NAACP and Family Lawyers Are Looking Into Lennon Lacy’s Hanging Death

BY: DION RABOUIN, the Root

On Monday night, lawyers Al McSurely and Allen Rogers met with Claudia Lacy and Larry Walton to discuss the next step in the investigation into what McSurely called “the probable murder” of Lacy and Walton’s 17-year-old son, Lennon Lacy.

While the parents of boys like Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis waged uphill battles hoping to see their sons’ killers put behind bars, the biggest obstacle for Lennon’s family is the fact that police in their small North Carolina town insist that their son took his own life.

In August, Lennon was found hanging by his neck from a swing set in the middle of a trailer park near his home in Bladenboro, N.C. Authorities quickly ruled out foul play in his death and have since labeled it a suicide. But Lennon’s parents have met the reports with disbelief, as have many of Bladenboro’s black residents.

McSurely, an attorney working with the NAACP’s North Carolina chapter and Lennon’s family, told The Root that he and the family are looking to find out who killed Lennon and that they “have a rough idea of who some of those people might be.”

“What we’re trying to decide now, after talking to several witnesses who have come forward to us, is how we’re going to play that with the DA,” said McSurely, adding that the family may take the case to the FBI or U.S. Department of Justice. “It’s not like Ferguson or Trayvon’s case in the sense that here, we don’t know who shot him. In this case, somebody strangled him and took his body over there and … hung him up there in the middle of the night.”

Lennon’s autopsy was released last week by Chief Medical Examiner Deborah Radisch, and all signs pointed to suicide. But far from assuaging his family’s concerns, the autopsy, like every part of the investigation so far, has made them more suspicious.

Radisch noted in the autopsy’s “summary and interpretation” section that Lennon had attended the funeral of his uncle the day before his death, indicating that Lennon “had been depressed over the recent death of his uncle.” This finding confused and upset the family because they say it has no relevance to physical and forensic-analysis findings.

“An autopsy cannot determine whether a person was depressed—you can’t tell that from physical signs, so why was it put in the report?” Lennon’s brother, Pierre Lacy, told The Guardian. “That’s a red flag to me—it’s not factual.”

The family also noted that missing entirely from the autopsy was the fact that Lennon was wearing white shoes, with the laces missing, that were a size-and-a-half too small for him. His family insists that on the night of his death, Lennon was wearing a pair of black Jordan sneakers that he had recently purchased for the start of school. Though the autopsy carefully notes that Lennon was wearing “black socks, a pair of navy blue nylon sports pants, a navy blue nylon short-sleeve shirt and multicolored boxer shorts,” it makes no mention of his shoes.

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If Lacy’s death was a homicide, it may be a modern-day lynching.

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