Whispers of lynching cloud hanging inquiry in Temple Terrace, Miss.

/
hangingsmap.jpg
  • Damien Johnson was found hanging in a tree. Police say the death was a suicide; the man's friends and family suspect something much worse.
It's been 11 weeks since a worker in an office park found a horrifying sight in the neighboring woods: a black man hanging from a tree. Police say they think Damien Johnson took his own life. But Johnson's family and an assortment of other people - including a former Temple Terrace City Council candidate - say they don't trust what the police are saying. They suspect he was murdered. The specter of a black man found hanging conjures dark images from America's history of lynching. Because of that past, "it's hard for an African-American to take at face value the reports handed down by police personnel," said Ben Chaney, brother of civil rights icon James Chaney, a voting rights worker killed in Mississippi in 1964. Chaney said he is working to form a group called the National Coalition Against Lynchings to collect information about suspicious hangings in the South. Critics of the Damien Johnson investigation are seeking answers they may never get. On the night of Sept. 21, Johnson left his boarding house near the University of South Florida. The 24-year-old's body was found the next day, five miles away at Tampa Telecom Park off Fletcher Avenue. A two-day police investigation concluded that Johnson climbed onto a limb 15 feet up, tied knots around the branch and his neck with a bedsheet, and dropped toward the ground. Detectives and medical examiners say they found no signs of a struggle or bruises on Johnson's 6-foot-5, 170-pound frame. Temple Terrace Deputy Police Chief Patricia Powers defends the department's investigation and says officers kept an open mind to the possibility of a lynching. But "all the facts supported a finding of suicide," she said. Family and friends say Johnson was not the person police portray. They describe a struggling but ambitious father-to-be who had reasons to want to live.  [more]