Maryland’s chief medical examiner has officially ruled that a Black man found hanging from a tree in Prince George’s County on Sunday morning died by suicide.
The ruling came Monday, just one day after the body was discovered high in a tree in front of an industrial business on the 9300 block of D’Arcy Road in unincorporated Upper Marlboro, WTOP News reported.
Police and fire crews arrived around 7:55 a.m. Sunday. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. Because of the height of the body and the need to wait for the medical examiner, many drivers passing by saw the grim sight. Photos quickly spread on social media. Almost immediately, users began calling it a lynching.
County Executive Aisha Braveboy, a Democrat, held a press conference Monday and pleaded with the public to stop.
“Don’t ask for clickbait and use this tragedy to get followers or to get likes, because this is a tragedy,” she said. “A person is dead. He’s dead, and he took his own life.”
Braveboy added that officials “will tell the truth” and she would not entertain “theory, innuendoes and folks who just want to spew, quite frankly, untruths.”
The Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined the man died of suicide by hanging with no other signs of trauma.
Hellbound and Down 