N.C. teen's hanging death ruled a suicide; mother says it was a lynching
By Victor Blackwell, CNN
updated 3:47 PM EST, Mon December 15, 2014
This dog doesn't hunt. Big strong kid hangs himself and he just so happens to be 17 and black who dated an older white woman in a small town with a recent KKK march. Oh, and the grave of this boy was pissed on by one of the local brain-dead. This is sickening. Sorry if it was posted before...
His family says that night, he packed a gym bag, washed his ankle brace and hung it on the clothesline to dry before heading out for an evening walk.
The teen had asthma, his mother says, and a doctor had recommended he exercise outdoors at night when the temperature and humidity dropped. Around 10:30, Lennon left his family's small apartment and headed down a dirt road.
His family never saw him alive again.
Just before 7:30 the next morning, he was found hanging from the frame of a swing set in the center of a mobile home community. According to medical documents, his body was covered in fire ants.
Link: http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/15/justice/north-carolina-lennon-lacy/
= new reply since forum marked as read
shot himself in the head while handcuffed in the back of a police car. 
I actually heard this story from my co-worker yesterday, who happens to be a black woman. We couldn't decide what decade we were living in.
At least at this point. How does anyone forcibly hang this strong athletic young man without there being any other injuries to him? Surely he'd be fighting for his life. And apparently that trailer park was in view of the home of the woman he'd been seeing.
He was about to play in his first football game in at least a year since his mom made him quit for a year because of his grades, he'd just lost an uncle he was close to and apparently had stopped seeing the older woman he was dating who his mom didn't like him dating because of her age. Frankly, in that last selfie he took of himself he looks about as sad and depressed as a person could be.
At this point I just can't get passed there being no signs of any foul play, and there were no drugs or alcohol in his system. No one saw or heard anything, so how could he have been lynched so silently? If he was killed somewhere else and brought there and hung by others, there would have been signs on his body that he was killed somewhere else, and a bunch of people carrying his dead body and managing to get him hung would also cause a lot of noise and commotion that someone surely would have noticed.
He might have gone somewhere after leaving home, and I'm guessing it was to that woman's house. He was wearing different pants than he left home in but apparently they were also pants that he owned.
Seems like the ME just wrongly wrote in "suicide" as the manner of death when the paperwork said that an investigation was pending. I'm not seeing how there being no object for him to stand on makes suicide an issue either. He could easily have climbed that structure and sat on the upper bar to fix the hanging belt and leash and leaned over to slip his head in the makeshift noose, leaned over and let go.
The ME needs to change that "suicide" manner of death so the police can continue to investigate. Sadly though I think he probably did kill himself with there being no evidence on his clothing or body showing he fought for his life or that he was killed some other way elsewhere. People in the town being upset over his dating this much older white woman may actually have added to suicidal thoughts he might have had. If the woman does live in that trailer park and especially if the swing-set can be seen from her home I think that's significant and even more evident of suicide with that relationship (and the supposed loss of it) being what put him over the edge.
Man, he just looks so incredibly sad and defeated in that last photo he took of himself. 
