FBI Will Investigate Lennon Lacy’s Hanging Death in North Carolina

By Carla Murphy Dec 15, 2014

At the family’s request and ahead of an "awareness" march this past Saturday meant to drum up attention, the FBI has agreed to investigate the hanging death of a black 17-year-old high school football player. Lennon Lacy was found this August hanging from a wooden swing set in the middle of a trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina. Lacy’s family had requested that the feds step in after local officials ruled his death a suicide and closed the case within five days. The family, aided by the local chapter of the NAACP and bolstered by findings of their own private forensic investigation, strongly disagrees.

"We don’t know what happened to my son three months ago, and suicide is still possible. But there are so many unanswered questions that I can’t help but ask: Was he killed? Was my son lynched?" Lennon’s mother Claudia Lacy writes in a Guardian op-ed.

Lacy’s ex-girlfriend, according to CNN, was a 31-year-old white woman (age of consent in the state is 16*) and a local Klu Klux Klan rally had taken place in a nearby town in the weeks before his body was found. Some speculate that Lacy’s interracial relationship with an older white woman could be motive in this small North Carolina town. 

*Post has been updated since publication to include North Carolina’s age of consent.