The FBI is looking into the hanging death of black North Carolina teenager months after it was ruled a suicide, as his mother asked, “Was my son lynched?”
Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old high school football player, 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 that an FBI agent will probe the case.
“We are thankful for the decision by the FBI to investigate — thoroughly — the death of my son,” the boy’s grieving mother, Claudia Lacy, told the Daily News. “I do not believe he committed suicide. Too many questions remain, too many answers not given.”
The mom pointed out that her son was dating a 31-year-old white woman.
“Lennon loved life and was looking forward to life,” she added.
The teen’s body was spotted by a witness around 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 29, hanging from a swing set in a local trailer park. Local authorities said the teen killed himself, but his mom says she knew they were wrong the moment she saw his body zipped into a body bag.
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 interracial relationship and attended an interracial 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 laceless 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.
The white shoes found with him went missing before the Medical Examiner got the body. They have not been found.
When the witness called 911, operators told her to take the body down.
His hands weren’t bagged to preserve any DNA from a possible attacker.
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.”
With News Wire Services
