The FBI is following up on a death that involved the hanging of a
black North Carolina teenager months after it was ruled a suicide.
According to NYdaily:
Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old high school football player who was dating
a 31-year-old white woman, was found hanging from a swing set in
Bladenboro, a small town where racial tensions still run high.
His family and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People have called the death suspicious for months. On Friday, Bladen
County District Attorney Jon David said Friday that an FBI agent will
probe the case.
"Was he killed? Was my son lynched?" his mother, Claudia Lacy, asked
in a Friday op-ed in the Guardian. "It's hard to think that in 2014,
with a black man in the White House, such a thing could have happened
in the United States."
Lacy's family said lingering racism remains an issue in Bladenboro, a
small town that is 80% white and 18% black.
"Black people don't walk late at night, because they're afraid of not
making it home," his brother, Pierre Lacy said.
The NAACP also suggested the area's racial tensions — and Lacy's white
girlfriend — played a part in the hanging.
"He did have an inter-racial relationship and attended an inter-racial
church and people in that community raised their dislike of that,"
Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina's NAACP, told
the Guardian last month.
Lacy's family last saw him on Aug. 28.
The 17-year-old who dreamed of playing in the NFL was getting ready
for the next day's football game and decided to go for an evening run.
He never came home.
The next day, police found Lacy hanged by a dog leash and a belt on a
playground outside of a trailer park. He was wearing lace-less shoes
that were a size and a half too small for him, his family said. The
belt around his neck was not his own, they claimed.
Four days later, investigators ruled the death a suicide.
"For those four days, the police didn't once come to my house, they
didn't look inside Lennon's room — they still haven't to this day.
They didn't ask to see his cell phone so they could track his calls,
they didn't ask me what clothes he was wearing the night before he
died," his mom wrote in the Guardian.
Detectives suggested Lacy was depressed.
"How do you psychologically evaluate a dead person?" his brother
Pierre Lacy asked. "He was just too excited for football for me to
believe that he would end himself."
Days after Lacy was buried, his grave was desecrated, further raising
his family's suspicions.
Activists said they just want a thorough investigation into Lacy's death.
"There seems to be a rush to suicide," Barber said. "If Lennon Lacy
was white and was found hanging in a predominately black trailer park
that has known to have some drug involvement and other things, we just
don't believe it would be this quick rush to say it was a suicide."
The family hopes the FBI probe could be the detailed investigation
they have been waiting for.
"We demand the truth. Tell us what happened to Lennon Lacy," Claudia
Lacy wrote. "Tell me what happened to my son."
This definitely doesn't sound like suicide to me. What's up with
America and all these racial beef? Taking us back to the stone age...
