Nolan Wells, Daniel Erving, To’nea Miller, Demartravion “Trey” Reed, Tasia Fortune, Tyler Smith, Demetrius Fleming, Juliana Umba Nzita, Rasheem Carter, Torrance “Tory” Medley, Dennoriss Richardson—these are only some of the names of Black men and women who have either disappeared or been found dead under mysterious circumstances across the United States in recent years. And as more and more news reports of these types of deaths surface, calls for justice have amplified from social media users, community leaders, and organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF).
“Thinking about the image, the brutal image of a Black person hanging or dead under seemingly suspicious circumstances. That’s not an image that exists isolated from the present. Rather, it invokes a history of racialized terror, and it contributes to this collective unease that Black people and Black communities have been facing for centuries,” LDF attorney Alyssa Gordon told theGrio. “And given that history, we believe that it’s incredibly important that every suspicious incident is thoroughly and independently investigated in every single case to make sure that the truth is uncovered, addressed, and these families are made whole as much as possible.”
And to do so, the Legal Defense Fund has called on Congress and the United Nations to conduct these investigations. This week, the LDF submitted letters to both entities urging officials to take immediate action in examining the growing number of suspicious deaths of Black people across the United States.
“It’s been 250 years since the United States became a new nation, and one thing that has not changed throughout all this time is the persistent devaluation of Black lives,” Gordon noted. “in recent years, there’s been more and more reports of Black people found dead under suspicious circumstances, a number of deaths, including hanging from trees, and what we’re seeing here is an apparent indifference from state authorities, local authorities, and federal authorities. So this is not only an affront to the families of these victims, but to the American people at large.”
“To that end, it is important that federal resources are invested to conduct a rigorous inquiry to ensure that the past is not prologue. The past is not the present — and to get to the truth of what’s happening, we really need our federal government and international bodies to act. But we’re just not seeing the level of momentum that’s necessary to address the scope of the problem,” she continued.
The letters call on Congress to create a congressional commission and ask the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism and Independent Expert Mechanism to advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement to conduct thorough and unbiased investigations into the series of suspicious deaths of Black individuals across the country. Despite the existence of studies like JULIAN’s “Crimson Record,” which found 70 modern-day lynching cases in the South and the growing number of cases of Black people being found hanging from trees and dying suspiciously, no federal actions or investigations have been made into what has become a disturbing pattern. Through Congress and the UN’s investigations, the LDF hopes these unbiased probes will produce data that prove the influence of racial bias in these cases.
“We need to concretely be able to show and statistically be able to show that racial bias is at work and it’s skewing the investigations and the numbers. Once we create that as our foundation, we can then capitalize on that. Now that we know that this is true, we would be able to recommend remedies in terms of how law enforcement can change the way that they classify these deaths and how they investigate these deaths. We could create model legislation that could be used in states across the country to militate against this from occurring. But it’s just really important to get the unbiased data first because that would be able to inform later solutions.”
In the letter addressed to Congress, LDF president Janai Nelson urged that the findings of the Congressional commission be made public. Making a similar request to the UN, the organization also asked that “the U.N. Independent Expert Mechanism to advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement to evaluate whether American law enforcement is failing to investigate these deaths due to racial bias, and if so, recommend remedies.”
“When domestic institutions fail, it is the responsibility of our international bodies to come in and investigate because we need unbiased investigations that are not tainted by the racialized history of America’s past and America’s present, and because of that, it is essential not only that we bring in these federal resources, but that we bring in international resources as well,” Gordon shared explaining the decision to submit a request to the UN. “It’s not an either/or; it’s a both/and. We are calling for as many resources to be used as possible to help address this horrific issue that just continues to happen.”
Though the letter references the ongoing investigations into the deaths of individuals like Wells, Erving, and more, Gordon explains that the LDF’s request does not hinder nor create any preliminary conclusions in these cases, but rather amplifies the nuances of these cases.
“What we are seeing is growing evidence that racial bias in law enforcement, in medical examination, things like that, have skewed the results of suspicious deaths to where a lot of medical examiner offices are actually classifying what should be a homicide as suicides for various reasons,” she explains citing a 2025 Maryland audit of cases handled by former Maryland State Medical Examiner Dr. David Fowler which found that dozens of police custody deaths were misclassified as accidental or of unknown causes citing that racial and pro-police biases may have contributed to the mischaracterizations.
“Our research has determined that OCME was especially unlikely to classify death as a homicide if the decedent was Black or if they died after being restrained by police,” Attorney General Anthony Brown said at the time. “These findings have profound implications across our justice system. They speak to systemic issues rather than individual conduct.”
An example, the LDF attorney says, is “concrete evidence” that things may be being skewed in these investigations, thus explaining the growing suspicions in some communities.
“Black people are dying. Black lives are being undervalued, and we need to address that head-on. Otherwise, the past is just going to continue to replicate itself in the present,” she emphasized.
While the LDF is still awaiting a response from Congress, the organization is encouraging communities, regardless of whether or not a suspicious death has taken place in their state, to contact their elected officials, encouraging them to support the commission. However, on the national front, Gordon tells theGrio that the organization has received a response from a party within the United Nations and is working to set up a meeting to discuss it.
“These are not isolated incidents; these are interconnected,” she concluded. “The one overarching point that I will reiterate is that Black lives are no less important than any other lives. It is truly, truly heartbreaking to see so many deaths go unaddressed or be obfuscated in some way because it’s showing black people that ‘hey, you don’t matter as much as other people,’ and it’s important not only to combat that vehemently, but to also keep close to the heart your own value and your own sense of personal worth, because it doesn’t matter what other people tell you, what other systems tell you, other entities tell you. We know who we are. We know what we bring to the table. We know that we matter, and it’s important to internalize that and use that to drive us forward in this movement.”
