The family of Otis Byrd, the 54-year-old man found hanging from a tree last month in western Mississippi, believes the hanging was not a suicide and is opening an independent investigation of the case, lawyers for the family said at a news conference on Wednesday.
The family has asked for NAACP participation in the case and as part of its investigation has hired the pathologist Michael Baden, who was also called to perform an independent autopsy of Michael Brown, the black teenager shot dead by a police officer last August in Ferguson, Missouri.
“At this point the family believes that it was not a suicide,” said Dennis C Sweet, a lawyer for the family, at an appearance in Jackson, Mississippi.
Byrd’s body was found hanging from a tree near his home in Claiborne County by state wildlife officers on 19 March. Thirty federal agents were dispatched to investigate the case as a potential lynching.
The FBI reportedly shared autopsy results with the family last month, but the results of the autopsy are unknown to the public. Sweet declined to comment on the conclusion of the autopsy shared with the family.
“At this stage I don’t believe we can go into it,” Sweet said.
Baden’s work will be hindered by the fact that Byrd was cremated, Sweet said. “He is disappointed that the body was cremated,” he said.
“They don’t feel they have all the answers they need at this point,” Sweet said of the family. “What the family wants to relay is that they do want to take legal action.” Sweet said his firm was working with the NAACP on the case. He said the family did not have plans to file a lawsuit.
“All everybody wants is a transparent answer to what happened,” another family representative at the news conference said. “As private citizens, to make sure all the information that was gathered is revealed.”
Byrd was found hanging by a bed sheet from a limb about 12 feet high, with his feet about two feet off the ground, and his hands were not bound, according to authorities.
Byrd was on parole after serving 26 years in prison for the murder of a woman during a 1980 robbery.
