned an independent autopsy, funded in part by Colin Kaepernick. At a press conference, Crump invoked Mississippi’s history directly, saying, “This is the state where Emmett Till was lynched.” Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter has pushed back on the framing that his department is rushing to a conclusion, saying the investigation is following the evidence and that officials understand the “historical sensitivities” involved, but that the job is to respond to facts, not speculation. As of the most recent reporting, the cause of Wells’s death remains undetermined. Autopsy and toxicology results are still pending.
A DOCUMENTED PATTERN, NAMED
Civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson has spent years documenting cases like these. Her organization, JULIAN, published “A Crimson Record: Seven-State Modern-Day Lynching (MDL) Report, 2000-2025” this year, examining more than 100 cases across Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama. More than 70 of those cases, JULIAN concluded, meet the report’s definition of a modern-day lynching. Mississippi accounted for the highest number, with 19 documented cases, including a pattern JULIAN identified in Rankin County of Black men going missing from the same locations around the same dates, roughly every couple of years.
The report’s authors found a recurring investigative sequence across nearly every case they examined: premature conclusions, an absence of psychological autopsies, compromised crime scenes, and shoddy or evasive official reporting. In Alabama specifically, the report found that autopsy reports, investigative records, and police body camera footage are not automatically public, making outside scrutiny “nearly impossible unless the case attracts national attention.” Local newspapers there, the report found, often run sheriff’s office press releases rather than conduct independent reporting of their own.
That last finding describes something visible across every case in this report. National attention is not a given. It is a threshold that has to be crossed, case by case, usually by the people who loved the person who died, and it is not crossed evenly.
“I want to be clear,” Shena Medley wrote after her brother’s death. “We expect and demand complete transparency from the Brookfield Police Department. My family deserves answers. Tory deserves answers. The community deserves answers.”
Part Three of this series moves from individual cases to the system that produces them: what happens to people once they are in the custody of the federal government, and how long it takes anyone outside that system to find out.
Sources: ABC News (US — Reed case, autopsy findings, family response); WLBT (US — Reed ruling, Tindell quote, Cleveland Police statement); Yahoo News (US — Medley case, family statement, police findings); BOSSIP (US — Medley case, Sulton quote); WUWM (US, NPR member station — Dr. Robert Smith quote); Contraband Camp (US — Sulton “rushed to judgment” quote); BET (US — Bassinga case, community reaction quote); Level Man (US, community commentary outlet — Bassinga case); X/Mis Leading (US, social media — Earl Smith case, limited independent confirmation available); Daily Voice (US, local news network — Aguirre case, family and police account); Fight Back! News (US, advocacy outlet — Aguirre vigil, organizer quote); CNN (US — Wells case timeline); PBS NewsHour (US — Wells family statements); NewsNation (US — Sharpton and Crump statements, Sheriff Ledbetter response); BLK Alerts (US, community outlet — Wells case context, broader disparity data); Jill Collen Jefferson and JULIAN, A Crimson Record: Seven-State Modern-Day Lynching (MDL) Report, 2000-2025 (civil rights organization primary source — all statewide MDL figures and investigative pattern findings)
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
