NAACP Bummed: Mississippi ‘Lynching’ Turns Out To Be A Suicide
By Brian Anderson, March 20, 2015.
When authorities found a dead black man hanging from a tree in Mississippi on Thursday, certain segments of the black community were sure is was a racially motivated killing. I mean, come on. Black guy. Hanging from a tree. Mississippi. It had to be a lynching, there’s simply no other explanation. Well, except suicide that is. A federal official connected to the case has stated that all of the evidence points away from homicide.
Otis Byrd was last seen on March 2 when he dropped a friend off at a casino in Vicksburg, Miss. On March 8, Byrd’s family notified authorities that the 54-year old man was missing. On March 19, he was found dead, hanged from a tree by a bed sheet around his neck.
There are some other interesting things to know about Byrd. From The Clarion-Ledger:
According to the Mississippi Department of Corrections, Byrd spent a little over 25 years in prison for the Feb. 1980 murder of Lucille Trim in Claiborne County. Records show he robbed her of $101. He was convicted of capital murder on October 28, 1980, and was paroled Nov. 2, 2006.
Here’s the conspiracy theory: Byrd was lynched as retaliation for the murder of Lucille Trim. But wait, it gets more intriguing:
Trim is the mother of Martha Rainville, the first woman in the history of the National Guard to serve as a State Adjutant General when she became Adjutant General in Vermont in 1997. Rainville currently lives in Virginia and is married to the Hon. Paul McHale, a former congressman from Pennsylvania and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Yes, Martha Rainville, the daughter of Byrd’s murder victim, is white and presumably her mother was as well. A black man that killed a white woman is found dead, hanging from a tree. This was not lost on the NAACP. As reported by The Root:
The Byrd family and the state NAACP are calling for a full investigation into the death. “Considering Mr. Byrd’s body was found hanging from a tree, we are calling on federal authorities to immediately investigate to determine whether his death is a result of a racial hate crime,” Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP, told the Clarion-Ledger.
The NAACP wrote a letter asking the DOJ to get involved in the investigation.
Because any time something unfortunate happens to a black person the federal government assumes it must be racism, the Justice Department committed 30 agents to the investigation. Unfortunately, one day into the investigation, the story falls apart.
From The Daily Beast:
On Friday, a federal law-enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times that preliminary autopsy results point to suicide as the cause of death for the black Mississippi man found hanging from a tree.
The NAACP must be bummed. First, the “terrorist” attack on their Colorado office turns about to be a guy with a firecracker getting revenge on a tax preparer, and now their big fundraising drive lynching is nothing more than a suicide. Who knew it was this hard to find racism?
http://downtrend.com/71superb/naacp-bummed-mississippi-lynching-turns-out-to-be-a-suicide
