The FBI and California Attorney-General's Office will be investigating the deaths of two African-American men who were found hanging from trees in Southern California, CNN reported Friday.
24-year-old Rubert L. Fuller's body was reportedly found in Palmdale, Los Angeles County., and 38-year-old Malcolm Harsch's body was found ten days earlier, 52 miles east, in the town of Victorville, San Bernardino county.
"There were no indications at the scene that suggested foul play," San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said last weekend, according to ABC. "The cause and manner of death are pending."
Victorville Mayor Gloria Garcia said Harsch's manner of death has yet to be determined by police, adding that the authorities "take very seriously the concerns voiced by so many who fear that Malcolm's death could be racially motivated, a hate crime, or a form of retaliation," in light of the recent protests.
"Malcolm Harsch's life matters to our City," Garcia added in her statement to the public last Tuesday, according to CNN.
"Hangings in public, suicides, do occur with some regularity," Los Angeles County Medical Examiner Coroner Dr. Jonathan Lucas reportedly said. Despite Fuller's death being described as "an alleged suicide," the authorities "felt it prudent to roll that back and continue to look deeper."
A week after the death of Fuller, his older brother, Terron Boone, was killed in a police-involved shooting, according to the Los Angeles Times. It remains unclear whether the shooting was connected to the death of Rubert Fuller a week earlier, The Times reported.
PROTESTS broke out in Minneapolis, Minnesota in late May following the death of African-American George Floyd, killed by Officer Derek Chauvin.
A video circulating on social media and news showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for some eight minutes while the latter was saying he could not breathe. Floyd was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
According to the Associated Press, dozens of businesses across the Twin Cities boarded up their windows amid the spreading racial riots in order to prevent looting. Minneapolis-based Target announced it was temporarily closing two dozen stores in the area, AP reported.
In addition to the spreading riots, thousand of peaceful protesters reportedly marched through the streets of Minneapolis calling for justice, as other rallies are organized across the US. According to AP, local leaders urged demonstrators to refrain from using violence.
The Fuller family said Tuesday they were seeking an independent investigation and autopsy after Rubert's death was declared a suicide, according to CNN. "The Sheriff's Department immediately declared his death a suicide without completing a full and thorough investigation," the family's representative, attorney Jamon R. Hick said.
"For African Americans in America, hanging from a tree is a lynching. Why was this cavalierly dismissed as a suicide and not investigated as a murder?"
A HATE CRIME investigation was launched Wednesday after several nooses were found hanging from trees in the city of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area, the city Mayor Libby Schaaf said on Twitter.
"Several nooses found on trees around Lake Merritt were removed and will be investigated as hate crimes," Shcaaf wrote. "Reports that these parts of exercise equipment do not remove nor excuse their torturous and terrorizing effects."
Several nooses found on trees around Lake Merritt were removed and will be investigated as hate crimes. pic.twitter.com/JW8TvY6pi4
— Libby Schaaf (@LibbySchaaf) June 17, 2020
The mayor continued, saying that "symbols of racial violence have no place in Oakland and will not be tolerated," adding that "we are all responsible for knowing the history and present day reality of lynchings, hate crimes and racial violence."
According to Schaaf, "objects that invoke such terror will not be tolerated in Oakland's public spaces."
On the morning following the launch of the criminal investigation into the potential hate crimes, an effigy was found hanging from a noose in a tree near Lake Merrit, according to CNN.
"Material stuffed in the shape of a human body with a rope tied around the torso and neck, laying on the ground next to a tree with an American flag lying next to it," was reportedly found by police.
Lynchings in the US became common in the mid-19 century, rising in number during the Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War. Used to enforce white supremacy, the acts of racial terrorism were mostly common in the southern states.
While most lynching victims were African-Americans, lynchings of Latinx Americans were common in California, representing 10% of the national total. Some 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, according to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
According to the institute, some 3,446 African-American lynching victims fall in the vast number, alongside some 1,297 whites. Native Americans, as well as Americans of Asian, Greek and Italian descent and the US' Jewish community were also victims of lynchings.