Jesse Jackson faults investigation in Mississippi killing

KOKOMO, Mississippi (Reuters) -- Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson accused Mississippi authorities Thursday of failing to thoroughly investigate those who he said may have lynched a black teen-ager in the once-segregated Southern state.

Jackson, president of the Rainbow-Push Coalition civil rights group, said at least 15 people had a motive to kill Raynard Johnson, a 17-year-old honor student found hanging from a pecan tree outside his family's home in Kokomo on June 16.

State investigators ruled the death a suicide after two autopsies failed to turn up injuries or marks on Johnson's body consistent with murder. They closed their investigation into the death this week.

But Jackson said that Mississippi investigators failed to follow up crucial leads in the case and that he suspected local whites lynched the teen-ager for dating white girls in the town about 150 miles south of the state capital, Jackson.

"They never saw fit to put those whose motives were suspect under oath where they would risk perjury," Jackson told reporters in a conference call. "They concluded suicide before the investigation began."

Jackson, who led a march through Kokomo in July to protest Johnson's death, declined to identify his suspects in the case, although he said names had been provided to the FBI and U.S. Justice Department.

He demanded that a grand jury be convened to hear testimony in the case. He also said his civil rights group would hire its own investigators, including a pathologist, to probe Johnson's death further.

On Wednesday, Marion County District Attorney Buddy McDonald told a news conference in Columbia, Mississippi, that there was "no substantial evidence" Johnson had been murdered.

To many blacks, the Johnson case bore similarities to that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black who was abducted and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.

Till's name is still cited through the South as an example of white hostility toward blacks.

The last recorded lynching in Mississippi occurred 40 years ago when eight masked men dragged a black man from a county prison and hanged him just days before he was due to go on trial for raping a white woman.

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