Police Say These Deaths are Suicides, Many People Aren’t So Sure
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A memorial for Robert Fuller sits in Poncitlan Square next to Palmdale City Hall, Cali. in June 2020. Associated Press Watonga Republican
In less than one month, six black people have been found hanging from trees, in California, New York, Oregon and Texas. Authorities say that all these deaths appear to be suicides, with no signs of foul play. Family members of the deceased, protesters and activists and some scholars of anti-black violence are intuitively suspicious about those conclusions.
The body of 24-year-old Robert Fuller was found June 10 in a tree near Palmdale City Hall. Malcolm Harsch, a 38-year-old Black man, was found hanging from a tree on May 31 in Victorville, just 44 miles away from Palmdale. A day before Fuller was found, Dominique Alexander, 27- year-old, was discovered in the same manner in Fort Tyron Park in Upper Manhattan. In Spring Texas, a teenager that has not been named was found in the parking lot of Ehrhardt Elementary School. Houston police found a Hispanic man hanged outside a store in the community of Shady Acres. The body of Otis “Titi” Gulley, 31, a homeless black man who identified as a woman, hanging from a tree in Rocky Butte Park, according to the Portland Mercury, Oregon.
These incidents are happening at a time of nation wide racial upheaval, when people are already on edge and suspicious about police accounts of their encounters with black people. Tree hangings evoke traumatic memories of America’s grisly history of unpunished lynching of thousands of black adults and children between 1880 and 1968. African Americans do commit suicide, of course, though the rate is 60% lower than for whites, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“It is very uncommon for young black men to commit suicide, let alone by hanging,” said Raymond Winbush, a psychologist since 1976 who has treated hundreds of black men and boys and is the director of Morgan State University’s Institute for Urban Research in Baltimore, Maryland. The American Association of Suicidology reports that firearms are the predominant method of suicide among African Americans, regardless of sex or age, followed by suffocation by plastic bags or gas inhalation.
The Department of Justice and the FBI announced June 15 they will be reviewing the hanging death of Fuller, Harsch and the two men in Houston.
Lakeria Kelley can be reached at Intern@WatongaRepublican.com