When you walk into a death scene and see someone hanging from a tree, it would be easy to assume you already know what happened. But as a death investigator, that’s exactly what you cannot do. In this episode, I’m talking about the death of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, a mother of four who was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi. Investigators now believe Tasia was already dead before her body was suspended and that the scene was staged. Her death has been classified as a homicide, although her exact medical cause of death had not been publicly released when I recorded this episode.  I’m going to walk you through this scene the way I would have approached it as a forensic nurse death investigator. What would I photograph? What would I look for around the tree and on the ground? Does the ligature make sense? Could she have reached the suspension point? What can lividity tell us about where her body was positioned after death? Are there injuries that don’t fit the scene? Could her clothing, shoes, DNA, phone records or surveillance footage tell us that she had been somewhere else? And this case demonstrates something I learned very quickly doing this work: your job isn’t to decide what the scene looks like. Your job is to determine whether the physical evidence supports what it looks like.  Sometimes one piece of evidence that doesn’t fit is the piece you need to pay the most attention to. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 00:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Mattson. 00:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. 00:24 Do I have some stories for you. Are you ready? Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I’m so glad that you’re here to join me again. 00:37 Anyway, I wanna talk about the hanging that wasn’t the cause of death. Most of y’all know I am Julie Matson, registered nurse, forensic nurse, and retired forensic nurse death investigator. 00:52 Today, I wanna talk to you about a case that immediately caught my attention, and the reason is because it shows exactly why you can’t walk into a death scene and look at one obvious thing and then decide automatically that you know what happened. 01:09 So, when most people hear that someone was found hanging from a tree, automatically your mind goes to suicide, and most people would. I understand why. 01:22 You see a body hanging, and your brain wants to automatically connect the dots. But as a death investigator, I don’t get to do that. 01:31 The position of the body tells me just that, how I found the person, but it does not automatically tell me how that person died, and there’s a big difference. 01:42 Now, that brings us to 29-year-old Tasia Fortune. Now, I don’t know if y’all have heard this story. Tasia was a mother of four. 01:52 She was African American female, found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi. Now, this happened on August 3rd. 02:02 Because of where she was found and the way her body was positioned, this case immediately generated fear and questions and national attention. 02:13 But as the investigation developed, authorities actually revealed something incredibly important. Investigators actually believe that Tasia was already dead before her body was placed in the tree. 02:25 And so according to testimony from a Jackson police detective, this hanging had been staged. And cases like this are always interesting to me. 02:36 But today, I wanna talk to you a little bit about what happened to Tasia, and I also want to approach this the way that I would have approached it working a death scene. 02:47 If I walked into a scene and saw somebody hanging, I wanna let you know, what would I be looking for? What would make me start questioning suicide? 02:58 And what could tell me that this person died somewhere else and was actually moved? And what findings might tell the forensic pathologist that the person was already dead before they were suspended? 03:13 So, this was the fun part of my job, to kinda put the puzzle pieces together. Because when you work with death investigation, you learn pretty quickly that things are not always what they look like. 03:25 So, let’s talk a little bit about her being discovered. Tasia was found behind a vacant home, and this was in the 500 block of Road of Remembrance in West Jackson. So again, we’re in Mississippi. 03:44 Now, right away, that location would make me start asking questions. 03:50 It doesn’t really mean because suicide couldn’t have happened there, because people die in all kinds of locations of suicide, but I still wanna know, like, why she was there. 04:01 Why was she behind that abandoned house? Did she have some connection to that property, or had anyone seen her there before? Did she walk there? Was she brought there? W- was there a vehicle there? 04:17 Why was she there? Was she alone? Most importantly, is it actually where she died, or is this just where somebody left her body? 04:26 So that distinction is huge in death investigation because we talk about, and I know I’ve talked about this before with y’all, primary and secondary scenes. 04:37 So many deaths have two scenes, and the primary scene is gonna be where the fatal event occurred. Now, the secondary scene is somewhere the body, or other evidence was moved afterwards. 04:51 So, investigators in Tasia’s case now believe that she was killed somewhere else before being brought to the location where her body was actually discovered. 05:02 So, if I learn that, it’s gonna change the entire investigation. 05:09 When I first go to a scene